Seed tapes are the easy, convenient, economical, and eco-friendly solution for planting your garden.
Nothing, but nothing, beats the taste of delicious, homegrown, healthy, freshly picked veggies straight from your own garden.
Written by David Arnold, Seed Developments
With Spring just around the corner, now is the time to plan for a fabulous year-round harvest. And what’s the best way to fill your garden with flavorsome, nutritious vegetables? Grow them from seed! There is a huge choice of different varieties and for just a few dollars you can be eating your own vegetables throughout the Spring, Summer, Fall and yes, even into Winter.
Growing from seed helps protect our environment too.
Homegrown helps to shrink our carbon footprint by reducing our reliance on intensive farming methods and ultimately trucking crops across the country to stores where they are usually packed in single-use plastic packaging. If we all grew just some of our own food at home, just think of the positive impact that would have on our planet and climate change.
But wait a minute, isn’t growing from seed tricky, time-consuming, need a lot of space and well, just hard work? Happily, the answer to all these questions is No!
Whatever your personal taste may be and however large or small your growing area is, in stores and online catalogs, you will find a vast range of tempting vegetable seed varieties to grow successfully at home. And the really good news is, there are many very easy to use seed products available to make growing easy and successful.
Take for example pre-sown Seed Tapes and Mats.
These clever products take all the guesswork out of seed sowing as the seed is pre-spaced and sandwiched between two layers of special, 100% biodegradable tissue that breaks down completely in the soil, leaving behind nothing but your perfectly spaced seeds.
Learn more about What are Seed Tapes here.
All you need to do is prepare the soil where you want your crops to grow by raking it until you have a fine surface, then simply roll out the seed tapes or lay the seed mats onto the soil, cover them with a thin layer of soil, water the sown area (and keep moist throughout the growing time). You can even cut the tapes and mats with normal scissors to fit the space you have available.
When the seedlings appear there’s no need to thin them out as this has been done for you when the tapes and mats were produced. It’s worth noting that thinning seedlings can damage the plant’s root system resulting in the possibility of pest and disease attack. Pre-spaced seed tapes and mats significantly reduce this risk, giving you stronger, healthier, more abundant crops.
Use Seed Tapes in Containers too!
For those of us who have little or no outside growing space but would, nevertheless, want to grow some of your own food, veggie growing is still absolutely possible and successful using seed mats and discs that fit into standard seed trays or plant pots. Herbs, salads, and microgreens are some of the typical crops that can be grown in a kitchen or on a balcony or small patio. Simply choose your growing container, fill it with good quality growing soil (available in convenient-sized bags), lay out the seed mat or disc on the surface, cover with a small amount of the soil, water (and keep moist), place in a sunny, warm position and in a very short time you’ll be enjoying tasty, nutritious veggies that you have grown yourself – think of that!
But what about flowers, I hear you say? Can I buy flower seed in pre-sown products? Yes, you can!
Many of the well-known packet seed brands offer seed discs and mats with beautiful mixtures of stunning flowers for you to grow in containers or direct into your garden beds. This is the ultimate, easy flower growing solution – simply follow the same method as you would for vegetable tapes, mats and discs and in just a few weeks you could be enjoying flowers that are good to look at. As an added bonus to nature lovers, many of these flower varieties are pollinators and so are friendly to beneficial insects. These flower products can also provide a valuable source of seed food for our fine-feathered friends too.
Look to these NGB members for seed tapes and discs.
Whatever your growing passion is, whether it is for tasty, nutritious food or providing lovely color, fragrance and interest to your garden, pre-sown seed tapes are the easy, convenient, economical, successful and eco-friendly solutions for you.
“This post is provided as an educational/inspirational service of the National Garden Bureau and our members. Please credit and link to National Garden Bureau and author member when using all or parts of this article.”
