How Do You Do a Seed Inventory Before Ordering?

Quick answer: A seed inventory is a list of every packet you already own, with its variety, the year it was packed, and roughly how much is left. Do it before you order, not after. Most gardeners find they already hold a third of what was on the shopping list, and a handful of packets too old to be worth sowing.

What is a seed inventory, and when should you do one?

A seed inventory is an audit of the drawer. Not what you sowed, not what you plan to grow, simply what is physically in your possession and whether it is still worth putting in soil. It takes about forty minutes for a normal domestic stash and it is the cheapest hour in the gardening year.

The timing that matters is before the order. Seed catalogues arrive in the quiet part of the season, which is exactly when enthusiasm outruns memory. Ordering first and auditing later is how a drawer ends up with four half-used packets of the same lettuce and none of the carrot you actually ran out of.

The second-best time is right after the last sowing of the season, while you still remember what ran out. Either way, the audit is an off-season job, separate from the in-season habit of recording each sowing as it happens.

What to record for every packet you own

Keep it short enough that you will finish the drawer in one sitting:

• Variety name — exactly as printed, written the same way every time.
• Packed for / tested date — the year on the packet, not the year you bought it.
• Roughly how much is left — full, half, a pinch. Precision is wasted here.
• Keep, test, or replace — the decision, made once, written down.

That fourth field is what turns a list into a plan. A list of packets tells you what you have. A list with decisions attached tells you what to order, and it survives the six weeks between the audit and the moment you finally sit down with the catalogue.

Resist the urge to add germination percentages, supplier names and prices on the first pass. Every extra column is a column you must fill for sixty packets, and the audit that never gets finished is worth nothing at all.

How to sort the drawer: keep, test, replace

Work through the packets once, sorting into three piles rather than deliberating over each one.

Keep covers anything within its expected viable life and stored somewhere cool and dry. Test covers packets past that window, or any packet that has spent a summer in a shed or a greenhouse, where heat and humidity do more damage than age alone. Replace covers the short-lived species and anything you cannot identify with confidence.

An unlabelled packet is a replace, not a test. The time spent growing out a mystery seedling to find out what it is costs more than the packet did.

Roughly how long seed stays worth sowing

These are general storage guidelines rather than guarantees, and cool dry storage extends all of them:

• One to two years: onion, leek, parsnip, and other alliums and umbellifers.
• Three to four years: lettuce, brassicas including mustard and pak choi, beans, peas, carrots.
• Four years or more: tomato, cucumber, squash and other cucurbits.

Storage conditions matter more than the number. A packet kept in a sealed box in a cool room will often outlast the guideline, and the same packet left on a sunny windowsill will not reach it.

How to test old seed before you decide

A germination test costs ten seeds and a week of counting, and it turns a guess into a number.

1. Count out ten seeds from the packet, taken from the middle rather than the top.
2. Space them on a damp piece of kitchen paper, roll or fold it, and seal it in a bag.
3. Keep it somewhere warm and check against the germination window printed on the packet.
4. Count how many sprouted. Seven out of ten is seventy per cent.

What you do with the number is a judgement, not a rule. Above about seventy per cent, sow normally. Between forty and seventy, sow more thickly and thin harder. Below forty, replace it, unless the variety is genuinely hard to find, in which case sow the whole packet and accept a thin stand.

Write the result and the date on the packet in marker while the paper towel is still in front of you. A test result you have to remember is a test you will repeat next year for no reason.

Which crops are worth replacing every year

Short-lived seed is the honest exception to the keep-what-you-have principle. Onions, leeks and parsnips lose viability fast enough that a two-year-old packet is often a disappointment dressed up as thrift. Buying those fresh each season costs little and removes a whole category of germination mystery from spring.

Everything else is worth testing before replacing. A four-year-old tomato packet stored properly will frequently outperform expectations, and a brassica packet three seasons old is usually fine for a thickly sown tray of baby leaves even if it would be marginal for a precisely spaced row.

