How Do You Keep Track of Which Seeds You Already Sowed?

Quick answer: Write down three things every time you sow — the variety, the date, and whether the seed actually went into soil. Check that record before you open a new packet. A dated sowing log is what prevents double-sowing, tells you when the next succession round is due, and turns a drawer of half-used packets back into something you can plan with.

What should you write down every time you sow?

Most garden record-keeping advice hands you a long list: variety, seed source, row length, tray number, germination date, transplant date, first harvest, yield, weather notes. All of it is useful, and almost none of it gets written down — because at the moment you are sowing you have wet hands, an open packet, and about four seconds of attention to spare.

So start with the shortest record that still works:

• Variety — the name on the packet, written the same way every time.
• Date sown — the day the seed went into soil, not the day you planned to sow it.
• Sown or not sown — a plain yes or no for every packet you own.

That third field is the one people leave out, and it is the one that does the most work. A list of what you sowed tells you your history. A list of what you have not sowed tells you what to do next weekend. Keeping both in one place is the difference between a record and a plan.

Everything else — germination rate, transplant date, harvest notes — is worth adding once the three-field habit is holding. Adding it first is how logs get abandoned in the second week.

Written out as a line, the whole record fits on a phone screen:

Cải xanh baby mustard — sown 12 March — yes

Each field answers a different question you will actually ask. Variety answers what is this? when you find an unlabelled tray in six weeks. Date answers is this batch late, or am I impatient? Sown or not answers what do I do with the packet in my hand right now?

Write the variety name the same way every single time. "Baby mustard", "cải xanh", and "mustard, baby" are one plant and three entries, and three entries is the same as no entry when you are scanning a list in a hurry.

Why sowing is the task memory loses first

Gardeners remember an astonishing amount. You can probably name every plant in your beds, which corner floods, which tomato disappointed you two summers running. But sowing dates slip, and there is a reason for it.

Sowing is repetitive, low-drama, and spread over weeks. Nothing distinguishes the Saturday you sowed the second batch of mustard from the Saturday you meant to. There is no visual difference at the time — bare soil looks like bare soil — and by the time seedlings appear, the useful information has already faded. The memory has nothing to hook onto.

Transplanting and harvesting both come with a clear before and after, so you remember them. Sowing has almost no memorable signal attached to it — which is exactly why it needs an external record more than anything else you do.

Where should the log live?

There is no correct answer here, only trade-offs. All four of these work, and all four fail in a different way.

On the packet itself

Write the date directly on the packet in permanent marker as you sow. This is the fastest method in existence and it never needs charging. It fails at exactly one thing: you cannot see the whole picture without emptying the drawer and reading every packet.

A paper notebook

Cheap, durable, pleasant to use, works in the rain if you are careful. A cheap composition notebook lasts years, and many gardeners keep one per season. It fails when you want to answer a question like which of these did I already sow? — that means reading back through pages instead of scanning a list.

A spreadsheet

Sortable, searchable, easy to duplicate next season. This is the method most experienced growers land on. It fails on the phone, at the exact moment you need it: standing in the garden with one hand free, pinching and scrolling a grid built for a desktop screen.

An app

Built for the phone, always with you, no transcription step. It fails when it asks for more than you want to give — a full garden plan, bed layouts, a subscription — before it will answer the one question you came in with.

The honest recommendation: keep the marker on the packet and one scannable list somewhere. The packet catches the record at the moment it happens. The list is what you actually check before opening a new packet.

How a sowing log prevents double-sowing

Double-sowing is rarely dramatic. You sow a short row, then open the same packet weeks later having forgotten the first row entirely. What you lose is subtle and annoying: two batches maturing days apart instead of weeks apart, a packet emptied a season early, and a harvest that arrives all at once.

The fix is a habit, not a tool. Check the log before you open the packet, not after you close it. Recording after the fact still leaves you sowing blind at the only moment the information matters.

The same record solves a related problem: buying seed you already own. A seed inventory that tells you what is in the drawer is the cheapest way to stop duplicate orders, and it is the same three fields you are already keeping.

What succession sowing needs from your record

Succession sowing means planting the same crop in small batches spaced days apart instead of all at once, so the harvest arrives steadily rather than in one glut. It is the single most useful technique for a small kitchen garden, and it is completely dependent on records.

Without dates, the batches drift together. You sow batch two later than intended, batch three earlier, and by midsummer you have reinvented the glut you were trying to avoid. The intervals only exist on paper.

What the log needs to carry for succession work:

1. The date each batch went in — the anchor for everything else.
2. How many batches are planned — so you know when you are done, not just when you are behind.
3. What happened last time — emergence and first-harvest dates, added after the fact, are what let you shorten or stretch the interval next season.

Labelling and tracking each succession, then recording actual emergence and harvest dates, is what turns a plan you guessed at into a plan you tuned.

When is the next round actually due?

The common advice is a fixed interval — sow again every two or three weeks. It is a reasonable starting point and a poor rule, because seedlings do not read calendars. A cold fortnight and a warm one produce very different plants.

