Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Seed Organization

I can’t be the only one with this problem – Storing and organizing left over seed. I’ve tried several different methods over the last year, none of which were terribly successful. Initially, I taped the seed packets closed and put them in an old school-supplies box. This was adequate until I needed back in those seed packets. Every time I had to cut the tape to re-open the seed packets, the packet itself degraded a little more. Also, there was no organization to the box. When I needed a specific packet, I had to sort through everything in the box to find it.

Next I put the different varieties of seed packets in their own labeled baggies. I had a plastic sandwich bag for all my different tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, etc. This helped with the organization, but the seed leaked out of the seed packets and soon I had bags of miscellaneous tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers.
So here’s my latest attempt:

Seed book
I tri-folded the seed packets and slid them into clear plastic business card holder sheets. Each sheet holds 10 seed packets. I can actually read the seed packets, and so far, I don’t think that any seed has been able to escape the packets. The image above is my test run. I am going to take it on a trip to share with some gardening friends. If the seeds all stay put, I will put my other (20-30) seed packets in the protector sheets and organize it so that each sheet is dedicated to a plant type (i.e.: berries, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, greens, etc.).I also put white ruled paper behind each sheet and plan to catalog planting /germination notes for each seed I plant in 2012. Hopefully this seed catalog/garden diary will be the answer to my seed storage and organization prayers.

If anyone out there has a good method that works for them, I would love to hear about it. I’ll even post it here (with your permission) to share with others.

2 comments:

  1. Great idea! I was thinking small zip locks filed in a recipe box. But I like this much better.

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  2. Thanks! The real test will be after I've done my Spring plantings and have about 20 more open packets to file away. I'll write and update on this one way or the other though.

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