Seed Inventory and Storage Hacks and Garden Happenings

Today was a pretty good day on the homestead. In the Chicken Run Garden, we planted our first potatoes. As the season goes on, we'll continue to layer in more. I had lots of help from my girls and they loved getting to play in the dirt. Additionally, I've been playing with the garden management notebook, and seeing how I can best utilize it as an effective tool. Today, I came up with a seed storage hack. I've been using presentation notebooks for reorganizing all of my recipes and it occurred to me that they'd make a great place to store my seeds and inventory lists! The larger seeds I've got, like peanuts, I will continue to store in my seed box, as well as the bulk seeds I have like cilantro and salad greens. The sheer volume of those seeds would overwhelm my notebook. But for single packets, and especially medicinal seeds, I've decided to store them in this notebook, alongside the Gardening by the Moon 2022 calendar page which corresponds to the correct planting times for the specific seeds. And the seeds I'm keeping for longer term storage I've sealed in mylar bags with oxygen absorbers to help preserve their viability. My general rule is that seeds stay viable for about 3 years, depending on their type, and handling. So far I've had good luck this way. Another planting hack is to let your chickens do the work for you! We have a few patches that they have scratched bare, taking care of any bugs/weeds. In those areas, I'm planning to plant some squash/pumpkins and then cover it with straw like I did with the potatoes we planted. This weekend we will focus on weeding and tidying up some over grown and unruly areas of garden space, and then wood-chipping those areas and pathways. Spring is here! Finally! And we get the joy and privilege of being sowers, praying for God's blessings and provision on our soil, that it may yield it's abundance. And that is a perfect picture of what faith looks like.