How to Organize Seeds for Gardening

Every hobby or enterprise has it's own special organizational needs and gardening certainly has plenty of those! You have to keep track of where is the best place to plant a new plant, what kind of soil it needs and then track how to grows where you plopped it! You have to know which plants are biennials, which need to be dug up, which need certain types of fertilizer and how each plant is propagated. One of the hardest things to keep track of is seeds.

They're tiny. You can't tell one from the other unless you're a botanist. You rarely plant a whole packet of seeds at one time, or if you do, you have to remember which one you planted, what variety and if you want to plant it again, where did you order it in the first place. I use to have rubber banded together clumps of seed packets in my gardening shed. When the next planting season rolled around, I couldn't remember or correlate any of the information, so I'd chuck them all and start over again!

But then, a gardening friend shared her seed sorting system and it works extremely well.

Supplies Needed

One plastic tote filing box that will hold hanging file folders

Labels or tabs for each file

Quart Ziploc bags

Small desiccant pouches or tabs (website to purchase these or you can sometimes buy them from your florist. Mine sold me 25 one year for a buck!

Procedure to set up Seed Sorting System

Step one: Label each file folder with the species name, like lettuce, or tomatoes, daisies, etc.

Step two: Place each seed packet in a zip lock quart bag, alone with desiccant.

Step three: Then place this Ziploc bag of seeds and seed packet in the appropriate file folder.

Step four: If you have a lot of seeds, you can make a file labeled "order more" and when you empty a seed packet, drop it in this file, if you've decided you like that plant and want to order more of them. When it comes time to reorder seeds in the winter, all you have to do is go to you order more file to see what you need to replace and a quick shuffle through the other files allows you to see what inventory might be low.

Step five: I keep a folder in the box that contains all the invoices from the seed companies, that way I have their shipping and mailing information on hand to send in a new order. I even drop seed catalogs in the box when they come in each year.

That's it. A garden seed storage in a box! Now...if I could just store my bulbs in a file box and my root cuttings....and my....