Seed saving

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.