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.