Nursery Plant Tags – Buy Them or Make Them

Sooner than later you need to get a nursery plant tag system in place when Starting a Backyard Plant Nursery. While we can generally tell our plants apart we are adding more varieties of plants to our nursery so we need to be tagging more plants. We are also always looking for ways to improve our retail presentation! The advantages are:

• Know what and how many of a plant you have.
• Provide information including pricing to customers
• Add a greater level of professionalism to your plant selling
• Using codes and or colors you can quickly keep some data on your plants like start date, batch, selling price.

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Our Video on DIY Nursery Plant Tags

We can show you some plant tags we purchased and ones we made ourselves. Some of the plusses and minuses of each explained.

 

Low Cost Nursery Plant Tags

Your choices are primarily:

• DIY type – Make your own DIY Nursery Tags. These include hand written on plastic or wood, tags you print yourself, and some ideas we have below that you can use.
• Tags that you order and have customized for your nursery and plants.
• Stock Pre-Printed tags that are available for many plant species.
• Buying a specialized thermal printer and making your own tags. We will write about these separately.

Pre-Printed Nursery Plant Tags

We Love These – from ororavisual.com

Pre-Printed Plant Tags – Our Classic Tags remain an industry standard.

No other stock label contains our level of care and planting information. More than 2,800 plant varieties available including shrubs, fruit trees, perennials, azaleas, house plants, shade trees, vines, groundcovers and roses. Includes English and Spanish plant care information.

Available with white elastic string for an additional $.03 per tag or purchase PLAS-TIES (vinyl-coated wire) separately. Printed on weatherproof plastics with fade-resistant inks. Size: 2 1/2″ x 4 1/16″, 100 per package.

Classic 2 x 4″ Plant tags – Pre-Printed

Cost is $0.16 per tag + Shipping = about $0.18 cents per tag with elastic strings. Although not personalized, these tags look great. From the manufacturer: More than 2,800 plant varieties available including shrubs, fruit trees, perennials, azaleas, house plants, shade trees, vines, ground covers and roses. Includes English and Spanish care information.There is a spot to ad either your own personalized adhesive tag or write in a price.

We should add that Orovisual also sells customizable plant tags, nursery related products, sign holders and electronic plant tag printers and supplies. They are a good resource for your nursery.

Low Cost – Printed – Customizable Plant Tags

These Customizable Tyvek Weather Resistant Plant Tags from Print EZ may be a good answer for you. Prices include 4 lines of your text and a one color, black ink logo.

Custom Printed Tyvek Plant Tags

1,000 for $142.99 + Shipping is going to run you about $0.18 to 0.20 cents each

2,000 tags of the same imprint is  $217.99 with free shipping is just $0.11 cents each. Very economical if you grow a lot of the same plant. What is nice is  you get 4 lines of customization (Text) and a one color logo included. Take a look, these look great! We buy them for our larger volume plants where we need hundreds of the same tag each year. These are Green Giant Arborvitae and Norway Spruce of which we grow hundreds per year.

 

Print Your Own Tags on a Laser Printer.

Laser Strip Loop-Lock Tags – to be printed on a laser (Not ink jet) printer. These blank plant tags come in a variety of colors and can be printed on a laser printer. You would of course need access to a laser printer. You can completely customize these and if you have a color laser printer you can really make them attractive. As a bonus and perfect for a Backyard grower, use the colors for pricing or even blank to identify certain plants. Example White = $35.00 or Norway Spruce.

At around $100.00 with shipping for 1,000 tags these are an economical $0.10 each. Considering the ability to customize them, they are a very good value if you have a Laser Printer.

White Laser Strip Loop-Lock tags

 

Make Your Own DIY Plant Tags

For smaller amounts of plant tags, lets say 50-100 of a variety, making your own plant tags is certainly a good option. Not considering your time these can be very economical.

Please watch our video above to see how we make some very economical Nursery Plant Tags with a laminating machine. We created a template in Excel although you could use Word or Google Dosc. We like Excel as it is easy to grid out our text and then duplicate rows.

The lamination sheets provide a good material for both stick type tags (Use the 5 mil lamination film) and also wrap around tags. Here are the items we bought to make these:

3 M Lamination Machine for less than $35.00 you get a thermal lamination machine that you can use to make plant tags and signs for your nursery.

5 mil Lamination pouches – 100 pack When you do the math on these your cost comes out to only $0.02-0.03 cents per tag. Even less for the smaller stick tags. It is a little laborious but a good winter or evening activity.

You can see how we do this in the video but the tags come out very nice looking and you can customize to make them look any way you want. Using just an ink jet printer you can make some very attractive tags and signs.

Hand written Tags

There are some great options for plant labels that you can hand print information on.
1000 Pack 5 color 4 inch Plant tags With Marker We find these are very useful just using their color to identify plants. If we are planting 100 White Dogwoods and 100 Pink Dogwoods, we will just put white tags in the white and red/pink in the pink. This is very helpful when planting bare root plants that look like twigs. At $18.00 for 1,000 tags, these are under $0.02 cents each.

The best marker we have found.

These really hold up for a couple seasons. 2 Pack Garden Marker Pen Permanent Markers Black UV Fade Resistant Marker Pens for Plant Markers

Some other ideas for lower volume, DIY Plant Tags

We like using paint stir sticks as writing on them is easy and they tend to last a fairly long time.

100 Pack Wood Paint Stir Sticks100 Pack Wood Pain Stir Sticks These come in at around $0.18 cents each so not super expensive. We like them to mark rows of plants and just using one at the head or end of a row.

50 Pack Wood Auto Paint Stir Sticks These 5 inch sticks are nice as well. A 50 pack is about $7.00 so these cost about $0.14 cents each and make a nice individual plant tag, especially if you have great handwriting.

We do recommend covering paper, wood, and plastic with this rugged tape.6 x164 Greenhouse Repair Tape 6 Mil Thickness Used to repair greenhouse plastic, this stuff is tough and adds some protection from moisture and UV rays. Handy stuff to have. You can make plant tags with this tape as well and a ink jet printer. just sandwich the paper between layers of tape making sure to seal the paper all the way around.