Seed Tapes: How to Use Them and Make Your Own

Seed tapes are strips of tissue paper with seed glued inside at fixed spacings, sown 1-2cm deep exactly like loose seed. A bought 6m carrot tape costs £2.50-£3.50, and in my raised-bed trial it germinated at 71% against 68% from a loose-sown packet. The difference shows up later, at thinning. The loose row took 25 minutes on my knees. The taped rows took 4. This guide covers how to sow tapes properly, the spacing maths that makes them worthwhile, and the flour-paste loo-roll method that brings the cost down to about 30p per 3m.

Do seed tapes actually work?

Yes, and in my trial they slightly beat loose seed for germination. In April 2025 I sowed three 1.5m rows of ‘Nantes 2’ carrots side by side in a Stafford raised bed: a bought tape, a home-made tape and loose seed straight from the packet. At four weeks the bought tape stood at 71% germination, my home-made version at 69%, and the loose row at 68%. Nothing between them worth arguing over.

The tape itself is simple. Two layers of biodegradable tissue sandwich the seed at a printed spacing, usually 2.5-5cm for carrots. The paper holds moisture against the seed while it germinates, then rots away within 2-3 weeks. Suttons, Mr Fothergill’s and most garden centres stock tapes for carrots, lettuce, radishes and spring onions, and discs in the same material for pots.

What tapes really buy you is time and seed. Every seed sits where you want it, so there is no clumped patch to tease apart in May and no bare 30cm gap where the packet ran thin. For anyone whose knees or eyesight make fine sowing a chore, that is the whole argument.

The taped row at four weeks: ‘Nantes 2’ seedlings up at 71%, each one already at its final 5cm spacing.

How do you sow seed tapes in a raised bed?

Sow tapes in a pre-watered drill, 1-2cm deep, and keep the paper moist until the seedlings show. The method takes five minutes per row.

1. Rake the surface to a fine tilth. Lumps hold the tape away from the soil and the seed dries out in the air gap.
2. Draw a drill 1-2cm deep. A cane pressed into the surface gives a straighter, more even drill than a trowel.
3. Water the drill first. Soak it with a can before the tape goes anywhere near it. This matters more with tapes than loose seed, because the paper must wet through before germination starts.
4. Lay the tape flat along the drill. Pin each end down with a small stone or a hairpin of wire. A breeze will lift an unanchored tape before you can cover it.
5. Cover with 1cm of sieved soil or compost and firm gently. Firming presses the wet paper into full contact with the soil.
6. Water with a fine rose, and keep watering. The paper must not dry out from sowing until emergence. For carrots that means checking every 2-3 days for 14-21 days.

Soil temperature decides the timetable, not the calendar. Carrot seed wants the soil at 7°C minimum and comes up far faster at 15°C; the full crop-by-crop figures are in our guide to seed germination temperatures. In a raised bed, which warms 1-2°C ahead of open ground in spring, my mid-April sowing broke the surface in 16 days.

The non-negotiable step: the tissue must stay damp for the full 14-21 days, so water every 2-3 days in a dry spell.

The spacing maths: what thinning really wastes

A thickly sown loose carrot row wastes around 85% of its seed. The arithmetic is blunt. A £2 packet of carrot seed holds roughly 1,500 seeds. Sown “thinly” by hand along a 3m row, around 300 of them go in, because carrot seed is too small to meter out singly with cold fingers. At a final spacing of 5-6cm, the row only has room for about 50 plants. The other 250 seedlings go in the thinning bucket.

A tape carrying 60 seeds along the same 3m loses almost nothing. Two seeds share the odd station and one gets snipped; that is the entire cull.

Thinning costs more than seed. It cost me 25 minutes of close work per loose row in the trial, and each bruised seedling released the scent that draws carrot fly from up to 1km away. My loose row took fly damage within days of thinning; neither taped row was touched. If the fly already plagues your plot, pair tapes with the barriers in our guide to carrot root fly prevention.

Spacings on bought tapes are set for you, but when you make your own you choose. These are the spacings I print onto home-made tapes:

How do you make seed tapes at home?

Home-made seed tapes need toilet roll, plain flour, water and a cocktail stick. A 3m tape takes about 20 minutes at the kitchen table and costs around 30p all in.

1. Split a length of 2-ply toilet roll into single ply and cut strips 3-4cm wide. Paper cost: roughly 3p per 3m.
2. Mix the paste: 1 tablespoon of plain flour to 2 tablespoons of water. Stir to single-cream thickness. Cost: about 2p.
3. Mark your spacing along the strip with a ruler. For carrots I dot every 5cm, which is 60 dots over 3m.
4. Dot paste with a cocktail stick, then drop one seed on each dot. Tip seed into a saucer first and lift each one on the damp stick. Sixty carrot seeds from a £2 packet of 1,500 cost 8p.
5. Fold the strip over lengthways and press along it. The paste grips both layers.
6. Dry flat for 24 hours, then roll and label. Write crop, variety and spacing straight onto the paper end in pencil.

Total: near 30p per 3m row, against £1.50-£1.75 for the same length of bought tape. Make them in February, when the garden offers nothing better to do, and sowing day becomes a five-minute job. The same saucer-and-stick handling works for fluid sowing, the gel method that suits pre-germinated seed; tapes suit dry seed, fluid sowing suits chitted.

The whole kit: single-ply strips, a 1:2 flour-water paste, a cocktail stick and a saucer of carrot seed.

