Fodder

How To Create A Digital Seed Inventory

February 8, 2025 by Leigh Leave a Comment

Every year, it’s the same problem, “What seeds did I buy last year?” I have yet to meet a person that only buys exactly what they need. But most people forget what they purchased last year, if they liked it, how much they still have, etc. Every gardener, farmer, or homesteader, needs a seed inventory. There are about a million ways to create a seed inventory, from paper to digital to mental. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter HOW you keep track of your seeds, as long as you do it. Today, I want to show you how and why I have a digital seed inventory and how you can do it too.

Before we get too far into this post, I wanted to give a suggestion about keeping a garden journal. A digital garden journal is a fantastic way to keep track of past, present and future gardens. Our Digital Garden Journal is a great way to keep up with everything without getting too overwhelmed.

Buy Now

Why Have A Seed Inventory

I want to say this first, you don’t have to have a digital seed inventory. In fact, if you want to keep it old school with a pen and paper? Go right ahead. I’m not here to judge. I just want you to be able to keep track of your seeds. In my garden planner, I’ve got several charts that help me track everything from seeds/seedlings, orchard information, pests, and more. This is my printed planner that helps me keep track when out in the garden. But I prefer my digital seed inventory for a lot of reasons.

First, when I order seeds, I am on my computer. Rarely, if ever, do I go into a store and buy seeds that I NEED. Those seeds are the seeds I saw and thought, “Hmm, that looks interesting.” And they get thrown in my cart. The seeds I need for my garden are bought online. That’s because I know exactly what I need, the amount I need, and I can usually get better deals that way.

Second, it helps me save a TON of money. I am an impulse buyer. No matter what I try to do to stop that, I am going to see something and snatch it up because it looks cool, could solve my problem and so much more. But the reality is that having a digital seed inventory on my phone tells me EXACTLY what I have on hand, and which storage bin it’s in.

Third, it helps me keep track of start times, harvests, and more. I enjoy being able to quickly look back at a seed in my inventory and see that it germinated well, produced a ton, and, probably most importantly, how many seeds I have on hand right NOW.

One of our five year goals is to feed ourselves and animals 75% from our land. That’s a ton of food. But to get to that goal, I need to make sure that I am only buying or saving the seeds that I know will work.

If you are interested in learning more about my favorite garden planner. I highly recommend Seedtime! This planner has been instrumental in helping me plan out my gardens with WAY more efficiency than I could ever expect! It has also reduced overwhelm, stress, and calmed my ADD/ADHD!

More Info!

Creating A Digital Seed Inventory

A simple spreadsheet is really all you need. It can be as fancy and in depth or as simple as you want. My physical garden planner is pretty in depth because I want to make sure that I can track as much information as possible. But sometimes there is a need for simplicity and I that is where my garden journal comes in.

If you are choosing to start your own digital seed inventory, then you need to write down the things that you want to track. Do you care what color the pepper is? Do you care if it’s a transplant or direct sow? Where you bought the seeds?

You also need to think about how you are going to access it when the time comes. Are you only going to use it at home? Then it probably doesn’t need to be web based. Are you looking for seeds from a local farmers market? Probably should be web based like Google Sheets.

Make sure that the things you want to know are easily accessible within that spreadsheet.

If you aren’t quite sure what you want in your spreadsheet, I have my digital seed inventory that you can purchase in our general store. This is the same one I use. The cool thing about it, is that while it is in depth, you can delete the things that you don’t want or need.

Need Help Organizing Your Seeds?

In my digital seed inventory, the first column is “location”. Pro tip? Get yourself a couple of photo storage bins like this and put your seeds in it! This is seriously the best garden purchase I have made to date. These storage bins have 18 4×6 storage containers.

On the outside of the bin, I write which bin it is A, B, C, etc. On the inside 4×6 bins, I write A1, A2, A3, etc of the corresponding bin. This way when I look at my inventory, I can see that corn seeds are in bins C12-C18. That way when I go to plant that corn, I don’t have to go find it, lug out a million seed packets, and risk losing a couple packets. This has been my hack for the last 10 years and I will always use it.

Using Your Digital Seed Inventory

One of the things I do every year, usually in July and December, is figure out how many seeds I actually have on hand. This really helps to make sure that I have plenty of seeds for the growing season. The hardest part of having a digital seed inventory (or really any inventory) is making sure that you are consistently updating the inventory.

No matter if you are using a box to store your seeds, a pen and paper to keep track of how many seeds you have, or going all digital and super organized. The reality is that if you are buying seeds, using them and growing food? You’re doing pretty amazing!

If you like the content I put out, feel free to buy us a coffee! It helps keep this site running, marketing and the goats in grain!

Buy me a coffee

If you like this post, feel free to share it and follow us below on our social media accounts!

