Seed Envelopes

In this post I would like to share with you my simple method of making DIY seed envelopes. As you all know, seed saving is a crucial step if you are serious about growing your own crops. Of course, not all seeds can be saved: it is recommended that you to only save seeds of heirloom varieties. By the way, seeds of some hybrids (F1) can provide decent crops in the next year but over time their production quality noticeably declines. So, in my opinion, two critical rules of farming are:

1. Find good seed varieties that should lead to plants that will thrive in your area
2. If those seeds are heirloom varieties, make sure to save some so that you can ensure dependable production in the following years.

I can attest the importance of from personal experience. Last year, I planted some watermelon seeds that I've purchased from a store instead of planting the heirlooms that I would always plant. I literally had zero watermelons despite some nearby farmers producing lots from the local seeds. Although this certainly made me question my ability as a farmer, the only change I made from the previous years was the seeds. I would normally get some watermelons at least! 

Learning from this lesson, this year I decided to get serious about saving my own seeds. This endeavor requires procuring some suitable containers for the seeds. While many options exist, I think the easiest and the cheapest option is to make your own seed envelopes. Here, I share the simple steps that I follow to make them.

First let's have a look at the water melon seeds that I've saved and want to use for the next year:

Nice, isn't it? By the way when I am saving seeds I always follow the following procedure. When eating the produce I separate the desired number of seeds into a sieve. I then run water over them to clean up the sticky plant matter from the seeds. I then put the seeds on a plate and keep it somewhere indoors for them to dry out. For some seeds like tomatoes, the seeds can stick to the plate but it is not too difficult to remove them. The longer you wait the more they will stick, so I recommend taking them off the plate and putting to an envelope when they have thoroughly dried within a few days. Enough with this sidetrack and let's get back to our envelopes.

The next step is getting a paper (A4 or letter-sized work great) and folding it over such that you end up with a square paper after you tear off the extra part. Pictures explain it better:

You can see that we end up with a triangle. If you open this triangle you will end up with a square paper, but we don't need to open it. Next we fold over the the two corners of this triangle toward the center. We make sure that the folded parts overlap with each other and the remaining corner is roughly centered between the folds:

We now insert one of these folded corners inside the other one to get:

Now we are almost done. You can see that we managed to obtain an envelope-like shape inside of which forms a pocket to put the seeds in:

We can now pour the seeds in it but I recommend writing some description about the seeds first. I typically write the main plant name, variety, and the year that I obtained the seeds. The year information is very critical as most seeds lose their viability (i.e. germination rate) after a couple of years. This way you save yourself from planting too old seeds when it comes to plant them:

All we have to do now is to put the seeds in and close the envelope. If you are a minimalist, you can simply fold the top triangle toward the center and slide your fingers to make a sharp crease to prevent the seeds from falling out. If you want to take it one step further, you can secure this part to prevent accidental opening. Using a tape works but I think a better option is to use something like a blue tack so that you can open and close it multiple times. This can prove to be handy come the next planting time. Here is how I do it with a blue tack, which perhaps should be called a white tack in this case:

Oh, by the way, do not throw piece of paper that we torn out to make the initial square. You can make more seed envelopes for storing smaller seeds from these. Here I created two such envelopes for storing tomato seeds of different variates:

I admit that I have been lazy in this post and made all my seed envelopes from white paper. But wouldn't it be so much nicer if we used colored paper to make seed envelopes with matching colors to their crops? Like using red paper for tomatoes and green paper for peppers? Anyways, if you find the time to make such envelopes please share with me in the comments below. Also if you have better or different ways of making seed envelopes I would like to learn about them as well.