Back in February I shared a tutorial for these seed paper valentines Sairshe and I made for her classmates. Making seed paper is easy and the finished product is beautiful to use for cards, gift tags, ornaments, garlands (like I made with our leftovers), and anything you would use paper for! Often people wonder how easy is it to plant and if the seeds really grow so I’m sharing our experience.
I have to admit that while I love the idea of seed paper, I have never actually planted any of the seed paper cards that I’ve been given over the years. I always mean to but then get distracted by growing vegetables instead. Hmm, maybe I should make seed paper with vegetable seeds! This year I was determined not to let our extra seed paper valentines sit on the shelf forever so I finally planted seed paper. And it was easy! And our flowers grew!
In April we planted them and we’ve been enjoying beautiful marigolds in our front yard all summer.
Sairshe started by tearing the paper hearts into small pieces. The size of the pieces depends on how many seeds are in your handmade paper. Our hearts had a smattering of large marigold seeds so the pieces didn’t need to be too small. I helped her make sure that each small piece had at least one seed and that any large clumps of seeds got separated.
I dug a shallow trench along the path in our sunny front yard and Sairshe sprinkled placed her pieces of seed paper. We spaced them out evenly so our flowers wouldn’t be too crowded.
After a few weeks of watering her marigolds grew into baby plants, then larger plants until finally the flowers bloomed. It was so fun to grow them right in the front yard where we walked by them every day going to and from the car. Sairshe loved checking on their progress.
I hope her teachers and classmates planted their valentines and got to enjoy growing marigolds too!
If you’ve been given a seed paper card, or if you want to try your hand at making your own (tutorial here. have I mentioned it’s easy?) then I highly recommend you plant it and enjoy the beautiful flowers that bloom.
[...] Update: To see how we planted these and how the flowers grew, see this post. [...]