[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 greens, lettuces, herbs, some that might be outdated, new ones .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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 2642 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/market-farming/attachments/20090316/6495a16e/attachment.bin
More information about the Market-farming
mailing list