Plantable seed tags
Create your own beautiful plantable seed tags! Add flower petals and you'll have a beautiful decorative card for now, and flowers for later!
What you will need:
Flower seeds - I’ve used California poppy seeds
Fresh or dry flower petals (optional)
Scrap paper or card
Large mixing bowl
Food blender
Sieve
Fine muslin cloth or parchment paper
Tea towel
Baking tray
Cookie cutter
What you need to do:
Find some pieces of old scrap paper in your home. You can use plain white paper, newspaper, tissue paper, cardboard or any other type of paper that doesn’t have a glossy coating. If you want your seed tags to be coloured, it’s best to use mainly white paper and a smaller amount of coloured paper or card so your tags aren’t too dark and you can see the seeds. I used the tissue paper the Mud & Bloom compost pellets come wrapped in to make my tags a lovely yellow colour.
Tear your paper and card into small pieces (around 2cm lengths) and put them into a large mixing bowl.
Continue until your bowl is half full. The quantity doesn't matter too much, but the more you do, the more paper you can make. Fill your bowl with warm water until the paper is completely covered and leave it to sit for the night.
The next day, you can put your paper mixture into your food blender. Do small amounts at a time, with plenty of water, and blend for 30 seconds until your paper turns into a nice pulp. If you don’t have a blender, you can mix your paper with your hands, until it reaches the consistency of a thick soup and you can no longer see any paper pieces.
Place a sieve over a bowl and then pour the pulp into the sieve. Use your hands or the back of a spoon to press down the pulp and squeeze the excess water from it.
Once the pulp holds together when squeezed, tip away the water in the bowl and then put the pulp into the bowl. At this point it should still be a little bit moist: if it’s too dry, it will crumble and won’t stick together.
Now you can sprinkle in your flower seeds! Stir gently until the seeds have been evenly dispersed throughout your paper mixture. Choose small seeds that can be sown quite densely such as wildflower or herb seeds. I’ve used the California poppy seeds that are in the Mud & Bloom June box. I have some of these in my garden from a previous year’s box and they’re like pure sunshine when they bloom! They also reliably self seed each year.
If you want to, you can also add some flower petals to your mixture to decorate to your paper.
Lay your muslin cloth on top of a baking sheet. Muslin cloth is great for helping to wick away some of the moisture but if you don’t have any, parchment paper can be used and will make it easy to turn the seed paper shapes as they dry.
Pop your cookie cutter on top of the muslin/paper and put some of the pulp inside. Using your fingers, press the pulp down so it fills the cookie cutter, trying to make sure that it’s an even thickness.
Wrap a tea towel around your finger and use it to press firmly down all over your pulp to remove as much water as possible. You may need to rewrap your finger in a dry bit of tea towel several times!
Once you have removed as much water as possible, carefully lift away the cookie cutter and then repeat until you have used up all your paper mixture.
Leave your baking tray somewhere warm, near a radiator or sunny window to air dry overnight. The next day day, turn the paper shapes over, so both sides dry out.
Once dry, you can use your seed paper to make cards or gift tags! Glue dots will secure them them onto cards or you can poke a hole in the seed paper with an embroidery needle to add some string.
The seed cards can be planted out in spring until the end of June for flowers in summer, or in autumn to flower next year. Soak the card in water and put it in the ground or in a pot of soil. Cover it with a thin layer of soil, water well and then watch them come up!
Author: Denise Hope, home educating mum of two boys
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