Winter inventory: the shoebox, the snap test and nine thousand lettuce seeds

10 January 2026 · 3 min read

The collection lives in a shoebox in the hall closet, which stays between 55 and 62 °F through the year and is the coolest place in the house that is not the refrigerator. Inside the box, each variety has a paper coin envelope labeled with the crop, the variety, the year and the number of plants it came from. Also inside is a quart jar with a lid, holding the envelopes of the seed I care most about, with a small packet of desiccant in the bottom. The jar is for the long-lived treasures: the tomatoes, the beans, the squash.

January is when I tip the whole thing onto the table and take stock. This year the count was forty-one envelopes across nineteen kinds of plants. Some of that is sensible: six tomato varieties, two beans, two lettuces, three squash lines, a dozen flowers. Some of it is not. I have one envelope of lettuce seed that weighs 11 grams, which by the usual figure of around 800 seeds to the gram is nearly nine thousand seeds. I sow perhaps a hundred lettuce seeds a year. That envelope is a lifetime supply and then some, from four plants I let bolt in 2025.

The useful check at this stage is dryness, because seed that was not dry enough when it went into the envelope will have lost vigor or molded, and January is when you find out. The snap test is my method for the big seeds: a bean or a squash seed that is dry enough should break cleanly in half when bent, with a snap, rather than folding or denting. If it bends, it goes back onto a plate in a warm room for another week. Small seed like lettuce and cosmos I test by pouring a pinch onto a plate and tapping it; dry seed slides and rattles, damp seed clumps. Three envelopes this year clumped. All three were flowers I had bagged in a hurry in a wet October.

The other job is ruthlessness. I cannot use nine thousand lettuce seeds, and lettuce does not keep much past three years, so most of that envelope is going into small envelopes of about a hundred for the swap table in February, and the rest to the compost. The same goes for the second envelope of zinnia, and for a pepper variety that was mediocre two years running and does not deserve bed space.

Seed saving has a hoarding streak built into it. The inventory is where I notice it and resist.