A gift From a friend
Email from Rich:
I am trying to grow the rainbow, share the rainbow, here in Trenton NJ. I have enclosed a 1/10th share of the legendary Jere Gettle’s Jere Collection, which is one pack of each of Baker Creek seed company’s up to 1600 hundred varieties of vegetable, herb, fruit and flower seed they have in stock at their main store. They offer the first 1,025 packs for $1295.00 then pick the rest of the store at $1.00 a pack. This will be in the ballpark of $1,700.00-$1,800.00 depending on what is in stock. This is a pretty good discount considering most packs range between $2.50 up to $5.00 a pack, and I got brainwashed by their trippy catalogue, so I said I’ll take all of it. It will average out to $1.16 a pack or so. I kept half, and split the half other half into 5 portions. I had to get one of these to my favorite show. I want to encourage your audience, in general, to get extra variety by sharing seeds, but also be aware of the tedious process it can be to divide them up. Doing anything several thousands of times is rough, but if a group of people want to band together and endure a good amount of head-down, factory-work hardship, splitting a Jere Collection is totally doable, if…
You stay organized!
Get 2 – 1 packages of 50 gallon Ziploc freezer bags, and 2 packages of 1 quart Ziploc freezer bags to hold sorted sections of packets, and also to use for the sorted dime bag sections. I used 2” square plastic dime bags to hold the sorted seed shares. They come 1,000 for $11.99 on Amazon. This is by far the cheapest option. Organize each pack into sections out of the giant box which all packs will come into bag labeled Amaranth to Zinnia. You will have time to play with the seed later just sort it out. Working a section at a time is best. *Have sharpies to label and tape to reseal partial packs.* (I used staples and regretted it)
You are not going to hand write all of this, and xeroxing packs is way expensive. I just made a table and centered each variety name, printed it on paper, cut them, and stuffed each dimebag with a paper label and the seed share. I am making the word doc available to try to save anyone interested the step of typing labels.
The idea is to get the seeds from the pack to the dime bag in the least amount of steps. Good luck. Estimates and math helps, drug dealing experience could be useful. (Just kidding). Egg cartons help. I preferred to tap the amount out directly into the bag. I don’t think there is a right way or wrong way. Don’t get to precise with small seeds. The counts will average out. Order in advance and budget time. If you could split a pack in 1 minute the collection would take 26 hours to split up. I got my time down to 2-3 minutes a pack by the end, but was closer to 5-6 minutes a pack in the beginning. The collection can be split down to 1/10 shares but I wouldn’t split it any further. A 1/10th share will give you a pretty nice amount for a good time. Most pack counts are about double the minimum posted on the pack. Some of the rarer and smaller stuff is doled out more sparsely.
If you consider the tens of thousands of hours of work that went into saving this seed through the generations the work won’t seem so bad. Spending time with the packs and seed is also learning. I think I have most of the catalogue memorized by now.
If anyone else tries this, I am sorry in advance, and I would love to hear about it. My email is ************, and my 12 subscriber beginner youtube gardening channel is under Dinosaur Gardening.
I am making a few subeducational videos, and will uploading more NJ gardening videos soon with better variety. Good luck. Grow the Rainbow, share the Rainbow!
Rich’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBnqwUspH6WzANonaxQyd6Q
https://steemit.com/@gardeningchannel
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/james.prigioni
LAWN TO HIGH PRODUCTION FOOD FOREST: https://youtu.be/7ByAh_0CIW8
CUCUMBERS, Everything You Need To Know! https://youtu.be/2dq2OQsFCjM
5 TIPS FOR BUILDING HEALTHY SOIL: https://youtu.be/7-Tyz7fGeZo
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