@bluegrassmom
I decided to go a little further than just showing the bags and boxes, may be more info that you wanted but I think some might find it useful.
Here is the plastic ice cube tray I used the past three years while collecting pods. You can see the plastic ruler I have taped to the tray. It allows me to flip it up to put the pods and beads and paper in the container, then flips down to give me a writing service to write the pod parent names on.
Here is a sample of the little slips of paper I keep in the tray to write the pod names on.
Here is a sample of the gym clips and beads I used this year to show the ID of the plant the pollen is from.
Here is how it looks once the paper, the clip and bead and the pod is put in the ice tray. I like to fill out the slip of paper first and force it down in the little compartments then put the bead and pod on top, it helps keep the slip from blowing out on windy days.
I take the tray up to the shed, then shell the pod and put the slip of paper the clip and bead and the seeds in a container to dry for a day.
Then after the seeds dry I put them in one of the little baggies, (l like these better than the ones with the special white area to write on ) I use a marker and can use the entire baggie area to write on. That is pretty necessary being the baggies I use are so small. Then I squirt just a spritz of water into the baggie. I used to include a the little slip of paper, but finally after reducing the size of the paper I deleted it completely. So this year it was just water no paper and I had really almost no mold and very few mushy seed, almost none. Not sure the mushy seeds were from the paper, but the mold was and I think that help to create some of the mushy seeds. I think that mainly just comes form immature seeds.
This is the box I bought at Hobby Lobby to store the new "Alphabet beads I bought" and I think I will use one of them next year to collect pods with. During the early part of the season and late in the season the small ice cube tray is great, but during peak pod collecting time I have to stop back by the shed and empty the tray and pick up new paper slips because I have way more pods that will fit in the tray.
I also use the same ice cube tray for pollinating. I put the pollen in the tray and the clips and beds for that plant. I usually keep my tweezers in the tray when pollinating. Just set this up as an example, I can usually fit four different types of pollen at a time with beads.
Here is how I store my little seed packets in the fridge, I will end up with several of these trays stored in the fridge. They are stored by date, and after four weeks they are set aside in the fridge and I start to plant them.
I plant my seeds in cups, I do twelve cups at a time because that is how many my tray holds and it is a good weight to carry to the seed cup beds.
Here they are planted in the little seed cup beds, you can see I already have some sprouting in this bed. These seeds were planted back on the second and third of August.
Here is a full view of one of the seed cup beds.
