Saving seed from your own garden is one of the most satisfying
garden activities I can think of. It is as close as you can come to getting something
for nothing and is an amazing demonstration of how gardens are living, self
perpetuating things (the fact that the garden produces these amazingly complex
little genetic packages is as near to a miracle as most of us are ever likely
to come). All you have to do is allow nature to take its course and everything
you need to plant more gardens in following years is produced for you. Doing this saves money, makes you more self
sufficient, helps to preserve genetic diversity and is fun (I have also found
it is the best ways to one-up other gardeners in discussions at parties
because few people do it or know much about it).
Carrot seed
Seed saving is most commonly practiced in the vegetable
garden. You can plant a crop of bush beans, harvest it for weeks and then let
the last pods mature and end up with more bean seed than you started with! It
doesn’t have to stop with the vegetables though, I save seed from all kinds of
useful plants, nitrogen fixers, biomass plants, fruiting trees and shrubs and
more. It is a great way to get enough seed to grow biomass plants and nitrogen
fixers on a large scale. When you have an abundance of seed you can afford
to be profligate with it, scattering it wherever you think it might survive.
Seed saving sounds like it could be complicated, but it really couldn’t
be much simpler. Plants are programmed to make reproduction their top priority
(just like we are) and if we leave them alone they will flower and make seed (in
most cases). The only part that requires some thought is keeping the varieties
pure and this largely depends upon whether a plant is self-pollinated or
cross-pollinated. Self-pollinated plants produce seed that is the same as their
parents, whereas cross-pollinated plants produce seed that is a mix of both
parents. To maintain a cross-pollinated variety it must be pollinated by another
plant of the same variety. Another problem is with hybrid seed, the
seed of F1 hybrids don’t usually resemble their parents, so saving it is not
generally considered to be worthwhile (stick with open pollinated varieties).
Amaranth seed
The easiest plants to save seed from are the self-pollinating
fruit producers, such as tomatoes, eggplants and peppers (just collect the seed
before you eat them). Beans and peas and lettuce are also mostly
self-pollinating and easy to deal with. Cross-pollinated crops (these include brassicas,
cucurbits and corn) are a little more difficult because they need to receive
pollen from another plant of the same variety. The easiest way to do this is to
have only one variety of each species flowering at one time, though you could
also hand-pollinate, which isn’t as hard as it sounds. You don’t want one
variety getting pollinated by another or the resulting seeds will be a mix of
the two.
Keeping a variety totally pure is most important if you
are selling or trading it, or if you want to conserve a rare variety. If you
are just using the seed yourself it isn’t necessarily essential (I use most of
my lettuce seed for growing salad mixes and don’t even notice what variety it
is). If a variety gets crossed and turns into something weird and unusable you
can always discard it and buy new seed.
Leek seed
Saving seed has become a routine activity in my garden, whenever I
see seed ripening I go out with my dishes or paper grocery bags and collect it
(I tend to decide whether I actually want it after collecting it). In some cases
you have to watch the ripening seed carefully, so you can get it before it is falls
or is dispersed. Depending upon the plants you might collect seed directly from
the plant, or you might cut the whole seed bearing top and dry it in a paper
bag. I then dry the seed in a warm place (usually my greenhouse) and then clean
it with various sized mesh sieves and by winnowing. I store the dry seed in
regular paper envelopes in a cool dry place. Moisture is the enemy of stored
seed, they must be dry when you store them and must remain dry until you use
them.
I find one of the biggest problems with seed saving is what to do with
all of the seed that accumulates (plants like Amaranth and Kale can be
amazingly productive). You only need a small fraction for planting your own
garden, so have to find ways to use the rest. This usually means giving it away
(it makes great Christmas presents), trading it, selling it, or in some cases sprouting
and eating it.
Sweet clover seed
Another bonus from allowing plants to produce seed is that some
will inevitably fall and you get volunteers appearing in unexpected places. I
encourage this by cleaning the seed out in the garden and scattering the emptied
seed heads out in the garden (they often contain some seed). In some cases you
may get so many volunteers that you don’t actually need to plant, but that’s
for another post.
If you want to save seed you need to know exactly what it
is, so it is important to label the plants carefully (and write it down in your
journal too). You don’t want to be in any doubt what the seed is.
