Silica gel packs for seed saving

[checkerkitty]

I was hoping to get some information on seed saving. I was reading Fusion's website the other day and ran across the info on seed saving.
http://www.selectedplants.com/seedsaving.htm
He recommends a desiccant for long-term cold storage. I'll be storing my seeds in the deep freeze. I took a peek on the net for a bulk supply of packs and found this on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Silica-Gel-Hal...7552220&sr=8-5

Has anyone else used these or something similar? 100 packs for $6.99 seems reasonable. It's funny, I swear I had 5 trillion of these around the house at one time. Now that I have a use for them, they are gone! If anyone has a better source (aka-cheaper) would you post a link? I seem to remember round packs coming in some prescription bottles. I really want to do this the right way. Thanks everyone!

Christy

[Rockporter]

http://www.aliexpress.com/product-fm...olesalers.html

Here is twice the size packs for about the same price, one catch though, it comes from China...

[carolyn137]

I think it depends on what you mean by long term storage and at what temps, and for what reasons.

Seeds to be frozen should be dried down to a moisture conent of 6-8% before freezing and fridge freezer temps are about at 0-5 F. But long term storage to me means freezing down to minus 20 F or minus 80 F which is what seed banks do.

You can buy dessicant packs, last time I knew from SESE, but they also come in pill bottles of certain drugs so ask your druggist to save some for you if you want to do this.

I store my seeds at ambient temps/humidity and can usually get greater than 50% germination when about 5 yo and sometimes much greater than that/ Seeds older than from 5 to about 12 years old I jusut double sow and for seeds older than that I use some special methods and sometimes I win and sometimes not.

My own personal record is waking up seeds of September Dawn that were 22 yo but the documented record is 50 year old seeds.

I think it all depends on why you want to store long term and why.

I have seeds here at home that were saved from 1991 and that's about 3200 varieties grown since then. I sent someone some seeds from 1993 and he got them up and if you look at the WANTED Forum of the Seed Exchange you'll see that I provided seeds for Tadesse and Wuhib from 1994 and all who participated on that project got seeds to germinate.

My reason for saving all these old seeds is that many many known varieties have gone south and aren't what they should be so I'm always getting requests from here and there to do a search and see how far back I last grew a variety when it was as it should be.

[rxkeith]

like carolyn says, ask a pharmacy to save some for you.
i am a pharmacist, and you wouldn't believe how many of those things you can save in a day. thyroid pills have two desiccants per bottle as do some others. you can get a life time supply in a short time. normally they are just thrown out. free is as cheap as you can get.


keith

[Doug9345]

Silca Gel is also rechargeable. You just need to heat it up.