Organizing Seeds

I try to keep my seeds handy and in order. I've never been able to do just that. I have paper bags of seeds. I have jars of seed, lots of baby food jars from when I raised a robin. There are large plastic bags and more. The only ones I've managed to corral are the smaller seed. I have hundreds of packs of them.

I use a small cardboard box and do a lot of customizing. That small box gets larger every year. I use snack cracker boxes to make individual trays to fit inside the cardboard box. I also use them to make dividers for the trays.

I've reserved a space in the box for seeds as they come from the supplier. A compartment for flowers and one for vegetables.

Another compartment houses blank and used markers for flowers and vegetables. I also make tags for things like 5 gallon buckets of specialty soil I have made over time.

I keep two sizes of small plastic bags in the box. They are inexpensive craft bags I bought at Walmart.

I managed to find room for 3x5s for notes and labels. Scissors and pen always come in handy.

I even managed to squeeze in a small bag of homemade anchors for strawberry runners. I made them from heavy gauge copper wire.

Of course, most of the space is taken up by some of the many small plastic bags of seeds. Flower seeds are first, all in alphabetical order. Next, are my vegetable seeds, all in order. Next, come herbs and other things, all in order.

On the tiny label inside each bag is the name of the seed, the year it was harvested and a notation (pic) if I have taken a picture of the plant and filed it in my computer.

As far as where I keep these seed, most anywhere it's cool, dark and fairly dry. The World Seed Bank keeps seed deep inside a mountain vault with extreme measures regarding temperature, light exposure, moisture, and several other factors. One of the most respected seedsman in the USA, J. L. Hudson, keeps his seed in quart mason jars sitting on tables. I opted for somewhere in between.

It's a bit of work, but I like it. And hey!... it keeps me off the streets at night.

Happy gardening, Y'all!

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Have you ever looked at a seed and wondered how it works? Most people don't. They're just glad seeds do what they do. I think of a seed as a set of instructions, a program. One seed can take soil nutrients, air, water, and solar radiation and cause a maple tree to come into existence, while another seed given the same things to work with can cause a tomato to be.

Some seed can remain dormant for a thousand years and when encountering a certain set of circumstances, will germinate and begin to grow. I wonder about this thousand year dormancy. Was the seed alive all that time, or did it just have the potential for life? Being without life and then coming to life is more than I can comprehend. The world's fastest computer, currently the Tianhe-2 (China) can perform 33,860 trillion calculations per second, and it cannot tell us how a seed does what it does.

Hold a seed in your hand and give thought to it. Is it just an inanimate object to be put to the ground where it will express its potential. Or, do you hold in your hand, one of the greatest mysteries of the Universe? Within the seed is a will. Will cannot be seen or measured. Its presence cannot be detected by any instrument. Will keeps the Universe going. To know and understand will is to know and understand the mind of the Universe. That thing which drives all that is, can be held in the palm of your hand.