How to make a useful seed box by recycling some unwanted cardboard.
In my opinion sowing your own seeds is much more fun that planting bought seedlings. The feeling you get when you
- place a tiny dried up seed in a pot,
- spend time caring for it
- Watching as the tiny speck of green appears gently pushing its way towards the light
It’s so addictive. Sharing that feeling with your children is even more powerful. To see them be responsible for bringing life to a tiny seed and nurturing them into plants that provide us with food is a type of feeling I can’t describe.
Benefits of sowing seeds.
Sowing your own seeds opens up a world of possibilities. Shops actually sell a very limited variety of fruit and vegetables based on the longest shelf life of the easiest growth (A.K.A Bland) Growing your own seeds can offer hundreds of varieties with different tastes and textures, colour, sweetness. Have you ever tried a pineapple strawberry, a tomato with tiger stripes or a pretty red orache spinach leaf in your meals ?
No? and you wont either unless you grow it yourself.
Growing vegetables is such an amazing way to connect with the earth, enjoy a huge variety of unique vegetables and save a ton of money to boot. However, growing lots of seeds means storing all those packets in some sort of order so they are easy to access when its time to sow.
There are so many ways to keep your seeds sorted but every method we’ve tried ends up in a total mess.
This is our seed box right now, complete mess and with our busy sowing season around the corner its time to get organised
We’ve tried many ways but after seeing this idea over at “A Piece Of Rainbow” we decided to try organise our seeds a bit better than we do already.
At the moment we already use a shoe box, (or more like 2) but it’s such a jumble that I can never find any of the seeds we need.
I end up buying more so we can sow them on time but ending up with even more seeds to store, which led us to here.
The website A Piece Of RaInbow suggests starting 2 shoe boxes but I only had one and a spare delivery box, so I guess that will do.
I’m going to give you my instructions but i’ve include a link to the original instructions here so you can see for yourself.
We kind of enjoy winging it so here goes.
What you need
- 2 boxes or extra cardboard
- scissors
- roll of wallpaper
- Sticky tape
So, lets Make Our Seed Box Organiser
- We took a large shoe box and an extra delivery box we could use for the inserts.
- We measured the length of our seed box and the depth of it and cut out a rectangle that fit down the centre of the box.
The original instructions suggest leaving tabs at the end of the cardboard so you can tape or glue it to the box however we didn’t bother with this step as the thick cardboard help it in place.
Not having them fixed in place, gave me room to use more or less space depending on the variety.
For example peas and beans are a lot bulkier than carrots so take up a lot more room.
- We then cut 5 slits, evenly spaced, two thirds down the lenth of the cardboard piece. This is the centre of your box.
- Taking some pieces from our other box, we measured the width and depth this time and cut slices that were the same width of the box.(again leave tabs on each side if you want to tape it to the box. We didn’t do this and ours works fine.
- Again, following the example from a piece of rainbow we cut out the name tabs at the top of the inserts. I think they way the stack in the box so you can see every one is genius.
We used 3 inserts with the middle section raised and 2 with a hollow in the centre.
- We then cut a slice from the bottom of the insert up around one third of the centre of the insert and slid this into the slots we made in the first insert in the box.
- Next we printed and cut out each name label, and glued them to the tabs.
We organised our box by month to begin with but we found our quickly that most of our seeds get sown in march. It became impossible to put them all in month order.
The idea was that once we have sown the seeds in march we can move the packet to April to help with successional sowing.
This wouldn’t work for us so we changed our labels so our seeds are organised by plant family ie Legumes (peas and beans) roots, brassicas (cabbage, sprouts and kale etc)This works so much better for us.
If you need some labels for your box I created a quick list of the most popular options from months, plant families to individual vegetables.
I left some blank for your to make your own too. Hope this helps you get organised link to FREE Seed Box Lables Printable.
- We decided to wrap our box in some left over wall paper to make our seed box pretty.
I’ve also laminated my what to grow wheel and seed sowing calendar and stuck them inside of the lid so everything we need to sow is together.
You can get a copy of this in my FREE 12 Step Planning Guide For Beginners hereI
We love this seed box! it’s so easy to keep organised too so when the kids help to sow some seeds, it’s easy to see where each variety goes back.
This is a total winner. Helpful, simple to make and will make it easier for the kids or myself to find what we need to sow.
What plans do you have for the growing season?
Need help getting prepared? Check out this post to see how you can get ready to grow.
