I’m so excited – all the seeds I ordered this year have arrived! Yeah! Almost as fun as planting them is putting them away in my seed organizer.

To store my seeds, I have a plastic box with a lid that holds standard-sized, heavy, 1-inch expanding envelopes. I have 20 of these envelopes. Each I’ve labelled with a type of vegetable. I have Bush Beans, Pole Beans, Roots (carrots, beets, etc), Flowers, Tomatoes, etc. Each seed packet goes into the appropriate folder.

I love the way this set-up works. It’s easy to find my seeds and easy to return them to their spot.

Hannah, who runs the Vegetable Garden at Elm Bank (Wellesley MA) uses this approach and showed it to me. Rather than one box, she has at least ten of them!

I like to show my seed collection to gardeners and make the point that seeds last a long time. Most last at least 5 years. Tomato seeds can remain viable more than 10 years. A few seed types are short-lived, like carrots and onions. But it saves a LOT of money, and is fun(!), to save seeds year to year in an organized system. I enjoy building up a collection with lots of variety.

So now I have my seeds set, I’ve cleaned up some planting trays, my shelves and lights are up. The next step is getting my hands into dirt and planting. Ahh…. My calendar says to start onions and celeriac next week. But I think starting a week early can’t hurt….