Simple Seed Holder

It’s autumn, and you have harvested all the fruits and vegetables.  If you are into starting you own plants in the spring, you will want to keep some of the seeds from the fall harvest.

I have started to do some of that and was looking for a way to store the seeds.  I didn’t want to put the seeds in a plastic sandwich bag since some of the seeds were still kind of fresh and moist. I wanted to package them so that they could dry up and keep till next spring. I needed to label the packages so I could tell what was what. I have different types of peppers, tomatoes and melons.  It would be good to differentiate between the hot peppers that I grow less of to the different colored bell peppers.


Just as I was going to go to the local stationary store to get some small paper envelopes, it occurred that maybe I can make my own by using the pile of scrap paper that I kept from junk mail, announcements and my kid’s old school handouts. That way I could save money and gas.  It solved my immediate problem of deciding how many envelopes to buy as well.

Start with a piece of letter size paper. Tear off a bit of the paper to generate a square.  This is not totally necessary, but it makes a neater envelop at the end.  You can do this any way you like.  The easiest way is to fold the paper over to form a triangle of the square.  This will tell you where to tear to form the square paper.

Fold the corner up once and then the second time to form the pocket for the seed.  Cross fold the pocket from the left and then on the right to form the envelope.  Fold the top down and around the envelope to form the crease that will be needed later to make up the finalized envelope.  (see following illustrations)

Flip the envelope over to label it.  Make sure the blank side of the scrap paper is on the outside or at least there is enough blank area for labeling.  Fold one side of the pocket and fill with seeds and fold the second side of the flap to keep seeds in.

Fold the top flap down and tug the extra bit of paper between the cross flaps to complete the envelope assembly.

One can use different paper to code what kind of seed the envelopes contain.

This all seemed like a very simple concept to use scrape paper to wrap thing up, but it is so easy to do and is very handy to apply, especially for items that one wants to air out when wrapped up.