Paint pen. Never fades.

Karen

I do the mini blinds - love them. You can cut them with regular scissors and use a regular lead pencil - lasts for years. Check flea markets or just get a cheap set from Walmart - it would be well worth the cost and you will get hundreds of labels from one set of blinds .......

Lynne

Duct tape doesn't fall off when applied to a dry container. The label should be put on the container before the soil goes into it. Turn your container over, put on a strip of duct tape. Use a sharpie and write the name.

The label is on the bottom because it won't blow away and the sun can't fade the ink. If you want to do something more then use a a marker and write on it with a paint pen or industrial sharpie (which you can get at Home Depot or similar). Right now I have out my Solstice Flats which were with from huge mesclun boxes from BJs. There is a duct tape label on the bottom but the lid has got that mesclun label still there and I wrote on that with an industrial sharpie.

You can label the tops however you want, but always, for precaution, and a duct tape label to the bottom of the flat while it's dry and empty and write on it with a quality sharpie.

T

I use a china marker. Had been using some from the dollar store which came 4/$1.

I needed a new one and got it from the hardware store plumbing department, they're a buck each, but seem alot better. The ones from the dollar store break pretty easy.

I use a sharpie.
I write on the bottom of the milk jug so the sun doesn't fade it.
If I forget,can't write if it's wet, I write(with a sharpie) on a plastic, picnic knife and stick the written part in the soil.
also, I only mark things I never grew before. I can recognize a lot of familiar seedlings now lol.
This is only my 2nd year WSowing, so far, so great!

:)Laura

I'm a first year winter sower/newbie, but for my other plants in the garden I use polished "river" stones all the time for labeling plants. You can usually find them for sale in little mesh bags at craft stores or garden centers...I don't think they really come from rivers...I think they're just ordinary rocks that the manufacturer has put through a tumbler to smooth them out.

I write the name of the plant on the stones with one of those permanent paint markers (also from the craft store). I guess you could use regular rocks for this, but the polished stones work better since they are smoother than regular rocks and they're easier to write on with the paint marker. Beach rocks or even smooth sea shells might work too...The paint marker writing doesn't wear off in the rain or snow or sun or anything. I have them all over the garden!

For winter sowing jugs, I've just been labeling the stone and sticking it inside the jug, sort of tucked into the side between the seed starting mix and the wall of the jug. The river stones are pretty flat, so it's easy to just kind of tuck them in there so they don't take up too much space inside the jug. Then for overkill I've been labeling the jug with the paint marker too. I figure the paint marker writing won't wash off on the milk jug since it's never washed off or faded on the stones? Like I said I'm a newbie winter sower ...

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the seeds I've sown in the milk jugs will germinate, and then once I plant them out I can just take the stones out of the milk jug and stick them next to each new winter-sown plant.

Here's a photo of my stones:

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Clever idea..looks like something my very creative and artistic friend would do. She even draws designs on her surgical face mask! Do they use up a lot of your planting room though? The pros of those are you can always transfer them to the flowerbeds once you plant your WS flowers into your flowerbeds.

Well, I hope I don't regret it, but I'm using packing tape instead of duct tape. It was too hard to pull off. I wrote in #2 pencil the label on an index card, cut the section off and taped it to the handle of my jugs w/packing tape.

Maybe I'll break down and cut up my broken blinds, but I could wash them in the tub and restring them. It looks like a heck of a lot of work and patience to restring. Otherwise I'm going to have to buy new, hard to get out to Walmart and not a high priority at the moment.

I agree they look and appear to work great.