Gardeners' Holidays 2024: First Sowing

Spring is officially here, which means it's about time to get our first crop, the snap peas, into the ground. I figured I could easily handle this on my own while Brian was out for a bike ride, but it turned out to be more difficult than I expected. The problem wasn't planting the seeds; it was finding them.

We keep all our seeds and seed-starting supplies in a big box labeled "seed starting," which is on one of the lower shelves in our overcrowded storage room. When I hauled out this box, the first place I looked for the seeds was in the wooden crate that Brian refers to as our "seed library," which contains all our seed packets from the current year and previous years, sorted by category. There was a section at the front labeled "This year," so I supposed that was where this year's seeds would be. However, a quick search plainly revealed that it was not. I then went through all the other sections and, while I did find some packets of snap peas, none were more recent than 2018. Clearly these weren't the seeds I was looking for.

Then I spotted a little box from Botanical Interests, our 2023 seed supplier, which was labeled "The good stuff (2024)." Ah, presumably the current seeds would be in here. And when I rummaged through, I did indeed find a packet of snap peas from last year's order—but there were only about 15 seeds left in it. That was less than half the number we would need to plant a full row of peas. Surely we would have ordered more if that was all we had left, wouldn't we? When I consulted my garden chart, it said that yes, we had ordered more from True Leaf Market this year. But where were they? And where, for that matter, were all the rest of the seeds from this year's order, which hadn't been in either of the two boxes I'd checked?

I went back to the big box and eventually found, tucked in near the front, a large brown-paper envelope, well camouflaged against the brown cardboard of the box itself. This was the package in which our seeds had been delivered, which Brian had apparently stuck into the box with all the seeds still in it. So I retrieved that, fished out the seeds, and planted them in the right rear garden bed, which we'd already cleared of weeds the week before. (Side note: we discovered in the process that our "Marvel of Four Seasons" lettuce truly lives up to its name. There's a head growing in that same bed that apparently overwintered from last fall's planting and is already large enough to start harvesting.) 

But my work was not done. Given that it had taken me about five times as long to find the seeds as it had to plant them, I was convinced we needed a better organizational scheme for our seed collection. We had saved far too many packets of seeds, some of them clearly far too old to germinate at this point, and they had turned into a haystack in which the seeds we actually needed were hard-to-find needles. So as soon as Brian got home, we brought up all the seeds and started going through them, removing the unusable ones and filing the current ones. We discarded anything that was over 5 years old—including a few packets that were over 15 years old—and anything that had been a spectacular failure, such as the Apple pepper seeds that completely failed to germinate.

By the time we were done, we had a huge pile of empty seed envelopes and two bowls of expired seeds, one for flowers and one for veggies. Keeping them separate was Brian's idea. He plans to scatter the expired flower seeds in some neglected corner of the yard and see if anything came up. We're still figuring out what to do with the vegetable seeds. If we toss them in the compost bin, there's a danger that some of them could defy the odds and sprout, creating unidentifiable rogue plants that take over our side yard. (Brian tried to argue that this could be "an adventure," but I vetoed the idea. Gardening with plants you can put a name to is enough of an adventure as it is.) 

My idea was that maybe we could scatter all the vegetable seeds in a shallow dish, set it out in the yard, and see if the birds and squirrels would eat them. However, many of them were beans, and it turns out that uncooked beans are unsafe for birds to eat. So for now, we've just poured them all into a jar, where we'll keep them until we either think of a use for them or give up and toss them in the trash. In the meantime, they make a rather fetching little decoration. Too bad I don't have an Instagram account to post them on.

After clearing out all the old and useless seeds, we had plenty of room in the seed library to file all the usable ones. In the process, we discovered that there weren't quite as many of them as we thought we had. Even though we'd gone through the entire collection before placing our seed order for this year, we somehow overlooked the fact that we didn't have enough of either our Provider green beans or our Marketmore cucumbers to fill all the squares we'd allocated for them. More startling still, we'd failed to notice that we didn't have any usable scallion seeds at all. I had to place a hasty second seed order with True Market—one packet of Provider beans, one new cucumber variety called Boston Pickling Cucumber, and a new scallion variety called Flagpole—to rectify the situation.

So in the end, I guess it was a bit of a blessing in disguise that our seed library was such a mess. If it hadn't looked like a disaster that needed to be cleaned up immediately, we might not have discovered that we were missing some seeds we needed until the time came to plant them. Then we'd have had to make do with whatever variety was available at the nearest store or, worse still, leave valuable space in our garden empty. But on the other hand, maybe if it hadn't been such a mess back in December, we would have been able to tell which seeds we needed and avoid the whole problem.

In either case, I think we're best off not letting it get to that level again. Moving forward, we plan to go through all the seeds when we place our order in December or January and remove any that we think we're unlikely to use. Maybe, if we're really on the ball, we can even cull the varieties that we don't want before they expire and donate them to our local seed library. That way they'll have a chance to be of use to someone instead of ending up as decorative objects in a jar.