How To Organize Your Seeds

Because I live in a region that gets 8 months of winter (not joking), no one loves this time of year better than me… when I can start pulling out the seeds, and summer no longer seems like a dream away. The last 3 years I have not had a garden because we had been moving/building/displaced. The result was a messy seed collection full of old seeds… and lots of new seeds arriving in the mail every day as I expanded my collection. Look at it… just a jumbled mess. For shame.

Photo by Prairie Girl, All rights reserved

Inspired by Homestead Revival’s post on Organizing Seeds and Planting Records, I set to work re hauling my entire system (or lack thereof). Using Amy’s templates for the seed record and mini file folders (you can find those templates in her post), I made a folder for each and every seed variety. Because I had lots of old seeds, I had a separate side project going to determine if they were still viable. You can read about about that at How to Use Old Seeds.

What I needed:

Card stock (I had plenty in my stash)

White paper

Little baggies (I had lots of these, too. Not sure why.)

Scotch tape

Pencil

Scissors

glue stick

I printed off a bunch of the seed record sheets on the regular white paper, and the file folder template onto card stock. The I cut and folded the mini file folders to assemble them, using tape to secure the edges. I cut the seed record to fit the front of the folders, and glued them on.

Photo by Prairie Girl, All rights reserved

Inside each folder I put the second part of the seed record, and the seeds. If my seed packets had been opened or were crumpled, I put the seeds in a new small baggie, labelled it (in case it ever got misplaced out of the folder), and put it in side the folder.

Photo by Prairie Girl, All rights reserved

If the seed packet was brand new and yet to be opened, I just placed it inside the folder as is. I will also put in pictures and more seed starting information. Some of the opened seed packets had good information on them, so I cut them up and put the piece of paper inside as well.

Photo by Prairie Girl, All rights reserved

There! Now doesn’t that look better? I had originally intended to color code the folders by vegetables/flowers/herbs etc, but ran short on some colors, so then I just figured it wouldn’t matter much. I did, however, find out I have way more seeds than could fit in the one container, so I divided up and put vegetables and fruits in one, and flowers and herbs in the other. This gives me more room for expansion.

Now in the interests of full disclosure, I must say that although I am very happy with the results, this was not a quick project. In amongst parenting and daily homemaking tasks, this took me over a month to do in my spare time. I just can’t do anything involving scissors, glue, and paper without having a 4 year old wanting to help mama do her “crafting”. So this was done in the evenings.

It’s so much nicer to have them like this! And now I can quickly and easily find everything at a glance.

Photo by Prairie Girl, All rights reserved