Under the Choko Tree By Nevin Sweeney

Setting up a Seed Inventory

If you want to grow the majority of your food yourself, fresh seed is important to ensure good germination. Unless you are going to live on zucchini for the rest of your life you are going to need to manage a variety of seed to ensure you always have enough fresh seed on hand to keep your garden producing. One tool you can use to help you do that is the seed inventory.

If you are like me, you have a collection of various seeds, bought in form various suppliers as well as home grown, of various ages and in various stages of use. It is a great exercise to get them all into some semblance of order and have a record so you know exactly what you have, and know when you need to save or order more. When I set up my seed inventory I took the opportunity to get rid of my surprising large collection of out of date seeds so I will no longer have that wonderful feeling of going to sow a particular vegetable seed and find they are either all gone or all out of date.

To set up your inventory, you can use the blank Excel spreadsheet which I used, it has been set out for you and can be downloaded here. The spreadsheet is set up with 6 columns –

  1. Vegetable – Fairly straightforward this one! Just type in the name of the vegetable the seed is from.
  2. Variety – Some vegetables have hundreds of varieties available and you may be growing more than one to extend the harvest, provide variety in your diet or just because you like them. Keeping track of the different varieties of each vegetable is important to make sure they are available when you need them. It can also be handy to keep a record of which variety you are growing, even if you are only growing one so you know which one to re-order when the time comes. Some vegetables do not have a varietal name attached, so I just leave the space blank.
  3. Amount – It is handy to also to know how much of a seed variety you have in stock so you know when supplies are getting low and you need to get some more. Some seed packets will tell you how many seeds are in the pack, the larger seeds can be either counted and entered as the number of seeds or weighed if you have a lot. For a lot of the smaller seeds like brassicas or umbellifers  you can get a whole stack of plants out of less than a grams worth of seed, and my scales don’t go down below a gram so in this column I enter “<1 gram” and it works for me!
  4. Source – Here you can enter the seed company you bought it from or the friend who provided it of if you saved it yourself (in which case I just put “home grown”). You may as I sometimes do, have the same seed from different sources so it is good to know where your freshest seed came from.
  5. Harvest date – is simply the date you harvested your home grown seeds. That way you have some indication of how old they are when you come to use them and whether they are fresh enough. For commercially bought seeds you won’t have this date, what you will have is –
  6. “Sow by” date – This can be read from the packet of any commercially bought in seeds. You can work out this date for your homegrown seed by consulting one of the seed viability lists on the net. (For Example )

There is also a section at the top where you can put in the date the inventory was originated and the date of the last update, where applicable. I used Excel to design the form so that you can go through your seeds and enter them in any order, then sort them for how you want them, I sort alphabetically by vegetable.

There is one more job and that is to review your list the seeds you have with a couple of seed catalogues and determine if there are any vegetables and/or specific varieties which are currently not in your inventory but which you wish to grow. Enter the names and varieties into your inventory but leave the rest of the fields empty, the information can be entered once the seed has been obtained.

It is a worthwhile effort to set up a seed inventory, then you can use it to plan out the seeds which you need to have to grow the food you want to eat. This will ensure that you will always have fresh seed of the right type on hand whenever you need to plant.

 

 

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