How to Store Seeds and Save Seeds for Gardening

In the last few years I have recently discovered gardening. I joined a community garden and I’m slowly learning how to make the most of our tiny little plot of shared land here in Vancouver, British Columbia. Honestly during COVID-19 gardening has been the best thing for my mental health and physical health. I highly recommend joining a community garden or turning your patio or grassy hard into a veggie garden.

This year we decided to save our seeds to save money and we had trouble sourcing seeds this year due to COVID so we let our plants go to seed so we don’t have to worry too much in the coming years. Not only does this save us having to buy seeds for a few seasons, but we can also share/trade seeds with our fellow community gardeners. But I have to say our garden plot looked pretty ugly for a while, seed pods really make the plants fall over and look like they’re dead.

So now that we have all these seeds my issue was how the heck do we store these seeds to keep them safe from temperature changes and humidity. I was going to just store them in paper envelopes, but then a fellow gardener told me a terrifying story about how there were beetle eggs in her seeds that she saved and they hatched inside the envelope and made their way all over their apartment. I immediately freaked out and needed to rethink my storage plan.

The initial plan was to keep them in the envelopes then placed them in mason jars with screw top lids, but we just don’t have that kind of storage space and I’d rather use the jars for food. So I browsed my local shops for containers and stumbled upon this plastic suitcase which is meant to store photos, but it actually fits seed envelopes so perfectly it’s like it was made for gardeners. Inside the sealed plastic suitcase are several smaller containers that also seal. I find I can fit several seed packets into each container. I love that It’s portable to take to our garden, we can just take out the individual containers as we need them or take the entire case with us for seed trading.

I’m currently in the process of figuring out how best to organize them, we don’t have a lot of seeds right now, so there’s plenty of extra space, but I’m thinking I may organize it by season so we can just grab each container depending on the month and take it to our community garden to plant them, I’ll update this post if I ever come up with a proper plan, but for now I’m just happy to have one secure place for seeds.

Where to buy this photo organizer? Check out your local Michael’s craft store or find them on Amazon with this link.

I love how compact it is and how it has 2 layers of protection so the seeds will last longer and stay safe from mould, moisture and pests. 

As for bugs in hand-picked seeds, the best way to deal with them is to freeze your seeds for about a week in an airtight container, more details about this below.

How to Save Seeds for Gardening

This isn’t necessarily the best way to do it but it’s how we learned from doing research and asking fellow gardeners, as years go on I’m sure there are ways to improve, but this is what worked for us.

We let the plants go to seed and then let the seed pods dry out as much as possible on the plant, they should be beige and dry, but we found the birds were starting to eat them so we picked the seed pods and let them air dry inside for several weeks.

Depending on your plant you can either handpick out all the seeds into a container or toss the pods into a bag and shake them around until the seeds separate (kale is a great one for this). Then to be extra safe we let the seeds air dry some more so mould won’t grow. Lastly, we transferred them to an airtight mason jar and put them in the freezer for a week to try and kill any eggs/bugs. When you take the jar out of the freezer let it come to room temperature before opening it, to prevent condensation from getting inside. Lastly, store your seeds in a paper envelope and then in an airtight jar or I highly recommend this photo keeper box I purchased in the links above if you plan on gardening long term.

I hope these tips for seed saving help you out on your gardening journey. I am personally so excited about this plastic photo saver, it’ll be something we’ll use for years to come.

I’d love to know how you store your seeds, feel free to leave a comment below or message me on instagram.