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  • From: Road's End Farm <organic87 AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Seed Storage
  • Date: Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:00:08 -0400


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greens, lettuces, herbs, some that might be outdated, new ones .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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