Garden Seeds; Grow Your Own

Beans are some of the easiest seeds to save from the home garden.

The actual act of saving seeds is very easy to do. In some plants the seeds are easy to see and saving them is a by product of eating them, like watermelon or tomatoes. In other plants you have to set aside some plants and let them go to seed without harvesting the part you eat, like broccoli or sweet corn.

Peas are inbreeders.

Yes, with some plants you need to know a little botany and know how they reproduce to be able to make good decisions about which plants to save seed from and how to go about your seed saving efforts.

You see plants can be divided into two broad categories for the purposes of the casual seed saver, the in-breeders and the out-breeders. The in-breeders are those plants that almost always self-pollinate their own flowers. That means that most of the time the flower has already pollinated itself before it has opened and the bees and butterflies start to come and get pollen from it. In-breeders are generally stable and reproduce themselves generation after generation with little variation.

Out-breeders, on the other hand, generally have big showy flowers to attract pollinators. Some of them even have their male and female parts in separate flowers to make it harder for their flowers to be fertilized by the same plants pollen. Other out-breeders are wind pollinated; they don't have fancy looking flowers that attract insects but instead they produce a lot of pollen that is spread by the wind.

Tomatoes are self pollinating inbreeders.

Inbreeders, like peas, beans, most tomatoes and some peppers are some of the easiest plants for the beginning seed saver to work with. With peas and beans of all types, allow the pods to mature and dry on the vine for as long as possible. The seeds should be completely formed and of a good size for their type. (I like to compare them to the original seed that I might have left over from spring). Keep an eye on them, however, that they don't shatter or split open, spilling the seeds on the ground.

Tomatoes and peppers should be allowed to ripen completely on the vine. Since peppers are dry inside you can cut them open and pick out the seeds, spreading them out to dry further before you store them.

With tomatoes, since you have a lot of juice and pulp around the seeds, need to be handled differently. For very small quantities of seed, the easiest thing to do is to slice open the fruit and with the tip of a knife, flip the seeds out onto a paper towel with as little of the surrounding gel as possible. Leave in a warm dry place to dry. The seeds will stick to the towel, so write the variety name on the towel and when the seeds are dry, roll it up and put it in a glass jar until spring. If you can't scrape the seeds off the towel at planting time, just tear the paper towel into small pieces with a seed on each piece and plant them towel and all.

A better way of handling tomato seeds, particularly if you need a fairly large quantity for sale or trade or if your plants have been bothered by one of the seed borne diseases is to ferment them. To do this cut open the fruit and squeeze the gel and seeds into a jar. Since I live in a very dry climate and the juice will evaporate without fermenting I usually put a lid loosely over the top, to retard evaporation. Check on the seeds and stir them up each day. They should bubble a bit and may even smell a little funky. After one or two days of this, fish a few seeds out and rinse them in a fine mesh strainer for a few minutes. Feel the seeds. They should feel smooth and clean, even 'squeaky' clean. If not let them ferment another day or two and test again. When they feel smooth and clean, rinse them well and spread them out to dry before storage.

Squash are outbreeders, but can be treated like inbreeders.

While many plant families are designated as out breeders, based on the types of flowers they have, we can actually sub-divide this group into those that suffer from 'in-breeding depression' and those that don't. Some out breeders cannot pollinate themselves or their genetic clones, their pollen isn't viable on their own flowers. Others can pollinate themselves but the seeds are not very viable or the seedlings are slow growing, weak and prone to disease. This is known as 'in-breeding depression'.

With these plants there is a minimum number of plants needed in the breeding population to prevent in-breeding depression. This is the minimum number of plants that should be blooming together and that you should save seeds from. Some of these numbers are very high, such as corn which requires the seed saved from at least 100 plants to avoid in-breeding.

Then there are the out breeders which do not seem to suffer from in-breeding depression. Most of these are the cucerbits, that is squash, melons, gourds and cucumbers. While all of the plants in these families have separate male and female flowers on the same plants they do not seem to suffer from in-breeding depression when they are pollinated with their own flowers.

While they don't suffer from in-breeding depression, if you grow more than one variety of each type you do have to be careful that the varieties do not cross accidentally if you want to keep the variety pure. One way of doing this is to seperate the varieties by distance from each other, but if you have a lot of pollinating insects or if your neighbors also grow this type of plant, that may not help.

