Collected Californian poppy Eschscholzia pods and seeds

January Review of  Seeds in my Seed Bank

• Many gardeners me included have collections of seeds from last year and prior. This is a summary of how I started 2020
• Alliums of many varieties not kept separate – all destined for  my daughters newish garden as requested.
• Some kept in a plastic box without being fully dried off. They don’t look too healthy so ditched them on compost heap where they could have gone much sooner.
• Some well dried off and now labeled.
• Set up a metal box for all bought and some dried seed
• Best seeds were runner beans – will use largest for this year.  There were more than I will need to get a reasonable number of plants.
• Several packets of annuals bought in the autumn sale – particularly those that can be expected not to have aged. I planned to be sowing in spring and am now very grateful for the stock as I can’t go out and buy more.
• Empty packets of various autumn sown seeds Calendula, sweet pea, wallflower, etc
• Saved seed from those plants I want to repeat, livingstone daisy, salvia, lupin, cosmos,
• Specials to try to cultivate yellow tree peony, pieris and collected shrub berries from nature walks.
• Salad leaf mixture, 6 varieties of tomato, climbing beans, broad beans etc.

Tips

• Save in envelopes for better dry storage. Make sure they don’t have open corners I used school dinner-money envelopes and they leaked
• Keep seeds separate and label with name and date
• If seeds decanted from the original proprietary packet keep the bit of instructions, name etc.
• Don’t use plastic bags in future they sweat and help cause rot-dry off seed before storing.
• Take care with the usually good sweet pea seeds this year they all had maggots in them.
• Separate dry seed from husks and pods.