Hi, CindyP!

I made eleven seed mats yesterday.  

I may have used the wrong kind of paper towel, since it is Bounty and they are a little on the thick side.  Do you think that will be a problem? I just used what I had on hand. 

While watching it snow just a little and drinking hot orange spice tea, I made mats for 3 kinds of radishes, carrots in two different spacings to allow some to mature, and 2 kinds of lettuce, Cos and Salad Bowl. 

That was so much more fun than sitting on the icy ground and trying to handle seeds with gloves on and not remembering where the last one was placed, anyway.  Seed mats are a great idea.

Next, mats would be nice for zinnias and marigold to give some color here and there in the garden.

I found out that just dipping the tip of a toothpick in the glue on the mat and then picking up one seed worked best of all. The tweezers just made me crazy since glue got on them anyway and they then tended to pick up several seeds at a time. 

Yes, this is way in advance of any planting.  I am taking these to Master Gardeners tomorrow to see if anyone has any suggestions about ways to do it better. 

Cindyp, I am planning to start some seeds inside next week.  Our last frost date is 3/19 in zone 7.  I can plant out by May 1, usually. 

I have never started a block of zinnias inside, but that is what I plan to start, the new Starlight Rose Zahara zins. It is still two weeks too early for peppers and tomatoes.   

In each sfg box, there will be zinnias and maybe more than one kind.  It is really hard to kill a zin.  

I guess this seed mat thing will be another horticultural experiment!  Oh, MG group was quite lively, but no one had done seed mats…  and, I got accused of being anal retentive since my seed placement was so precise!!   

I think several of them may try it also. 

Thanks for the response.

The seed mats did work just great.  But next year, I will use some very thin paper towels that I stole from a fast food place, or maybe tissues.  Bounty is just too thick.

The Cos lettuce was really cute in its nine little heads in a square foot.  The tomatoes from seeds came up slowly. The peppers are now the same size as the started peppers I bought when I thought the seeds were just never going to grow.  They just needed some sun.  The okra plants are two feet tall. 

The main problem was the goofy weather, and, the change to raised beds.  It delayed getting things in early enough since there was so much prep work to do.   

If you have not tried the seed mat thing, please think about it. The radishes especially came out just fine, as the lettuce.  Seedless watermelons are all over the place, only six plants, but each one has lots of little green marbles, and one is larger than a baseball. Cucumbers are climbing the cattle panel trellis, and the goards must be from another planet, they have just taken over vertically.  I have to figure out when to cut the goards off the vines.  They are the ornamentals, of course, not something you could eat.

The best part of all is that the mulch over heavy cardboard between the raised beds has resulted in NO WEEDS.  I have pullled a few blades of grass and a few tiny weeds from inside the raised beds, but that is all.  When the electric cooperative had a tree service take down trees that might hit a wire in the wintertime, we let them put 6 or 7 chewed up trees on our property, and that pile is the mulch we used. Sears gave me the heavy cardboard, and I do mean heavy.  It was almost strong enough to build with.  I got 10 sheets of 4x6 just for the asking.