Organizing seed packets
All gardeners check and refresh their seed stashes, erhm, I mean, collections, during the winter. It's early January and it's ALMOST seed-starting time. So here's a blog post about how I store my seeds, hopefully it'll get your organizing creative juices flowing!
For the longest time, I had a hard time keeping track of what kind of seeds I had. And remembering the timing. And keeping the whole mess less, well, messy. A few years ago I came up with this system and it's been working well for me. Getting an ADHD diagnosis a couple of years ago sure explained a lot... Anyway, this system has been working great for me for the last 5-6 years, so I'm sharing it in case it'll help another distracted and overly enthusiastic gardener out there!
We have this little filing cabinet that I don't even know where it came from originally... But at some point, it became my seed stash.
In the bottom drawer, I used a bunch of file folders to create 2 sets of tabs. Empty file folders with a white tab (tab is on the right-hand side of the folder) denote the timing of planting and serve as dividers. My white dividers are "Start in Feb", "Start mid-April (6 weeks)", "Start early May (4 weeks)", and "Direct seed and repeat".
In between each of these empty file folders, there's a set of folders with brown tabs (on the left-hand side of the folder), for the kinds of seeds. So "Direct seed" has brown tabs for Greens, Brassicas, Root Veg, and Peas and Beans. Each folder has the various packets loose (like in the pic for tomatoes below). This keeps me on schedule, the types of seeds are all like-with-like, and the individual packets are easy to get.
Is it mid-April? Great! I look at the relevant section, pull out the entire folder for tomatoes, and dig around and decide what varieties I want to start this year! When I'm done, I just pop the folder back in, and it's all back to being organized.
