I keep a lot of vegetable and flower seeds each year. I get so many free gift seed packets with my annual seed orders, and I have so many seeds left over each year after planting, that I have many packets, unopened or partially used. I have seeds for 5 different melon varieties, many different beans, 4 or 5 carrots, oodles of flowers, and so on. And I always end up saving seed from some of my garden flowers.
For many years, I kept my seed packets in a metal box, the tins like cookies or popcorn come in for the Christmas holidays. They were just in a jumble inside it. It kept out bugs and sunlight. When I moved to this house, I took over my husband's seeds as well as my own. He had them in a cardboard box.with cardboard dividers. I made more dividers, and took over the box. I keep it in the livingroom under the TV stand. I may have upgraded to a larger box at some point. But once I started saving seed in quantity, I ran out of room quickly.
So day before yesterday, we went to Kmart and we found a great plastic container by Akro-Mils, made for scrapbook organizing. It has a large compartment, divided into two columns, and it has room for 8 row dividers. It only comes with 4 plastic dividers, so I made more out of cardboard. It works swell! I labelled each divider. It also has a double lid, with storage space for my seed reciepts and miscellaneous stuff. It is not airtight, so when I go to store it for the summer in the fridge I'm going to encase it in a plastic bag tied shut, or another plastic tupperware or rubbermaid airtight storage unit.
It has enough compartments that I have room for each category of seeds. Cole crops and herbs are one unit, tomatoes have their own space, peas, beans, and corn form another. All pumpkins and squash have a unit. But when I go to store my home-saved seeds for all the beans next Fall, I will need another container for all those bulky seeds. I still don't have a container for my blue corn. It is just in a gallon ziplock, still on the cobs. I want to be able to pick a few kernals off each cob when filling orders, so they get a genetic diversity to avoid inbreeding.
We have had gorgeous weather here, some rainy days, but yesterday was in the 60's, sunny, and calm. We had the sunroof open for our country drive, and you couldn't ask for it to be nicer this time of year. The tulips and marcissus are all coming up, although the backyard ones are already blooming. I have to prune the grapes and apples soon. This week we are ordering the Mantis Electric tiller. I will report here how well it works. It comes with a great guarantee, so I can return it if it's junk. But one expert gardening local here has one and can't say enough good things about it. So I hope he's right!
