Yikes! Onions and leeks when they come up from seed look a lot alike; so do cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage. Plants, especially seedlings, need ID tags and it is easy to make your own.
Winter is the perfect time to do some of those garden chores that you too often procrastinate doing. Many gardeners, me included in my younger days, put off making plant labels or tags, relying on memory of what was planted where, only later to vow; Next year, I'm definitely going to make plant tags.
Most gardeners will put sticks and hang the empty seed packet or plant IDs at the end of each row of seeds they plant. Because bed gardeners often plant a variety of plants – interplanting – in a single bed, they need more plant labels than a row-crop gardener.
If you start your seeds in flats, use peat pellets trays or containers and transplant them later, tags are almost essential so you will know where one vegetable planting ends in the tray and the next begins.
Labels for bed gardeners serve more than just as identification; they act as markers so that when weeding larger plants that might already be growing in a bed, the smaller plants don't accidentally meet an untimely death by the hoe. The larger number of plant labels needed by bed gardeners can become expensive to purchase unless you get creative and make them.
A packet of 25 plastic plant tags or labels costs $2 to $3, but homemade labels not only cuts costs but can recycle other materials. Whether you make your tags or buy them, you will need a permanent marker to write the names of plants.
The best plant ID tags I have made for garden plants are plastic. In about 10 minutes I can cut 15-20 of them from plastic containers I've tossed in the recycle tubs. They are thinner than the store-bought tags, but if you cut a point on one end and stick them in the ground or in a flat and they stay put. Milk cartons, fabric softener, and laundry soup containers all make a good raw source for labels. I find clear plastics too hard to find in the garden and too hard to read.
I have also made metal tags using tin cans or aluminum from soda cans. Scrap aluminum roof flashing is my favorite metal for this. It doesn't rust, you can cut it with scissors if you don't have tin snips and it's cheap. An inexpensive engraver, the kind that you plug in and vibrates, can be used to put plants names permanently into the metal.
Metal tags are great for herbs or flowers because they last practically forever and the lettering doesn't fade like markers on plastic can when exposed to the elements for years. I prefer the plastic labels for vegetables because you can make them so much faster, but etching or engraving in the metal is better for perennial herbs and other long-term plants.
For more info:
Here are some other ideas:
http://www.metalgardenmarkers.com/
http://www.homeharvest.com/propagationplantlabels.htm
