Prepare for a new gardening season with these free printable watercolour garden markers!

It’s that time of a year again. The days are gray, and it seems like winter has been here forever. In these last cold months, it’s hard to believe that the world will ever be green and warm again. When I feel like this, I know that I need to quickly begin thinking summer. It’s time to plan our coming garden!

When planting those first indoor seeds, we usually go over the top with excitement over how great it’ll be to have a garden again. Just last year, at this time, we planted over a hundred tomato seeds! Not all of them made it through… But we ended up with seventy tomato bushes in our backyard garden -six or seven different varieties. Because of our relatively short growing season, we also start peppers, cucumbers, onions and cabbage indoors. And some flowers. And all kinds of herbs. All in all, lots of plants! All of them need labeling.

I always stumble over what will be the best way to label them. A few years ago, we made garden markers from rocks, but sun, rain and attention from kids didn’t allow them to live this long. Some other years, I simply wrote the names on craft sticks. Works too! But I am always looking for some pretty way to label our plants, and this year I decided to paint the labels. I’ve been exploring watercolours recently, both with my son and on my own, and the challenge of painting the markers seemed fun.

Once I painted them, I certainly wanted to share them here. You can use them for marking plants that you start indoors. You can laminate them and mark the rows in the garden. Or you can even label your envelopes of seeds with them.

With his wonderful logic of childhood, my son took this markers further and decorated them with faces. That’s something to consider as well!