Organizing your seeds can be a hard thing for some people. It's fine when you have a few packets, but what do you do when you have dozens? I wasn't sure, so I ended up diving them by type (tomato, squash, herbs, flowers, etc) and putting them in big envelopes. Inside each one is a ziplock for the open packets. I have the type written on the front of each envelope and I keep them in a container I bought at the dollar store. This makes it easy for me to flip through and find what I am looking for.

I also found this interesting way of doing it on the Frugal Mama & The Sprout blog. It uses a binder and photo pages to organize everything. This allows you to also add layouts of where everything is planted and then have the photo pages after it to hold each of the packets of seeds. I'm thinking of trying this next year.

Image courtesy of Frugal Mama & The Sprout

On the Montana Homesteader, they use an old photo album to hold everything together, including plans.

Reformation Acres has a whole bunch of ideas, including tic tac boxes and filing envelopes.

Thrifty Fun has even more ideas, including photo pocket pages and coupon organizers. 

Well, with the exception of cucumbers I think I'm just about done planting seeds for this season. I've done a few batches of peppers, tomatoes, squash, and eggplant, which should be enough to meet my needs and have plenty left over to sell. Every year I am too early with my cucumbers, which means my first batch dies because it is too cold outside when I move them outdoors. So this year I am purposefully waiting a few extra weeks before I start the seeds. Since I don't have any room inside for them, I can't be tempted to start them yet. I have a bunch more peas, beans, greens, and herbs to move outside, and once I do that I'll have room for the cucumbers. 

Here's some photos of my tomatoes and squash:

So today my first artichoke popped up. I've never grown these before - never even cooked one. But I do love eating them. I hadn't even planned to grow any, except that I got a free packet of seeds from the place I ordered my Asian Fingers Eggplant from. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to grow something new, so I decided to give the seeds one set of 6 pods to try growing it.

I had a hard time finding some of the seeds I wanted in the store, so I decided to look online. I ended up not only buying the plant I really wanted - Asian Fingers Eggplant - but also some flowers as well. I haven't done flowers from seeds in many, many years and even back then it was marigolds. And anyone who's had those knows it's super easy - just pinch the dried flower, pull everything out, and spread the seeds. 

So now that I have everything I need, it's time to start planting seeds.

I start by filling all of the trays with seedling dirt. I don't pack the soil in hard, as I want the roots to have room to move and grow. But I do gently push down on it to ensure I didn't leave any big air pockets.