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Storing seeds

If you visit our garden centre, we guarantee you won't leave without packages of seeds. You'll find hundreds of different types of seed in our garden centre, from annual and biennial flowers to herbs and vegetables. Think of a kitchen garden filled with fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, radish, and fresh mint. Besides the colour of the seeds and plants, the scent and of course, the taste makes growing vegs and fruit in your own kitchen garden phenomenal. 

Think of this: you arrive at the seed section in our plant centre and all you see is infinite sorts of seeds, such as herbs, perennials, and other garden plants. It's like being let loose in a gardener's sweetshop. But what do you do will your left-over seeds? Here's how to store seeds.

How to store seeds?

Once you've got your seeds home, how do you store them? Some seeds can be stored in cans or pots for several years, other seeds must be planted in the soil within months. Here are our top tips:

  • Use seeds as fresh as possible: seeds like parsnips and carrots don't live long in storage, so you have to buy fresh seeds each year. Other seed can be kept up to two years before it starts deteriorating.

  • Keep seeds in their original packets: this way, you'll know what you've got, and you'll also have sowing instructions ready to hand the next time you need them. Or, note what you won't remember a year after you removed the seeds from the packaging. Write down where, when and how you have to plant your seeds. 

  • Keep them all together: look out for handsome seed boxes in our garden centre, ideal for holding your seed packets and keeping them neat and tidy till you need them. These handy boxes provide you to keep your seeds organised. This way, you can start sowing seeds next year without searching for the right seeds. 

  • Close the packet properly: squeeze out as much air as you can, fold down the top and seal with a paperclip or elastic band. Air can make the seeds start to grow, when you planted the seeds in the ground, all you want them to do is grow, but when they're still in the packaging kept for next year, you want the growth to stop. Use clips or elastic bands to keep the air out.

Choose somewhere dark and cool: seeds store best somewhere unheated, reasonably dry, free of mice and at a more-or-less constant temperature. The fridge is ideal.

Tips on storing seeds

These three tips are the base for storing seeds. Keep these three tips in mind while storing seeds. If you follow these simple tips, storing seeds can't go wrong.

  1. Maintain cool conditions
  2. Maintain dry conditions
  3. Protect the seeds

Buy storage equipment and seeds at Rushfields

Please ask the staff in our garden centre for more information and advice about storing your seeds. If you have any questions about which seeds are suitable for storing and which seeds aren't, give us a call or come over to our garden centre in Poynings, Sussex.

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