A seed bank is a collection of seeds, dried, labelled and stored so they can be sown again. Collecting seeds with kids is one of the simplest autumn projects there is: a pair of scissors, a few envelopes and a shoebox. In September, next summer is already rattling inside a dry poppy head. Shake it and you can hear hundreds of tiny seeds against its thin walls. But what your child puts in the envelope is not a memory of summer. It is something else entirely.
What is a seed?
A seed is a baby plant with a packed lunch and a raincoat. Inside the coat lies a tiny shoot with the beginnings of a root and leaves. Around it sits the food the shoot will live on at first. The coat protects it all from drying out, cold and mould.
The seed head is where the seeds ripen. On calendula it is a little crown of curved, spiky seeds. On a poppy it is a capsule with holes under its lid, just like a salt shaker. A dry seed head crunches between your fingers and spills seeds into your palm. They look like dead little pebbles.
The seed is not dead. It is asleep.
A dry seed has almost stopped everything it does, and uses so little energy that it can wait for a long time. It is waiting for water and warmth. So your child is not storing a memory of summer. They are storing summer itself, on pause. Adults do the same on a grand scale: in Svalbard, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault keeps backup seeds of the world's food crops inside a mountain.
Why it matters
A seed bank makes an invisible cycle visible: flower, seed, winter, sprout, flower. It is also a collection. Your child sorts, describes and gives each kind a name, a date and a place, which is the same work a researcher does with an archive. The Norwegian curriculum asks children after Year 2 to "display and present objects through an exhibition or collection" (KM1814).
Try it at home: the shoebox seed bank
Suitable for: 4–12 years. ⚠️ An adult helps with the scissors. Seeds never go in the mouth, and some plants, like lupin and laburnum, have poisonous seeds.
- Find dry seed heads that are brown and rattle when shaken.
- Cut the seed head off over a sheet of paper and shake the seeds out.
- Let the seeds dry on the paper for a week.
- Pour each kind into its own envelope.
- Write the name, date and place on the envelope.
- Put the envelopes in the box, somewhere cool, dry and dark.
Always dry seeds in paper, never in plastic, which traps moisture and lets mould grow. And then: what happens if you put three seeds on wet kitchen paper on the windowsill now, in October?
Questions to wonder about
- Which seed in the seed bank is the smallest, and which plant grows the biggest?
- How does a seed know that spring has come?
- If you could give one seed to a child living a hundred years from now, which would you choose, and why?
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