Sow, or throw?

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Old Seeds

As a prelude to planning my 2010 garden, I have been doing a stock take – creating an inventory of my seed collection in Bento which allows me to search on keywords such as ‘Oriental’, ‘Tea’ and ‘Edible Flowers’ and means that I don’t have to keep lists of plants lying around or in my head.

Until yesterday I’d been cataloguing the new seeds, the ones just lying around. Yesterday I started in on my seed box, the old seeds – and I found out just how old some of them are. I have seeds almost back to when I started gardening, and lots of packets of seeds that are past their Sow By date.

Old seeds are a problem for gardeners with small gardens, or gardeners like me that want to grow new things every year – there’s never enough space to sow all of the seeds in the packet. If you have gardening friends or go to lots of seed swaps then you can give away your excess; you could also donate them to a local school garden or a gardening charity like Thrive. However, no one is going to want opened packets of out-of-date seeds.

So I am trying to work out what to do with them. Seeds have a definite lifespan (and there are tables where you can look them up), but I could do germination tests on all of these packets and see whether any of them are still viable.

There are various different types of seed here (and I haven’t finished going through the box yet, so the pile will grow), but I could try sowing all of the leafy veg seeds in a big pot and seeing what comes up. There may be some plants fit for human consumption, but plants that we eat only when they’re mature (like calabrese and broccoli) could provide the chickens with a supply of greens as well.

Some of the organic seeds might be suitable for sprouting, but non-organic seeds are not as they will have been treated with nasty chemicals like fungicides. With things like peppers I could just sow them all and see what germinates, then sow fresh seeds if I don’t end up with enough plants. I seem to remember reading something somewhere about someone (Bob Flowerdew?) using old seeds as a free green manure.

It looks as though a variety of approaches are needed to deal with my old seeds – unless I just cut my losses, throw them away and start afresh this year.

What do you do with your old seeds?

Posted 25 January 2010, 08:14.   Posted in .
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