I'd been noticing a sour smell in my apartment for the last week, and today I finally tracked it down.

I keep my seeds in a backpack, most in ziplocs but my marigolds are in envelopes, and a few of the ziplocs are open because I just didn't bother sealing them back up after seeding my garden. Well, I also put a bag of seed onions in there, sealed in a ziploc, and as I'm sure you can predict, they're the ones that rotted and were what I was smelling. The fumes penetrated the entire backpack, of course, despite the onions being in a sealed plastic bag. The ziplocked seeds and the backpack are out on the porch for a few hours airing out after being sprayed with a diluted vinegar mix.

My question is, since onions are known for releasing fumes that rapidly ripen fruits and vegetables, did the fumes do anything to my seeds that will make them non-viable? I'd hate to lose 5 years worth of seeds because of doing one dumb thing. Oh, I should note that none of the seeds actually got wet, as the onions were contained in their own sealed ziploc.

--GW