Choosing Your Seeds {+ FREE SEED INVENTORY PRINTABLE} -

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It’s the most wonderful time of the year!

Seed catalog season is here!

I love selecting seeds, in fact it’s one of my favorite aspects of gardening. Unlike buying produce from the store or farmers market, home gardeners have the wonderful opportunity to select unique, rare, or heirloom varieties. Choosing your own seed also opens up a whole new culinary opportunity. Many varieties of fruits or vegetables taste divine but because they don’t transport well for grocery stores we’ve never tasted them.

However because of the amazing selection of seeds, home gardeners can feel overwhelmed with figuring out what to buy and grow.

Here are some tips for going through your seed stash and making sure you don’t get carried away (ahem I always still do 😉 )

Creating your Seed Inventory

The first thing you want to do before selecting your seeds is to create a seed inventory of your current seed stock. If you’re a beginner gardener or used up all your seed last year you can skip this part.

When you take seed inventory you’ll want to make note of the type of fruit or vegetable, the variety, the seed company, the date you purchased them and the seed shelf life (your seed packet might say something like seed life: 1 year). Then you’ll want to make note of how much you have left and if you need to order more.
I’m offering you a freebie printable which is one of the many sheets that comes with my printable garden planner (which also has ‘seeds to purchase’ and ‘important seed packet info’ for example).

DOWNLOAD THE PDF HERE –> Seed Inventory Printable

Interested in more printables to help you stay organized?

Figuring out what to grow

I’ve written many garden planning articles on this site about how to figure out what to grow & you can also check out my book

‘Preventing’ Seed Addiction

The new seed catalogues are at your fingertips.

You’ve been browsing through the beautiful pages, making notes on your favorite varieties and even reading them before bed.

It’s the beginning of winter and you haven’t had dirt in your fingernails for weeks. You’re needing a gardening fix. Buying seeds for the upcoming growing season seems like the perfect solution.

The next thing you know you’re giddy with anticipation at the parcel of carefully chosen seeds arriving any day in the mailbox. They arrive! Oh the joy!

Now you start garden planning and you’re struggling to fit in all the varieties. Did you really order so many? What were you thinking? Perhaps you over did it. Perhaps your gardening heart was bigger than common sense. Perhaps you even need to hide your seed stash from your spouse.

Welcome to the world of the Obsessive Seed Collector.

Some of you will be excellent at choosing what vegetables you want to grow and then carefully selecting your varieties based from your available growing space.

Others (hello!) will browse through the seed catalogues like a hungry wolf, scouting out anything that looks pleasing to the eye. Sometimes it’s the description, sometimes it’s the name. Sometimes it’s the strangeness of a new heirloom and sometimes it’s the stunning beauty. For whatever reason. Now you have 120 varieties to figure out where to put.

I’ve been that person. *ahem* I’m honestly still that person 😉

However realistically it’s probably not the greatest idea to have too many varieties because:

Cost. Higher input = less dollar value gained from your homegrown produce.
Planning. How are you really going to fit in so many varieties within one growing season?
Harvest. Having too many varieties means you end up harvesting just a handful of each kind.
One Meal? Will your produce only give you one meal? Wouldn’t it be better to grow more plants of one variety?
True Test. You won’t fully know if that variety is best suited to your micro-climate and garden with such a small test plot.