Long before people have been around, plants have been growing from seed without seed catalogues, plant nurseries, seed packets, mail orders, store displays, or any human intervention. Then why isn’t this possible with vegetables and fruits? It is of course very possible and you can do it more easily than you probably realize.
You can save considerable money on seeds, improve your vegetables and fruits from year to year, and save yourself the work of seed selection, purchasing, and so on. If you get really good at it, you could even develop a whole new heirloom variety.
Step 1
Start with Suitable Plants
For seed saving you want to use open pollinated or heirloom plants to get your seeds from. You want to stay away from hybrid plants, which can yield unpredictable results. Good seed catalogues indicate if seeds are hybrids (i.e. F1) or not.
Heirloom plants are great plants to start with, since they often come from people who have been carefully saving seeds from one season to another, selecting from plants that are the best in their garden, thereby improving the plants from one generation to another to the specific qualities that make that particular heirloom plant unique and wonderful. There are seed catalog's that specialize in this, which are representative of collections of many gardeners who are well practiced seed savers, rather than the seed conglomerate companies.
Step 2
Save the Best Fruits or Vegetables out of your Garden for seeds
Saving the best things for seed can be hard to do, especially at first, since those perfect carrots, radishes, asparagus, flowers, potatoes, or other plants are something as a gardener you want to relish and enjoy. To sit back and let it go to seed, rather than pick it and enjoy it seems counter to all your hopes as a gardener. If you save the seeds of the less tempting plants, you can be perpetuating the problems that led to that plant being less fruitful. If you save seeds of the best plants, you can be perpetuating the best of your plants. So one way to console yourself on not harvesting the best fruits or vegetables is to realize that by doing this you can probably have even more great plants like that one next year when you plant the seeds of such a fruitful plant.
There are some garden plants you can both harvest and still save the seeds from the best plants, such as tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, avocados, or any other fruit or vegetable that has the seed within it.
Step 3
Collect the seeds at the Appropriate Time
For many seeds, the best time to collect them is when the parent plant has died and dried, but before the plant has fallen to the ground or started to decompose. This often means allowing fruit and vegetables to ‘over-ripen’. If you pick the seeds too early, you risk gathering seeds that aren’t ready, resulting in unhealthy and weak plants or maybe no plants at all. If you wait too long, you risk losing the seeds to wind, birds, mice, or being replanted in the same general place.
For some plants, re-seeding in place isn’t a loss, though you do increase the chance of disease, pest invasion, and seed loss by allowing this to happen repeatedly. Year after year, I have cherry tomatoes, potatoes, and alpine strawberries that re-seed every year, simply because there are too many for me to pick them all on a consistent basis. However for optimum results, you don’t want to do this.
For beginning seed saving, you may want to start with larger and easier seeds, such as beans, marigolds, squash, pumpkins, or cucumbers.
Peas and beans are best collected when the pods have dried out, at which time they are easily gathered. If you live in a wet fall climate, you may need to watch for the plant starting to die back and gathering and drying the pods yourself.
For plants that have the seeds inside the fruit, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and pumpkins, it is best to strain and separate the seeds out and let them dry for a few days in a dry location. Some examples of good drying locations are on a plate on a sunny window ledge
Some plants have really small seeds, like chives, carrots, lettuce, which take some practice knowing what they look like and when to collect them. For these types of plants the easiest way to gather the seeds is to watch for when the flowering part of the plant has dried, then place dried flowering seed head in a paper sack and shake the seeds out.
Step 4
Save the Seeds in a Dark, Dry, and Cold Location
Before saving your seeds make sure they have dried, reducing the chance for destructive mold and mildew during storage. A general rule of thumb is that if you can bend your seed then it still has too much moisture in it and will rupture and die if frozen. However, if you attempt to bend it and it breaks instead, then it’s probably at 8% of moisture or less and can be safely frozen.
Store the seeds in their dried pods or paper, like paper envelopes, not plastic bags. This will help to reduce moisture buildup. Be sure to mark what type of seed they are and the year you saved them, since it can be difficult to remember the following years what they were. You can make your own desiccant, or drying agent, by putting about 1 tablespoon of powdered milk wrapped in a paper towel and placing it inside the seed container to help absorb moisture.
I like to save my seeds in a drawer in the fridge or freezer in air-proof containers. You want to cause the seeds to stay dormant by reproducing wintertime conditions of darkness, dryness, and coldness, which is easy to do in a fridge or freezer.
If the fridge is not an option, another possibility is to dig a mini-root cellar hole in your yard and have a water-tight box you can store your seeds in. The ground in many locations stays pretty cold during the winter.
By storing your seeds in a dark, dry, and cold location you will insure a higher germination rate at planting time, reduce incidents of seeds molding or mildewing while in storage, and have a worry-free place you can keep them until planting time.
If you freeze your seeds, when you remove the seeds from the freezer, allow them to come up to room temperature before handling for planting or sowing.
Step 5
Plant the seeds at the Correct Time
As spring approaches, it is easy to get caught up in the excitement of planting time approaching and to plant your seeds too early. This may take some practice and experimentation, though fortunately, when saving your own seeds you often can have lots of extra seeds to make mistakes with.
The longer seeds are saved, the lower your germination rate, so it is always better to use seeds the following season rather than older seeds. At the same time, it is also a good idea to hold back some of your seeds as insurance in case you have crop failure due to unexpected weather conditions or pests.
You can often find guidelines on when to plant on the Internet or on the backs of seed packets at a store with similar seeds.
One online example can be found at:
http://www.territorialseed.com/downloads/plantingchart.pdf
By: edibleyard.com