Why we make our own tapes each February

Why we recommend the home-made version: I price-checked both routes after the 2025 trial and the bought tape lost on every line except convenience. My 30p home-made tape germinated within 2% of the £1.50 bought one and put ‘Nantes 2’ at exactly the 5cm spacing I wanted, where the bought tape’s 2.5cm spacing still forced a light thin. The clincher is variety choice. Bought tapes cover perhaps a dozen standard varieties; my paste pot puts any seed I own onto paper, including the blight-dodging oddities no tape manufacturer bothers with. Two February evenings now produce a season’s worth of tapes for the whole raised-bed plot.

What do seed tapes cost? Bought vs DIY vs loose

A bought tape costs roughly five times the DIY version and ten times bare seed, per 3m row of carrots. Here is the full comparison from my trial records:

Read the table by what your time is worth. Loose seed wins on pence per row only if 25 minutes of kneeling counts for nothing. The bought tape buys back the 20-minute making session for about £1.30 a row, which adds up fast across a plot of ten rows. The DIY tape costs one winter evening and wins everything else.

Which seeds suit tapes, and which to skip

Tape the small, fiddly seed and leave the big seed loose. The crops that repay taping are the ones where hand-spacing fails: carrots, radishes, spring onions, lettuce, beetroot and parsnips. Parsnip seed is so light it drifts on any breeze, and its germination is patchy at 50-70% even fresh, so I paste it two seeds per dot; our growing parsnips guide covers why fresh packets matter more for parsnips than any other crop.

Lettuce earns its place for succession. I make 1m mini-tapes at 15cm spacings and lay one every fortnight from March, which beats scattering a pinch and forgetting where; there is a full succession plan in our guide to growing lettuce.

Skip tapes for beans, peas, courgettes and sweetcorn. A seed you can place singly between finger and thumb gains nothing from paper. Skip them too for anything raised in modules and transplanted, like brassicas, and for tomatoes and other crops started in heat indoors. Tapes are a direct-sowing tool. If your beds are new and you are still deciding what to direct-sow where, our raised bed gardening for beginners guide sets out which crops earn the space, and the RHS publishes a clear grow-your-own carrots page covering drills and depths that pairs well with this one. For organic growers, Garden Organic publishes seed-saving guidance that turns this year’s plants into next February’s free tape filling.

One caution from a comparison I ran on the paper itself: cheap quilted or scented toilet roll resists rotting. Plain 2-ply, split to single, broke down in my beds within 3 weeks. A quilted brand was still visible at 6.

Laying day: the dried tape goes paper-flat into a pre-watered 1.5cm drill, pinned at each end before covering.

Common seed tape mistakes

• Letting the paper dry out mid-germination. The tissue wicks moisture away from seed faster than bare soil does. One dry week in the 14-21 day carrot window kills the row. Water every 2-3 days without fail.
• Sowing the tape too deep. At 3-4cm the small seed inside exhausts itself before reaching light. Stay at 1-2cm and cover with sieved soil, not clods.
• Laying tape into a dry drill. Watering only from above after covering often fails to wet the paper through. Soak the drill first, every time.
• Leaving the tape unpinned. A 6m tape catches wind like a streamer. Pin both ends and midway before reaching for the soil.
• Using wallpaper paste for DIY tapes. Most modern wallpaper pastes contain fungicide, which can suppress germination. Flour and water costs 2p and does nothing but glue.
• Storing home-made tapes anywhere damp. A shed shelf in winter swings past dew point nightly, and damp paste moulds. Keep finished tapes indoors in a paper envelope.
• Taping old seed. Tapes fix spacing, so a packet germinating at 40% leaves visible gaps every few centimetres. Use fresh seed, especially for parsnips.

Frequently asked questions

Do seed tapes actually work?

Yes, taped carrots germinated at 71% against 68% from loose seed in our trial. The paper dissolves within 2-3 weeks of sowing and the seedlings come up at the printed spacing. The real gain is afterwards: thinning fell from 25 minutes a row to 4.

How deep do you sow seed tapes?

Lay tapes 1-2cm deep, the same depth as loose seed of that crop. Water the drill before the tape goes in, cover with sieved soil or compost, and firm gently. A tape sown deeper than 2cm struggles, because most taped seed is small.

Do you still need to thin seedlings from seed tapes?

Barely, because the seed is already fixed at or near its final spacing. Where two seeds share a station, snip the weaker one at soil level with scissors. Our taped rows needed 4 minutes of thinning against 25 for the loose row.

How do you make seed tapes at home?

Glue seeds onto strips of 2-ply toilet roll with flour-and-water paste. Mix 1 tablespoon of plain flour with 2 of water, dot it at your crop’s final spacing, drop one seed per dot, fold the strip over and dry for 24 hours. A 3m tape costs about 30p.

How long do home-made seed tapes keep?

Home-made tapes keep as long as the seed packet’s use-by date. Flour paste does not shorten seed life once fully dry. Store rolled tapes in a labelled paper envelope somewhere cool and dry. Damp storage is the one thing that ruins them.

Which seeds work best on tapes?

Small, fiddly seed: carrots, lettuce, radishes, spring onions, parsnips and beetroot. These are the crops where hand-spacing wastes the most seed and thinning takes the most time. Big seeds like beans, peas and courgettes are easy to place by hand, so taping them gains nothing.

Tapes sort the spacing; the calendar sorts the rest. Our seed sowing calendar gives month-by-month dates for every crop in the table above, the multi-sowing guide covers the cluster method that suits beetroot and spring onions even better than tapes, and the full growing section holds every crop guide we have published. Prefer starting under cover? Soil blocking solves the same spacing problem for indoor sowing.