Vegetable Gardening – A Time Capsule Garden

November 9, 2009 | Posted by Mark Z

When Mark’s and my homestead’s previous owners moved, they left behind many interesting things. The most useful is the pantry half full of canning jars, sealed buckets of hard red wheat, and #10 cans of dehydrated foods from Rainy Day Foods. Seeds/food stored in airtight containers at 50° or less can apparently be good for 30 years or more. All the products we’ve opened have been palatable.

One can I opened in January was a “Survival Garden Pak” that claimed it “contains enough seeds for both a fall and spring garden.” I had been looking over my garden plan and checking the seeds I needed to buy, when I remembered seeing two of these cans in the storage shed. I decided to see if the seeds were viable before ordering more.

What I found inside was a veritable time capsule. The packets indicated the seeds were packed for the 1977-1978 growing seasons—when I was in high school! The pictures were mostly drawings rather than photographs, and each was clearly marked with a price of 39¢. It was so cool!

Michelle's "seed time capsule." (Photo by Michelle Zeiger)

The following seeds were included: pole bean, beet, broccoli, corn, cabbage, cantaloupe, carrot, cauliflower, cucumber, lettuce, onion, pea, pumpkin, radish, Swiss chard, spinach, Hubbard squash, tomato, turnip, watermelon, and zucchini as well as borage, basil, caraway and fennel. The fairly standard varieties did not indicate whether they were hybrids or open pollinated. Apparently genetic modifications did not begin until later years.

I wonder if the any of the varieties have “died out” and will therefore be revived this way? I may contact seed banks to see if they’d like some of the varieties that I can’t grow here. I’m not even going to open the corn packet. I may try the cantaloupe and watermelon in the greenhouse, if there’s room.

January 28th I began to sprout some of the seeds. I put wet paper towel on small plates and placed a few seeds on top, covered that with more paper towel and plastic wrap. This I put on a warming shelf near the woodstove overnight. The next day I uncovered the plates and found all the seeds nicely swollen. The radishes even had little roots sprouting already. Later in the day the spinach seeds had germinated. Then I was really excited! “I will truly have a unique garden this year,” I thought.

And I did! Watch for A Time Capsule Garden in Review.

This is a distillation of Michelle Zeiger’s blog post on the Zeiger Homestead Website. You can read the complete story here.

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Mark Zeiger is a regular contributor to The Self Reliance Exchange. Michelle Zeiger, the author of this piece, is his better half. They homestead off the grid in Southeast Alaska. See their blog and photos of their garden at www.akzeigers.com.

Categories: vegetable gardening | Tags: seed storage, self reliance, vintage seeds | No Comments »