The Royal Horticultural Society suggests sowing by the state of the previous batch rather than by the clock: make the next sowing when the preceding one is well developed — roughly when leafy crops have about four true leaves, when peas are around 5 cm (2 in) high, and when beans are about 10 cm (4 in) tall.

This is where the log earns its keep twice over. The date tells you how long the last batch took to reach that stage under your conditions. The next time you sow the same crop, you are working from your own numbers instead of a generic interval — and if you miss a sowing date entirely, past notes tell you whether to double up on the next round or simply shift everything along.

Which crops make a log worth keeping

If you only keep records for some things, keep them for the fast crops sown in waves. Those are the ones where a missing date costs you a harvest gap.

• Leafy greens — mustard, lettuce, spinach, pak choi. Fast, repeatedly sown, easy to lose track of.
• Radish and salad turnips — fast enough that a two-week drift is the whole crop cycle.
• Beans and peas — fewer sowings, but each one matters more.
• Herbs like coriander and dill — bolt-prone, so the interval is the entire point.

Slow, once-a-year crops need much less. You are not going to forget whether you planted garlic.

Baby mustard is the crop that made the habit stick here — cool-season, peppery, ready as baby leaves in weeks, and genuinely worth sowing in small repeated batches rather than one long row. If you want a crop to practise succession sowing on, baby mustard seeds (cải xanh) are about as forgiving as it gets.

What seed-tracking apps do, and where they stopped short

Seed trackers exist, and it is worth saying so plainly. SeedBank, Seed Keep, Plotera and Seedtime all do a version of this, and several of them do it well. If one of them fits how you garden, use it — building your own is not a badge of honour.

Three of them were tried here, and each asked for the same thing before it would help: the whole garden. Bed layouts, plans, crop rotations, a subscription. That is a fair trade if you want a garden planner. It is a poor trade if what you needed was one screen answering one question — what is in the drawer, and what have I already sowed.

This is not a flaw in those apps. A product has to serve thousands of gardeners, so it grows features until it is a system. The narrower your problem, the less likely anything off the shelf matches it exactly.

Building a one-screen tracker when nothing fit

The alternative, which used to be unreasonable and is no longer, is to describe the tool you want in one sentence and let a no-code platform build it.

The sentence used here was literally this: a tracker for my seed packets — which ones I sowed and when. Build Anything, a no-code creation platform from Universe, read that back as a proper brief — record the varieties, mark which ones were sown, capture the dates, show sowing history at a glance — then built a working web app, named it, and gave it its own address. No code was written, and there was no app store review to wait for, because the result runs in a browser.

What that means practically: it is a mobile-first web app you can add to a phone home screen, where it opens full screen with its own icon. It is not a native mobile app and not desktop software, and it does not pretend to be. There is a free tier, and paid plans for heavier use.

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

@therikerootstories — a seed packet tracker described in one sentence

Whether you build something or open a notebook, the shape of the answer is the same. The tool is not the point. The three fields are the point.

What a sowing log will not do

A record of what you sowed will not tell you why germination failed, will not fix soil that stays cold, and will not replace the general garden notebook where the interesting observations live — which corner floods, which variety sulked, what the weather did. It solves one narrow, forgettable thing.

It also will not survive being complicated. Every field you add is a field you must fill in with wet hands. Logs die from ambition, not from neglect.

Start with variety, date, and sown-or-not. Check it before you open the next packet. That single habit is most of the benefit, and it works on paper, in a spreadsheet, or on a screen you built yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Should I write the sowing date on the packet or keep it somewhere else?

Do both. Writing the date on the packet in permanent marker captures the record at the moment it happens, which is the only moment you reliably will. A separate list — notebook, spreadsheet, or app — is what lets you scan everything at once without emptying the drawer. The packet is the capture; the list is the check.

What should I do if I forgot to record a sowing?

Estimate the date from the seedlings rather than leaving the row blank. Note it as approximate, and record the emergence date accurately from here on, since that is the figure that will actually be useful next season. An approximate record with a note beats a gap, because a gap reads as "never sown" the next time you check.

How long should I keep old sowing records?

Keep at least the previous two seasons. One season tells you what you did; two lets you compare a warm year against a cold one, which is where interval adjustments come from. Older records take up no space and occasionally settle an argument about when something was last planted.

Do I need an app to track seed sowing?

No. A notebook and a marker cover the whole job, and many experienced growers never use anything else. An app helps if you check your list on a phone in the garden more often than you sit down at a desk. Choose based on where you actually stand when you ask the question, not on which method sounds more organised.

Does a sowing log help with succession sowing specifically?

Yes, and succession sowing barely works without one. The whole method depends on knowing the date each batch went in, so batches do not collapse into a single harvest. Recording emergence dates as well lets you set the next interval from your own conditions rather than a generic two-week rule.

Counting what is already in the drawer comes first: how to do a seed inventory before ordering.