searching through my seeds

today i thought it might be a good idea to take a gander at my seed collection, some of which i have inherited from my recent sister sophie, and maybe start thinking about how i am going to lay out my garden next year.  little did i anticipate, this task was going to be very difficult.  i opened my seed bin and what did i see staring me in the face? sophie.  ouch.  there are seed packets in here that she has collected over time from back when she was living in oregon, 8 years ago.  no doubt those seeds are probably no longer growable (is that a word?) so what do i do with them? i have no idea how to grow most of this stuff!  my first memory to surface was last winter just after christmas.  sophie had landed herself a gift certificate to a seed catalog at our family's yankee swap and we sat in our sunroom for a few hours planning out our garden for the spring.  she knew exactly where each kind of plant should go, who it's neighbors should be and what to fertilize each one with.  i feel hopeless with out her knowledge here beside me.  she always used to say to me that it's important to kill things.  if you ever want to learn how to do it right, you learn best by doing it wrong first.  at least with plants.  my issue is that i will kill the seeds that she has saved for this long.  i don't want the sophie's seeds to go to waste because of my ignorance.  maybe i'm just worrying too much.  hopefully i'll get over it before next spring.