Labels for the Community Seed Collection

At the community garden, volunteers saved seeds from selected plants and kept them in paper packets. By autumn, a drawer was full. Unfortunately, several labels only said yellow or tall. Dima had recently joined the group and could not tell whether these words described flowers, vegetables or somebody's handwriting.

He offered to organise the collection. An older volunteer, Nell, recognised many packets, but she could not remember every detail. Dima was tempted to guess from the seeds' appearance so that the drawer would look complete. Instead, they created a separate box for anything they could not identify with confidence.

For the known seeds, they wrote the plant name, collection date and the part of the garden where each had grown. Nell added short notes about the colours she remembered. Dima designed a plain label with enough space for all this information and left copies beside the empty packets.

At the spring seed exchange, the group shared only the clearly labelled packets. Visitors asked fewer puzzled questions, and several took spare labels home. The uncertain box remained in the drawer for further checking. Dima had hoped to organise everything in one afternoon, but he preferred a visibly unfinished task to a tidy collection full of invented answers.