[Market-farming] Seed Storage

Road's End Farm organic87 at frontiernet.net
Mon Mar 16 14:00:08 EDT 2009


On Mar 16, 2009, at 12:31 PM, Marie Kamphefner wrote:

> Here I sit, at the dining room table, surrounded by packets of seeds.
> There's a huge pile for direct seeding in May, a pile of peas for 
> April,
> greens, lettuces, herbs, some that might be outdated, new ones . . . 
> the
> list goes on and on.
>
> How do you keep all the seeds straight? Some of these might end up 
> like my
> garlic did this winter - forgotten or lost. I think I need to figure 
> out a
> system to keep track of the seeds we have other than in shoeboxes 
> stacked
> inside a big tote and put in the basement.
>

I use heavy plastic containers of various sizes, shoebox size on up. (I 
switched to the heavy plastic from cardboard after the year the mice 
ate all the winter squash seed. Use the kind that have a tight fitting 
lid.)

Each general category of seed has a separate box -- the number of 
categories, and how to divide them, would depend on the person. Some of 
mine are "solanacea", "cucurbits" "onions, carrots, parsnip", "greens 
-- lettuce, beets, chard, etc." Each box is labeled on the top with 
what's in it, including a more detailed list when I feel it's 
necessary. Seed within the box is organized mostly by rubber banding 
similar things together; some boxes have additional interior cardboard 
dividers, for which I just cut out cardboard to size from old boxes.

Purchased seed goes into the boxes in the packages it came in. Seed I 
save goes into brown paper envelopes of various sizes, which I buy at a 
local office supplies store; these seem to work as well as empty 
packets being sold for the purpose, and are usually cheaper.

My basement is often damp. I have a closet with no windows adjoining 
the office; this stays fairly cool, as the adjacent rooms are not the 
warmest and the closed door and lack of windows shuts it off from most 
indoor and outdoor heat; I stack the boxes in there.

Garlic, potatoes, etc. of course don't fit into this. Seed stock garlic 
is stored in trays in the barn till planting time, which is before it 
freezes in the barn; I just set it aside from what I intend to sell. 
Potatoes do wind up in the basement, in a vented wood or metal cabinet, 
again to keep the mice out. To keep me from forgetting things there's a 
Planting Schedules list, which goes on for several pages, and is 
checked each week when I redo the Things to Work On this Week list. 
(yes, I do indeed spend rather too much time doing lists. but it does 
keep me from doing things such as entirely forgetting to plant any of 
the crops.)

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale
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