Saving seeds might seem like a waste of time. Plenty of companies are willing to sell you small packets of seeds for as little as $2. Time spent collecting, drying and storing seeds isn’t in vain, though. Besides being a way to save money, seed saving can be a fun way to learn more about plants. It also can help you stock what really works in your garden (and your kitchen). I save a few of the more expensive or harder-to-find varieties each year to make the next garden a little simpler. Here are a few things you should know if you’re interested in saving seeds this year.
Pollination: Open-pollinated plants came from two parent plants of the same variety and with stable characteristics from one harvest to the next. My Black Creaseback beans are open pollinated. Those beans will always produce another harvest of drought tolerant, long green beans.
Hybrid plants (usually denoted with an F1 after the name) come from breeding two parent plants of different varieties. Seeds from a hybrid, even if pollinated by a fellow hybrid, could be unable to germinate. If the seeds aren’t sterile, hybrids don’t produce the same characteristics two generations in a row. Instead, they’ll revert to the characteristics of a grandfather plant, or display an entirely new set of characteristics. This is great for genetic diversity, but not so great if you save Sun Gold cherry tomato seeds and expect Sun Gold cherry tomatoes from them.
Hybrids like the Sun Golds are popular because they have what’s called “hybrid vigor.” Hybrid crosses often have the best traits of their parents, such as taste and disease resistance. If you’ve been to a farmer’s market in the last few years, you’ll likely remember seeing a half yellow, half green Zephyr squash. That hybrid squash is well known at the market because of its great taste, continual harvests and better disease resistance than open-pollinated squash varieties.
Close Varieties: Whether you’re interested in saving peppers or cucumbers, pollinators can spread pollen from one flower to another and create genetic diversity. It’s what they’re supposed to do.
Peppers produce flowers with both male and female parts, known as stamens and pistils, respectively. Pepper flowers can fertilize themselves and are known as self-fertilizing. Cucumbers and other cucurbits produce two types of flowers—male and female. These types of plants need pollinators (or the wind, in the case of corn) to carry pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers to cross-fertilize.
I planted five different pepper varieties this year. Even though peppers are self-fertilizing, I know pollinators likely mixed pollen between plants. I’ll save seeds from the middle shishito plant to limit genetic diversity, but I won’t be surprised if some seedlings mature into not-quite-shishito peppers. I have three different cucumbers in the garden (Green Finger, Suyo Long and Armenian White) now and way too much genetic diversity to make saving seeds worthwhile.
Harvesting: Some plants, like peppers and tomatoes, you’ll want to harvest at the peak of ripeness for maintaining the best germination rates. For other plants, like basil and beans, you’ll want to wait until the seed pods or florets are dry to harvest the seeds. If you’re interested in saving seeds from a particular crop, I suggest doing a quick Google search to make sure you’re harvesting at the correct time.
Processing: Waiting for the seeds to dry out or placing them in a warm, dry place before storage is called dry processing. It’s simple, and likely what you think of when you think of saving seeds.
Wet processing includes fermenting the seeds in water for three to seven days, rinsing them with water, then drying the seeds before storage. Wet processing is necessary for produce like tomatoes and cucumbers because it mimics the rotting inside an animal’s intestines the seeds would go through before eventual germination.
A general rule of thumb is if the veggie in question is surrounded by watery flesh, then wet processing is the way to go. That said, there are gardeners who dry-process pumpkin seeds and others who reportedly wet-process pepper seeds.
Storage: I use regular mailing envelopes and store them in my seed box in the unheated pantry. Some online experts will tell you to use an airtight container or store the seeds in a fridge to keep out the humidity. If you want to go the extra mile, you likely will get better germination rates. But regular opaque mailing envelopes work, too, if that’s what you’ve got.
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