For my fellow revelers: which convention is used for the date on seed packet labels: date they were extracted, or date cleaned to dry, or date actually stored?
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revelgardener 
I don’t get too crazy dating seeds. I always document the year I harvested them. I rarely document the month, never the day. My reasoning is that for any given type of seed I usually harvest seeds a number of times per season. Since seeds last from one to many years I really don’t care if I picked some a week or two later than others. If you want to keep track of when various plants produce seeds some sort of garden journal will be more effective than putting dates all over your seed containers.
Mixing the same type seeds from various plants and times can help them adapt to your environment better. This may be where keeping samples from various plants separate may be useful. After I transplanted my past winter’s basil in the ground I made sure to harvest a lot of it’s seeds since it had been so productive through the entire winter on my window sill. This year I will mix some of those seeds with seeds from other plants and depending what happens next year I may keep a separate envelope for those that perform best.