I like to buy seeds.
Some times, I don’t have enough dirt to plant all the things I would like to plant in any one season. For years, I’d just let some odd seed go by, then never find it again when I had room. Later I found I could save seeds in a jar in the freezer for years to decades. So now when I find an interesting seed, I go ahead and buy it, dirt or no dirt.
So I was at the hardware store and saw a couple of interesting seed packets. They seemed awful light, but I bought them anyway. Reading the label, they were VERY light. Those must be some tiny seeds!
On the way home I got to wondering: How do those prices per weight stand up to precious metals?
So I looked at this site to pick up some rough metals prices:
http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html
and using 31.1034768 gm / Troy Ounce converted my Grams (or in this case mg) of seeds into $/Troy Ounce.
Here are the front and back of the two seed packets, so you can see the price and weight documented.
Seed packages: Lavender and Egg Plant front
Seed packages: Lavender and Eggplant back
Ok, cutting to the chase:
A lot of seed packages these days are 1 gm. Some are 3 gm. But these guys are about 1/10 that. (As were many others…) So to some extent there is a ‘cherry pick’ here in that I’m not looking at corn or beans. Also, this is retail, not bought in bulk. But retail is what I pay so it is what matters to me.
What are these puppies worth?
Benchmark
I looked up some metals prices this month. These are rough “eyeball averages” and not any particular day. Prices are US $ per Troy Ounce.
Platinum 1800 Gold 1500 Palladium 750 Silver 47
Seeds?
The 250 mg Lavender seeds costs $1.89. That works out to $235.14 per Troy Ounce. Roughly a little under 1/3 the value of Palladium and about 5 times the price of silver.
How about those eggplant seeds? Well, at only 100 mg in the package, and with a higher price of $2.79 you can guess which way they are headed… $867.78 per Troy Ounce. About 1/2 the price of gold or platinum. Higher than Palladium and over 18 times the price of silver!
Even those seeds that have 10 x as much in the package will be at $23 to $86 / Troy Ounce. Right up there with silver.
Somehow that seed freezer of mine just moved up a notch or two on the “preservation of value” scale… Maybe I’ll move it off the porch and into the office ;-)
In Conclusion
It would seem that my low interest in silver and my very high interest in preservation and expansion of my seed supply has a more direct tie to “tangible value” than I’d expected.
It would also seem that if you learn to produce and save your own seeds, it can be worth as much as sliver and gold… in more ways than one…
Musings from the Chiefio 
I have no idea why, but I just noticed that comments were not being allowed on this posting. It wasn’t anything I’d done… At any rate, I’ve turned them on…
At least with seeds you can grow more if you wish. Kind of fun actually. pg
@P.G. Sharrow:
A lot of fun!
That they are more valuable, ounce for ounce, than silver AND I can make more of them on my own makes it all that much more pleasant to look at my jars of seeds ;-)
And any that are “aging out” can get turned into food. Rather like that feature ;-)
Can’t eat a silver dollar…
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And the most priceless seed of all is knowledge. How do we retain and preserve the “most priceless seed”?
I recently came out of 4 days and nights without power thanks to a few hundred tornadoes. Amazing how much you can “see” without electricity, and lights, and refrigeration and tv and the web, and…
A ton of gold will buy precious little of any value if there’s nothing of value to be had at any price, and how will we do the most basic human things in the world if they can’t be bought? Hummmmm… Tornadoes and hurricanes and earthquakes and tusnamis and…etc. have a way of reminding us very quickly how helpless we are and how much we “civilized” people have forgotten about what really matters: how to survive in a harsh world.
For the passerby at Chiefio – learn how to preserve the “seeds” of life before the lights go out, its priceless.
Hi EM.
Looking for a suitable post to comment something remote. You have mentioned your Amish heritage, I believe. This Sott.net post might interest you.
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/228095-The-Amish-Don-t-Get-Autism-But-They-Do-Get-Bio-Terrorism.
Hope I am not being intrusive.
@Ken McMurtrie:
There is a “Tips” tab at the top of the page where folks can put random things of interest.
I’m not all hung up on it, it just makes it easier for me to find that “interesting odd things that was… somewhere…” when I have to time to return to it 10 posts later ;-)
That particular article would be most reasonably placed an this thread:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/04/17/butter-eggs-blood-sausage-carrots-health/
(put “autism” in the search box at the top next tp ‘tips’ and it popos up those artcles with that word in them)
To the point af the artcle, though: There are several different Amish communities and some do vaccinate (discussed in comments on the other thread). The point is often made that Amish DO have the same medical problems as the general population. What that ignores is that the Old Order Amish have lower levels while it is largely those who embrace English ways that start getting the English problems…
And it’s not a special Amish Genetics… My Dad died at 56 from lung cancer after smoking unfiltered Camels for 40 years. (Typical onset is 30-35 years after start of smoking). HIS dad lived to 90 something and his mom lived longer. Eating “organic” (as that was how all things were grown then…) and having no modern medicine.
They (the grandparents) also lost a few children in childbirth and had to deal with various miserable illnesses. I had measles, mumps, chickenpox and a few other odd things myself. I’m very glad my kids didn’t have to do that…
BTW, the polio vaccine was an ‘attenuated not killed’ virus for many years (maybe still is?) as it gave “community immunization’. Basically a kid who was innoculated would shed virsus into things like local swimming holes where it would be picked up by un-vaccinated folks and indirectly vaccinate them too. That some Amish kids picked it up just says that it was “performing as advertized” and immunizing folks against their will.