A Seed Box You Can Trust: How the Seed Ledger Works
A seed inventory that knows the year and the germination: how the Seed Ledger logs Added, Sown and Counted from a phone and keeps a shopping list by source
A seed inventory is worth keeping for as long as it can answer two questions before the ordering season: what do I already have, and how old is it. The Seed Ledger is built around those two questions. It is a Google Sheet with a phone form: each time a packet comes home, a row goes in the ground or a jar is counted, the entry travels form to sheet and the counts update from it. Logged in-the-moment, at the seed box or the potting bench, the sheet holds a count worth trusting.
The form that writes to the list
The form is called Log Seeds, and a link to it sits on the Dashboard under the heading "In-the-moment entry." It asks for five things. Date, which falls back to today when it is left blank. The Seed variety, chosen from a dropdown of every variety on the list, A to Z. What happened: Added, Sown or Counted. Amount, a number in the variety's own unit. And a Note.
Everything the form collects lands as one row on the Seed Log tab, so the whole history of the seed box sits in one place, in order. The log holds up to 5,000 entries, and a collection that reaches the limit is told on the Dashboard from 90 percent full, rather than having entries quietly dropped.
Three words for three kinds of moment
Added raises the number: a packet joined the collection, bought, swapped or saved from the garden. Sown lowers it: half a packet of kale went into a tray, a pinch of basil into a pot, ten grams of arugula into a bed. Counted records what you find in the box.
Counted is what keeps the list honest. A handful can leave the drawer without an entry: a gift to a neighbor, a packet that spilled. A Counted entry sets On Hand to the amount you counted on the shelf. The Last Counted column shows the date.
The Items tab is the list
Every variety has one row on the Items tab, with room for 250 of them. The owner's columns are Item, Category, Stored in, Unit, Low at, Source, Seed Year, Germination and Notes. The sheet fills in the rest: Added, Sown, On Hand, Sown in the last 60 days, Status and Last Counted.
Source says who the seed came from, or "Saved from my garden." Seed Year is the year packed or saved: the one printed on the packet, or the year the seed was collected. Germination is an optional percentage the owner types in, from the label or from a test of their own, as 85% or 0.85. A blank is fine and never shows as an error. Seed loses some of its sprout with every year in the box, and these three columns sit beside each variety so the oldest and the weakest packets can be found by sorting or filtering the Items tab. They are the owner's own figures, a reminder of what to sow first.
A variety is added on the Items tab, not on the form, which keeps the form to one dropdown. As a name goes into the Item column, it appears in the form's Seed variety choices. Each variety carries one unit, in the owner's own word: packets, grams or ounces. The sheet never converts between units, so a number always means what the unit beside it says.
How the On Hand number is worked out
On Hand is the most recent Counted amount, plus everything Added since that count, minus everything Sown since it. A variety that has never been counted uses the whole log. It is a live formula over the log, so correcting a log row corrects the number.
Low at, and the Shopping List
Each variety has a Low at number: the amount at which it is time to order more. Status reads Out at zero, Low at or below the Low at number, and In stock otherwise. Every Low or Out variety feeds the Shopping List on the Dashboard, grouped by Source and then by name, with its On Hand, its Low at number, its unit and its category beside it. It is the list to read before ordering: which seed company, swap or library each variety comes from, so one order covers them all.
Below the Shopping List sits Sown most: the varieties that went in the ground in the last 60 days, most first, with what is on hand and the Status beside each. A favorite that is running low shows up on both lists. With nothing sown, it reads "Nothing sown in the last 60 days." The row of counts across the top shows the whole collection at once: items on the list, Low and Out.
Storage places and categories, in the owner's words
The Customize Forms tab holds two short lists: Stored in and Categories. They start with Seed box, Fridge, Freezer, Pantry tin and Seed swap bag, and Tomatoes, Peppers, Greens, Roots, Beans & peas, Squash & cucumbers, Herbs and Flowers. They fill the dropdowns on the Items tab, and any of them can be renamed, added to or removed, so the sheet describes the owner's own garden rather than a template's.
Starting with a sample seed collection, then making it your own
The Seed Ledger arrives filled with a sample seed collection: 50 varieties of tomatoes, peppers, greens, roots, beans, squash, herbs and flowers across five storage places and eight categories, with about three months of log entries, so every status and both lists on the Dashboard show something real. Clear Sample Data, on the custom Ledger & Light menu, empties the log and the items, keeps the storage places and categories, and leaves the Items tab ready for the owner's own list. Entering that list is real work, done once. After that, each entry is a short form on a phone, and the sheet does the totalling and the sorting.
The menu also carries "Show my Log Seeds form link," so the form's address is always on the menu when it needs to be bookmarked on a phone.
Owned, not rented
The Seed Ledger is a Google Sheet bought once and kept, living in the owner's own Google Drive with no subscription to renew. Because the log is a list of rows, a collection that grows simply adds rows to the same sheet, and the history stays in one file.
This article describes how the Seed Ledger works. It keeps the owner's own counts, sources, seed years and germination figures.