Turning the inventory into an order list

The order list writes itself once the three piles exist. Replace pile becomes the order. Test pile becomes a decision you make in a week. Keep pile becomes the thing you do not spend money on.

Then apply one filter before you buy: will you actually sow this? A drawer accumulates aspiration as much as seed. If a variety has survived two audits without being sown, it is telling you something about your garden or your appetite that a catalogue photograph will not override.

The other useful filter is quantity. Domestic packets usually hold far more seed than one household sows in a season, which is why the drawer fills up. For anything you sow in small repeated batches, one packet often covers two or three seasons.

It is worth ordering against the gaps rather than against the catalogue. A gap is a crop you ran out of, a variety that failed twice, or a slot in the season with nothing to fill it. Those three categories are the only ones that reliably justify new seed, and all three come out of the audit rather than the photographs. Anything bought outside them tends to end up in next year's replace pile, still sealed, which is the drawer quietly telling you it was never a gap in the first place.

Where the inventory lives once it exists

Any of these work, and each fails differently:

• A written list in the seed box — always with the seed, but rewritten by hand each year.
• A spreadsheet — sortable and reusable, but built for a desktop screen and awkward to check while standing over the drawer.
• Photographs of the packets — quick to capture, hopeless to search.
• A small app — searchable on the phone, but only if it asks for no more than you are willing to type.

The failure mode is identical in all four: a system with more fields than you will fill stops being used by the second week. Whatever you choose, the test is whether you can answer do I already own this? in under ten seconds while holding a catalogue.

Building a one-screen inventory when a spreadsheet does not fit

Garden planners exist and several are good, but most of them want the whole garden before they will answer one question. If the question is only what is in the drawer and what have I already sown, the useful tool is much smaller than any product built to serve everybody.

That gap is now closeable in an afternoon. Describing the tool in one plain sentence to a no-code platform produces a working web app: in this case the sentence was a tracker for seed packets, which ones were sown and when. Build Anything read it back as a brief, built it, named it, and gave it its own link, which can be added to a phone home screen and opened like any other app. It runs in a browser rather than as a native mobile app, which is the trade that makes the two minutes possible.

The build is in this clip, unedited in the parts that matter:

@therikerootstories — a seed packet tracker described in one sentence

None of that is required to run a seed inventory. A pencil and the back of an envelope have done the job for a century. It is worth knowing only because the reason most people give up on garden software is that the software asked for more than the problem was worth.

What a seed inventory will not tell you

An inventory tells you what you hold, not how it will perform. It will not reveal how a packet was stored before it reached you, will not predict a cold spring, and will not tell you whether a variety suits your soil. It also does not replace the in-season record of what you actually sowed and when, which answers a different question entirely — see how to keep track of which seeds you already sowed.

Nor does it make the drawer smaller on its own. That requires the harder decision of admitting which varieties you are never going to grow, which is the one part of this no system will do for you.

Frequently asked questions

How often should I do a seed inventory?

Once a year is enough for most home gardens, done before the main ordering season. If you sow across a long season and buy in more than one batch, a quick mid-season check of the fast crops is worth it, because those are the packets that empty without you noticing.

Does the date on the packet mean the seed expires?

No. A packed-for date tells you when the seed was packaged for sale, not the day it stops working. Viability declines gradually and depends heavily on storage. Treat the date as the trigger for a germination test rather than a reason to throw the packet away.

What is a good germination rate for old seed?

Above roughly seventy per cent, sow as normal. Between forty and seventy, sow more thickly and thin harder afterwards. Below forty, replacing is usually less work than compensating, unless the variety is difficult to source.

How should I store seed between seasons?

Cool, dark and dry, in a sealed container, away from the temperature swings of a shed or greenhouse. Heat and humidity shorten viability faster than age alone, which is why two identical packets can behave very differently after the same number of years.

Can I inventory seed I saved myself?

Yes, and it matters more for saved seed, because there is no printed date to fall back on. Record the year you collected it and the plant it came from, and test before relying on it for a main sowing, since home-saved seed varies far more in storage history than commercial packets.