Lauren, I find it incredibly hopeful to hear that you’ve been able to get your warm weather plants started early with milk jugs on top of them. Woot! I’m definitely going to try it.
Getting back to the original topic, I think three equally valuable ways to use extra seeds are:
- Eating them, if they’re edible.
- Giving them away to other people who will use them.
- Doing a mass planting in extremely stressed conditions, with the plan of most of them dying, to see if you can find something that can survive it. Then you can deliberately cross it with everything else, disproportionately plant its seeds next year, or just let it casually cross into the landrace in order to have that valuable trait in your population going forward.
Jesse, I think you’re absolutely right: testing for cold tolerance is going to waste a whole ton of seeds with potentially wonderful genes! Which is why it’s best to do it when you have a whole lot of seeds that you wouldn’t otherwise ever be able to use.
This is one of those “You get what you prioritize first, and you might not get what you prioritize second” things. If the flavor / productivity / growth habit / whatever of those extra seeds doesn’t matter because you’ll never be able to use all of them, you might as well put them in an extreme situation to find out if any of them have something special to offer that you really want to preserve.
This is an excellent spinoff topic, and I want people to be able to find this information later, so I’ve made a spinoff thread here.