Tap, tap, tap. Is this thing on? It’s hard to believe it, but with about a month to our first sowing of the year, it’s time to start ramping up our 2025 growing season! Unreal! We are going to slowly start things out with planning and other pre-season tasks!
One of the most important planning tasks we need to knock out is determining what seeds we need to purchase for the season. So, our very first objective is to go through our current seed collection to determine what we have and what needs replacement!
We’ll get into seed viability in more depth later, but the gist is that seeds have a lifespan. We need to consider replacing any seeds that are pushing against their viability limitations. Conceptually, seed management is a necessary effort for any long term from-seed grower. It’s especially important for us “smaller scale” growers that aren’t using up entire packets (or entire bags) every season.
You can see we use photo organizers for our primary seed storage. It’s the best thing we’ve ever done for our seed collection! Our seeds are organized according to their type. Sometimes it’s a major classification (e.g. brassica) and sometimes things get their own photo case if we have a lot of it (e.g. tomatoes and peppers). We have a separate case for both flowers and for veggies. (And yes, we are certified plant addicts here!)
In each photo case, we have the seed viability for the contained seeds printed out. As we get seed in each year, we clearly mark the purchase year on the front of each seed packet. This allows us to quickly assess any “old seed” we have in our collection, enabling us to very quickly develop a list of any seeds that need replacement due to age.
While we’re at it, we also pop each packet to get a “gut check” of whether we have enough of that seed for the season. We all ready know what we ran out of last year, but we also want to know if we’re nearing that point this year. (Just in case we didn’t make a note of it getting low last season!) If it looks like it’ll be close, we put it on our buy list.
We’ll definitely thread in more information for our 2025 seed purchase soon, but for us, this is a multi-stage process. What we’re trying to get to is a complete list of every single new seed we need for the season.
We like to do this part before we plan anything “new” as it is both necessary and has a direct cost associated with it. It’s very easy to spend a ridiculous amount of money on seed, so starting with essential replacements will definitely help you maintain your seed budget later.
We’re excited to take you along for our 2025 growing season! We’ll still be a bit intermittent up until early March or so, but then we’re planning on hitting you up with daily posts until we just can’t garden anymore in 2025! As always, we deeply appreciate you following us and we’re looking forward to throwing down high quality, northern focused gardening posts!
