Make a Seed Organizer to Store Your Seed Collection

Like many gardeners I have a seed collection scattered among drawers, boxes, envelopes, seed banks. Sometimes I come across seeds I forgot I had and oftentimes I find them after the seed sowing window has closed for the gardening season. This year I’ve decided to try to be more thoughtful about what I plant and have made myself a seed organizer to file away my seed packs. With this seed organizer I know where the seeds are when I’m looking for them, I’ve categorized them in a way that makes sense to me, and when I’m done I can just place the seed packs back in the organizer until I need them again. The best part is that the seed organizer cost me $2.00 to make.

My seed organizer is made out of a plastic shoebox from the 99 cent store, some pieces of cardboard, and scrap craft paper. The five dividers organize my seed collection into annuals, perennials, vegetables, herbs, vines and exotic seeds.

I started out by tracing the outline of the plastic shoebox on a piece of cardboard using a thick, black marker. Next, I used a sharp blade to cut inside the lines, extracting the shape I needed. It is important to cut inside the line as your divider needs to be slightly smaller than the shoebox to fit properly.

For this seed organizer I created the divider out of scrap cardboard but you can use foam board. To hide the cardboard or rough edges of the foam board you can wrap the divider in paper like so.

Depending on the size of your seed collection you may want to make more dividers than I did. A small seed collection may benefit from several alphabetized dividers. Gardeners with a large stash of seeds may benefit from making two homemade seed organizers, and dedicating one to flower seeds and another to vegetable seeds. Take the idea and adapt it to your needs.

Make a seed organizer today to keep your seeds in a place where you’ll have easy access to them as you begin or continue sowing seeds for your garden. For an hour's worth of work and $2.00 I'm pretty happy with my homemade seed organizer. It is a lot less expensive than comparable seed organizers on the market. I can’t believe that it has taken me this many years to realize the benefit of keeping seeds in one easy to find location. Hopefully I can continue to stay organized because my seed collection is expanding and I need to use seeds before they lose viability. When you make your own organizer to file your seeds make sure to leave some room to keep your homemade plant labels and tags in it too. The seed organizer's portability should also come in handy the next time I attend a seed swap or need to carry my seed collection to a school garden to help start a seed library.

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