Twenty-five. Not a pinch, not a scoop. Twenty-five, count them, they're lettuce, they're free. The ones you have to be careful with are the beans because a bean packet is eight and eight is what's on the label, so if you put nine in, somebody at the fair opens it and counts nine and then next year they want nine.
Line one is the lot letter, top right, in the pen that's on the string. Line two common name. Line three whatever the donor wrote for the Latin, and I mean whatever they wrote, not what you think it should be. Line four the year the seed came off the plant. Line five is the germ figure and the germ figure does not go on without the date next to it. I don't care if the donor sheet says ninety-four percent. Ninety-four percent when. A number with no date on it is not a number, it's a rumor somebody wrote on an envelope.
Three hundred forty envelopes before the 4th. We have sixty-four lots and the glassine comes in boxes of five hundred, so we are not short on envelopes, we are short on morning.
Now — this room. Rule is the temperature in Fahrenheit plus the humidity in percent should come to under a hundred. Fifty degrees and forty-five percent, that's a lot you can hand out for six years. This room ran at eighty-eight through most of August and the hygrometer by the door has been sitting at fifty-two. That's a hundred and forty. I have asked for a dehumidifier and a window unit three budget cycles running.
And moisture counts about ten times what temperature counts, which is why every person who puts a jar of undried seed in their refrigerator is doing damage and going to bed pleased with themselves. Dry first. The test is you put a seed under your thumbnail and press — if it shatters it's dry, if it dents it's not, and if it's not it goes back on the screen.
Okay. Usable lots. I make it forty-one.
No — forty. I counted the 1988 parsnip. Parsnip is done in a year, it was done in 1989, I have known that lot was dead since before either of you were in high school and I wrote it down anyway because it's sitting right there in the rack looking like seed. Forty.
Onion's the same and there's no rescuing it. Lettuce and pepper you get three, maybe four. Tomato, cucumber, the cabbage family, five to eight. A melon seed that got dried right will still be coming up at ten. Which is the reason I keep saying this rack should not be alphabetical. Alphabetical is how you throw away your onions every single year because they're filed next to okra instead of next to the word hurry.
Here — Q. Take that one, Marisol. Cilantro, 1989, eighty-two percent, tested April of '90. R.T.V. brought it in with three others off the same bed. I have never grown that lot out. Put it back in Q when you're done, it goes in Q.
Where these exchanges actually come apart is isolation distance, and it's not on any packet in this rack. Squash is insect-pollinated and it outcrosses. A zucchini and a crookneck four hundred feet apart in the same neighborhood make seed that grows into a thing that is neither one, and the seed looks perfectly normal, and nobody finds out until the following July in somebody else's yard. Corn is wind, so it's a quarter mile or you bag it. Beans, peas, lettuce, tomato — they pollinate themselves, they need next to nothing. Selfer or outcrosser. That's the only sorting that matters and it isn't printed anywhere.
So — forty was wrong. Thirty-eight. D and L are both summer squash, both from R.T.V., same street. They can't both be what they say they are. I'm not pulling them, they're going out, but I'm not counting them as two clean lots.
A germination test is the only honest number on a packet and it takes ten seeds, a damp paper towel, a plastic bag, and between four and twenty-one days depending what it is. Towels are in the propagation room, top of the bench, don't use the blue shop ones. Ten seeds off the count, every time, permanently — that's the price of knowing, and it comes off the same count the fair gets.
Anything under about sixty percent is not a lot you thin. It's a lot you sow at double rate and stop handing out.
And tomato gets fermented. The gel sac around the seed inhibits germination and it carries bacterial canker, so it's three days in a jar of its own juice on the sill and then rinse. Seed dried straight off the cutting board keeps the sac and the disease. Dry-seeded stuff is threshing and winnowing and nothing else, and it goes in under eight percent moisture or it molds in a sealed jar, and over twelve it'll heat on you.
Do not sort by size. I see people do it. Big seed out of the same lot is not better seed, all you're selecting for is big and against every other thing that lot had.
Thirty-eight — no. Thirty-seven. I just read the eighty-eight percent off lot AC out loud and that packet has no test date on it. Eighty-eight percent as of nothing. That's not a lot I know anything about, that's a lot with a nice number on it.
Which — the one thing I'll say for myself. Every packet I have labeled personally since 1984 has a test date on it. Two thousand one hundred and sixty of them. Not one goes out of here with a bare percentage.
And this room still has no cooling. Memo went in 3/14/91, second page, line four, same as 1990 and 1989. One dehumidifier. One window unit. That's it, that's the whole ask.
Somebody donates hybrid seed to this rack about twice a year, and always in good faith, and I always take it and I never put it out. Seed off an F1 tomato is not that tomato. It comes apart into a scatter of whatever the two parents were and most of that is worse. That's not an opinion, that's what segregation is.
Fill from the bulk jars into fresh envelopes, don't tip a packet into a packet — you lose count and then the count is decoration. Fold, crease it hard with the bone folder, stamp the date, and the stamp pad's dry on the left end so press the left side or you'll get half a date. Every lot goes down and only down. When a lot's out, the envelope stays in the slot with a zero on it. We don't top anything up.
It's a quarter to eleven. Vents are opening. Three hundred forty by the 4th and neither of you has filled twenty yet.