Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Gardening Organization

I love this time of year almost as much as the first harvest.  Planning is in my blood!

The catalogs arrive daily, but that doesn't matter.  Most are junky scammy ones.  I would mention names but I don't feel like getting arguements about them.  I'll just say that if you keep getting catalogs from places you never order from, those are probably them.  LOL!

The catalogs I like are Johnny's, Territorial, Victory, Selected Seeds, and Brent&Becky's.  Burpee's is good too, but I never end up ordering from them these days.

I have a SYSTEM for keeping seeds and deciding when to plant them inside and out.  My seeds are kept refrigerated in medical specimen vials I found cheap years ago.  They last years longer that way.  I number the vials on top and on the sides.
The tray was easy.  I drilled holes the size of the vial bottoms in a piece of plywood and glued another piece under it.  I'm going to build a better one with a 2nd board 1/2 way up (the current bottom holes are tight to hold the vials upright).  But the main point is that the seeds are all in one tray, sealed and refrigerated (in a basement refrigerator also used as a root cellar for potatoes and carrots and such).

I keep a list of the vial contents using Excel (for easy columns).  A part of it looks like this:


SEEDLIST 2018





VEGETABLES





VIAL CROP TYPE ACQ YR




101 PAC CHOI CHING-CHIANG 18
102 TOMATO SWEET MILLION 17
103 TOMATO SUPERNATURAL (ROOTSTOCK) 18
104 TOMATO BRANDYWINE 17
105 TOMATO PINEAPPLE 17
106 TOMATO CHEROKEE PURPLE 16
107 TOMATO STRIPED GERMAN 13
108 TOMATO MOSKVITCH 13
109 TOMATO GARDEN TREASURE 16
110 TOMATO GARDEN GEM 16
111 CORN ALLURE 16
112 CORN ALLURE 16
113 CORN ALLURE 16
114


115 LETTUCE ROMAINE, RED MARSHALL 17
116 LETTUCE NEVADA 17

I also keep index cards for each week of planting or transplanting, with notes...

The number in the upper right is the weeks before or after the average last frost date (April 15th here, but I round it to weekends for simplification.  A few days doesn't matter.  And, as you can see, I change the weeks sometimes.  I also have a set of cards counting backwards from the average FIRST frost date for Fall plantings.

I keep all the empty seed packets.  Sometimes there is good information, but it also tells me where I got the seeds from. 



2 comments:

Megan said...

I like getting seed catalogues too, even though I don't do much gardening. One can still dream, can't one? Incredible organisation at your end!

Megan
Sydney, Australia

The Whiskeratti said...

We're always impressed with your gardening acumen. It seems so otherworldly to us, this business of growing things.

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