I want to mark the location of the seeds and seedlings I plant as well as the the mulch pits I dig. But finding a reliable means to do so is frustrating.
Wood rots and colours so that it merges with the undergrowth.
Plastic tags are often quite short and, because they're light, will fall over and get lost in the mulch.
I've used aluminium foil pinched atop of twigs or bamboo too but the foil falls off.
Then I thought: ceramic. Since my garden is festooned with plates -- each bed looks like a flying saucer parking lot because I use dinner plates to cover my terracotta pot wetpots-- I started thinking about the porcelain option.
Cups? Broken bits of terracotta pots? Plates on their sides?
It just so happens that my wife is a keen mosaic artist and we do have a ready supply of tiles on hand and tile cutters.
Are you with me on this?
So all I need do is lay in a supply of old tiles -- old white or lightly coloured tiles -- preferably large ones - and trim them into narrow strips.I could even write on them too if I wanted. Inserted upright into the soil I'd have myself markers galore.I could even deploy colour coding if I had the supply of different suitable tiles. White for plantings; another colour for mulch pits.
No rot. Easily located among all the vegetative growth.
You may wonder why I should obsess about tagging like this. When you mulch thick and often it's easy to lose stuff in the garden. Seedlings. Seed holes. Even hand tools. Pit fertilising stations.... Inadvertently each time you throw on some more mulch material you may cover past gardening efforts.
So it's all about preventing drowning. They're little hands rising from the dirt: I'm here!
Indeed, if I added a little square or rectangular tile cut to the top of these strips maybe I've got a retailable item? So what's the market in garden markers these days?
