Saturday, May 5, 2012

Plant Labels

On March 13, I wrote a blog entry about the bedding plants we were in the process of starting. 


It is hard to believe that the tomato and pepper seeds that were in those little boxes have grown into large plants and have either been sold at the market or planted by us here on the farm.

Each of the boxes shown in the above link contains a different variety of tomato or pepper and it is very important to keep them straight as they grow and get transplanted into 4-inch pots and put in separate flats.  It would be terrible to sell a jalapeno to a customer who thought they were buying a bell pepper!

So, after the seedlings are transplanted from their starter boxes into a 4-inch pots, we make sure each pot is labeled with the correct variety.   This is done using small white plastic stakes that have the appropriate variety name written on them.  

For several years, we hand-wrote the names on these little stakes.  However, neither of us has very good hand writing and it sometimes got embarrassing if a customer could not read what was written on a stake!  So, last year I began looking for a label maker.  I was surprised at how much some of these cost.  I searched online and didn't have a lot of success finding something that would work at a reasonable price.  

One day I was in Staples and noticed they had one on sale.   It wasn't real fancy, but they had it discounted by about half and it looked like it would do for what we needed.  So, I bought it.  Here is a picture of it.


The keyboard is smaller than a regular computer keyboard, but otherwise it has the same functionality.....backspace, line feed, upper and lower case letters, etc.

The tape can be expensive if you buy it in a store.  I found that I could order it cheaper online and that if I waited until P-touch had a sale on it, then I could get an even better price on it.  However, even at that, it is still more expensive than if we hand-wrote the variety names on the plant stakes.   It took me a while to figure out how to make the most efficient use of space on the tape.  Eventually, I learned how to set the space that is left between each label to the minimum. 

In the picture below, you can see what I mean by making the white space between the words minimal.


Finally, I cut the labels apart, peal the backing off and attach them to the aforementioned plant stakes.


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