If you are like me you collect seeds. I have a hard time walking past a seed display in a store. There is always a deal or something interesting and it is only a few dollars. Don’t get me started on seed catalogs or websites. The real problem is how do you keep those seeds stored in a way that you know what you have.
I decided to try something new this spring. I have harkened back to my childhood days of collecting baseball cards. There was nothing better than getting a new pack of cards, tearing into it to see what treasures it held. The joys of finding a Twins player, a rookie card or, the holy grail, a Kirby Puckett was the peak of excitement.
We had the same issue that I now have with storing seeds. That is to keep the safe, organized and put away so your mom (or wife) doesn’t throw them away. So I turned to the same solution I did as a youth plastic baseball card pages.
I got myself a binder, a couple dozen card pages, and way too many small zip top bags and set out to tame my piles of seed packets. (I will include links to all the things I used at the bottom of the post) I took the open packets of seeds and emptied the contents into the small bags. I then slapped a custom made label on the bag and slid it into a slot that would have held a Pat Meares rookie card when I had less gray hair. The unused packets would be folded up in a way that let them fit but still allowed me to read the packet.
The seeds were put into pages with similar other seeds. This led to lots of questions from my helpers. Like what is okra and what pages does it go on. Which was a good question that I only could answer half of. I guess that is what misc. pages are for. The girls were good helpers and actually made the process go faster. I hope they learned something too.
I only had a couple of real issues with the outcome of the project. The first was I should have bought a different bigger binder. The second was that the larger seeds like peas and beans filled up the little baggies and will slide out of the pages. Overall I think it is a good method and should let me easily know what I have on hand.
