My Foot-Wide Home-made Seed Tapes

There’s a guaranteed way to get hard-to- germinate parsnips and carrots to come up in a few days!

Parsnips, carrots, and other slow-germinating seeds take so long to come up—often 2 weeks or more—that weeds often overtake the row.

If you’d like to get these slowpoke crops to come up in just a few days (or if you want to speed up other crops such as onions, lettuce, beets, etc.), my wide-row seed tape planting idea is for you.

1. Roll out one layer of reinforced paper towel. Get the toughest towels you can. The cheap brands fall apart during the sprouting stage.
2. Moisten the paper towel, using a spray bottle.
3. Sprinkle the seeds evenly over the entire towel surface. A salt shaker is a good tool for this job. The seeds should land about 1/2 inch apart. Plant them just as you would in a wide row in the garden.
4. Cover the seeds with another layer of strong paper towel and moisten it with the spray bottle.
5. Roll the towels up together loosely; don’t wrap them too tightly. The sprouts will need room to grow.
6. Put the roll in a plastic bag, seal it, and place the bag where the temperature is warm and constant.
7. In 3 or 4 days the carrots will sprout; parsnip seed may take 5 to 8 days. When the time is up, unroll the towels and take a peek. If you can see tiny roots growing out of the seeds, get ready to plant. If they haven’t germinated, roll them back up.
8. In the garden, work the soil, add fertilizer, and smooth out the wide row seedbed with a rake.
9. Unroll the paper towels together and set them on the seedbed. Toss in a few radish seeds.
10. Cover the towels with about ¹/4 or 1/2 inch of soil, using a rake to pull some up and over.
11. Smooth the soil over the towels, then lightly firm the soil with a hoe.
12. Stand back and watch ‘em grow. The sprouts will be poking through the soil in a few days. You’ll be able to thin and weed earlier than ever.

Just for the fun of it, I tried planting a whole series of crops on the same roll of paper towels: radishes, lettuce, carrots, beets, onions, and chard. This is an unusual but sure way to get a whole row of crops off to an earlier start.

When the main crop, say of carrots, has some big enough to eat, I start to harvest. At the same time I pull some of the icicle radishes. They are much bigger than the carrots at this stage.

When I pull them, they leave a tremendous hole in the soil. This traps water and helps the soil to breathe better. The big advantage, though, is that it creates extra growing space for early carrots. And in a heavy clay soil, the White Icicle keeps the soil loose. It plunges into the soil, allowing air and water to get through the heavy soil to nourish other plant roots.

White Icicles are good to eat, too, especially when I pull them out late in the season from my rows of fall root crops. The cool weather gives them a nice taste. If you happen to grow one all by itself, look out. It could get big. At a gardening talk once in Atlanta, a woman presented me with one that weighed 71/2 pounds! I’ve tried other white radish varieties, but none works as well for me as the great White Icicle.

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