Top 10 Ways To Improve Soil

October 19, 2023 by Leigh Leave a Comment

As we are steadily moving towards cooler months, and for some of you freezing already, now is a great time to start looking into ways to improve soil. You don’t have to do any of it right now, especially if it’s too cold to work the soil or grow a cover crop. But having these ideas in your journal as ways to improve soil will help in the long run.

10 Ways To Improve Your Soil

Mulch

Mulching is usually a forgotten chore in the garden but it is so important. I know what you’re thinking, “I don’t have any plants in the ground, why should I mulch?” Because mulching, no matter the season, keeps weeds at bay, puts organic matter back in the soil and helps retain moisture in the soil.

Cover Cropping

This is another huge thing that gets left out for most new gardeners. They think, well I’ve harvested what I need so I’m just going to rip out all of the plants. Then they don’t put any new plants to make sure that the soil stays covered.

I use this mix from True Leaf Markets for the kitchen garden. Depending on what I need in my big garden will depend on what mix (or self mix) I use. I usually try to do a mix that my chickens and ducks can eat on. But regardless of what you buy, something has to be planted in order to keep your ground soft and workable.

Organic Matter

This goes hand in hand with mulching and cover cropping. Soil needs to have organic matter to give it better structure. If you have ever lived in a place with clay soil, you know it is clumpy when wet or blows away if too dry. We want to change the structure of the soil by allowing roots to grow and create channels. The more growth and channels, the more water can be absorbed.

Low or No Till

Tilling isn’t bad per say, but over the last hundred years or so, we have come to realize that tilling may not be the best thing for the soil. When you till, you are ripping the soil apart and that means you are ripping apart the microbiomes that live in the soil. To make this more relatable, it would be like a nuclear bomb going off in your town every couple of months. Everything is destroyed and you have to rebuild season after season.

If you can limit the amount of destruction to the soil, you will have soil with better moisture retention and a lot less run off. Not to mention it’ll have the channels to retrieve nutrients from deeper in the ground.

Leaves and limbs

We’ve been taught to think that leaves and debris is something that must be hauled off. But you are getting rid of one of the best (and FREE) resources that our land gives us! Throw those leaves into the compost or straight onto a bed to act as mulch. Trust me, your garden will thank you for it.

There could be issues with the leaves and branches composting and sucking up a ton of nitrogen. But I have not seen that to be an issue. But I also cover crop with nitrogen fixers.

Animal Bedding

I talked in depth about using animal bedding as compost here. It is probably the best and easiest ways to fill up or top dress a garden bed. Especially, when you are looking for free or cheap materials for your garden beds.

You can also use pine shavings as mulch too.

Eliminate pesticides and synthetics fertilizers

When I read Gabe Brown’s Dirt to Soil, he mentions that when you use synthetics you are creating “lazy” plants. If the plant doesn’t have to work to get its nutrients because you give it to them, the plant isn’t going to be as hardy or give back to the soil. Same thing with pesticides. Even natural fertilizers and pesticides are creating a situation where the plant doesn’t have to defend or protect itself.

We don’t use any amendments to our beds except compost and animal bedding. That’s it. We learned very quickly that our plants were healthier and are better able to fend off pests if we just left them alone. So that’s what we do.

Animals

Animals are a phenomenal way to improve your soil! To put it very simply, you put an animal in a portable pen, give them some hay and let them be in that pen for 1-4 days depending on the animal size and size of pen. After you move them to a new area, seed where they were. If you can keep this up, they will slowly but surely fix your compacted soil!

Our pigs have been instrumental in bringing our property back! They turned hard, compacted clay, that a tiller couldn’t get into because of the rocks, into the softest black soil within 3 rotations!

Crop Rotation

We’ve all heard this one. You’ve got to rotate crops to keep pests, fungi, etc from becoming a problem. But it’s actually more than that. When you rotate your crops from a heavy nitrogen feeder to a nitrogen fixer, you are giving the soil a chance to recover. We want to make sure that we don’t put heavy feeders in the same place for about 3 planting seasons.

For example: You planted Corn in summer 2022, Squash in Fall of 2022, and Tomatoes in summer 2023. Your soil is going to be bone dry when it comes to nutrients. But if you were to plant beans, peas, and garlic in fall of 2022 instead of squash, you have broken the heavy feeder cycle without having to amend the beds with inputs.

Plants

Plants probably the most under rated way to improve soil health. I used to pull spent plants from the ground and give them to my chickens, goats, pigs, whatever. But when you rip out plants, you are taking all that carbon out of the soil. You are wrecking all those channels and creating more work for the soil microbiome to fix.

The best thing you can do when you are done with a bed is to just hit it with a weed eater, clippers, etc and just chop and drop it just above soil level. This will leave all that carbon (roots) in the ground to compost and feed the microbiome.

What are your favorite ways to improve soil health?

These are just my favorite ways to improve soil health. In fact, these are the only things I do and we have seen a HUGE improvement in planting. It used to be that we would have to use a drill attachment augur to be able to plant. Now, I can just stick my hand in the dirt and move the soil out of the way. How cool is that!?