One of my favorite late summer activities is seed saving. I keep my favorite veggie seeds from the community garden, the zinnia seeds from our wedding flowers that I sowed every year since 2018, and various herbs I keep in pots around the yard. In the last few years I’ve started collecting native seeds for my Winter Sowing workshops and personal perennial garden.
I organized the seeds that we collected from the NEORSD sites first. They are in alphabetical order by Latin name and correspond with a nice excel sheet full of information. I am still hoping to propagate them for our work sites this spring. One woman I met at a seed swap taught me how to make little origami envelopes. The whole process of collecting seeds and folding them into envelopes feels therapeutic to me. It’s an activity that fills me with hope for next year’s growing season.
BEFORE: This wild bar cart had all of my jars and envelopes of seeds, as well as my teas and pet medicines. What a mess! Don’t judge me!
The process is fun until I find the canisters, jars, envelopes and boxes of seeds from over the years all over the house. I spent a lot of the winter with “
Sort Seeds” on my “to do” list but it just haunted me knowing it would take probably a full afternoon to organize the hundreds of seeds in my collection. I was given a personalized seed organizing book for my birthday, but I knew I needed more than the 50 slots provided. Luckily, there were several photo albums at the thrift store that would come in handy.
AFTER: Ahhhh! My seeds are now organized into photo albums and tins. There is proper room for a tea station on top now!
It finally happened! Last weekend I went through all my seeds. The categories turned out: Native seeds from work in a canister, native seeds from home in the seed book, a photo albums of garden vegetables and a photo album of annual herbs, flowers and medicinals. I am happy to cross that one off the list!
It was easy to find the seeds in needed for planting my veggie garden this year!
Now I have my winter sowing mostly together. I’m starting my vegetables in my propagation class at LCCC, and I know exactly where to go when I want to pot up my calendula, nasturtium, tulsi and cempasúchiles.
I’ve only started the peppers so far in the LCCC greenhouse, since they take just the right conditions to germinate.
I have 12 milk jugs of native seeds started.
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