The best way for a home gardener to assure pure seed of their chosen variety is to isolate individual blossoms and hand pollinate them. This is not very difficult to do at all. Late in the afternoon look for male and female blossoms that will open the following morning and put a little masking tape around the end of the flower to keep it from opening. In the morning go out and pick a male blossom, take the tape off the female blossom. Remove the petals from the male blossom and open up the petals of the female, if they aren't on their own. The male blossom should be shedding loose pollen if it's at the right stage; just rub the part containing the pollen (the anthers) onto the female blossom's stamen (which is an ovary and contains the beginnings of the seeds) then tape the female blossom tightly shut to prevent bees from coming and collecting the pollen and possibly leaving pollen from a different plant.

The written description sounds complicated. It's really not nearly as complex as it reads and is very easy and fast to do. In a day or two the petals of the female flower will shrivel and fall off, leaving behind the miniature fruit. Be sure to wrap a bright string or ribbon loosely around the stem of the fruit so that you will know that is the one you are saving for seed and warn your garden helpers not to pick that one.

Once you have pollinated your cucerbit plants just keep them watered and wait for the fruit to grow. You can collect the seeds from watermelons and cantaloups as you eat the fruit. A short period of fermentation as described for tomato seeds will help clean off adhering fibers and kill some seed borne disease. For pumpkins and winter squash you can wait until you are going to eat it also.

Cucumbers and summer squash you need to let the fruit mature far past the time you would normally eat them. They will grow quite large and develop a hard skin. They may turn brown or yellow, this is the stage at which you can collect their seed.

For gourds allow them to fully mature and dry out, then cut them open and collect the seed. If they still seem a little moist be sure and spread them out in a dry spot to finish drying off before you put them in storage.

Dry seed pods in paper bags. Staple an index card to the bag with the variety and year on it.

When you are saving your own seed they must be very dry before you put them into storage. Make sure they are as mature as possible on the plant, for peas and beans this means letting the pods dry on the plant, but collecting them before they split open. For things like carrots, onions, beets and spinach let the flower stalks dry on the plant until the most mature ones are in danger of falling off. For these you could hold a paper bag under the flower and shake the mature seeds into it every couple of days or you can cut the stalks and put them upside down into the bag and put them in a warm dry place to finish maturing. Shaking the stems will cause most of the seed to fall out into the bag.

For other plants like those in the cabbage family (cabbage, broccoli, turnips, radishes, etc) that are in small pods you can do the same thing or just pick off the pods as they dry and put them in a paper bag in a warm dry place until the pods pop open.

To separate smaller seeds from plant debris place them in a large bowl or tub. Since the wind doesn't blow when and how I need it to, I set a box fan up outdoors and stand in front of it. I pick up handfuls of seed and debris and let it fall back into the bowl. The fan will blow away the chaff and the heavier seeds will fall back into the bowl. You will need to experiment with how far away from the fan you need to stand with each batch of seeds so that the seeds are not getting blown away also.

You should test the dryness of seeds before storage. With larger seeds smash them with a hammer. If they easily shatter into pieces then they are dry enough. If they just get smooshed then they need to dry longer.

When your seeds are dry enough put them in a glass jar and slide the index card inside.

Once the seeds are dry store them in air tight containers, like glass jars in a cool dry place. Be sure to label the seeds with the variety and the year the seed was saved. Seeds from the same type of plant often look very similar to each other. For instance there is very little difference in appearance between broccoli and cabbage seed.Some seeds loose their ability to sprout in less than 2-3 years. Other types of plants may continue to sprout 50% or more of their seeds when they are 5 years or older.

An ordinary hybrid plant is a plant where each parent is of a particular true breeding variety. Hybrids can be an advantage, especially with those plants that suffer from inbreeding depression. The first generation of seeds planted will usually be vigorous and uniform. The disadvantage is that if you save the seed from that first generation and plant them, then you will have a bunch of mongrels. Every one will be different, some will be like one of the original parents and some like the other parent, with some in between and some like neither parent. This is how new varieties come into being in traditional plant breeding. The breeder will select those plants that are most like the ideal they have in mind and breed them together. Then they do it again in the next generation. They continue to do this until they have a true breeding variety.

Open pollinated plants or non-hybrids refers to plant varieties that breed true without help from the breeder (other than to insure that there are no other varieties planted too close that would contaminate them). These are plants from which you can save seed generation after generation and they will be the same variety.

Heirloom plants are those open pollinated varieties that have stood the test of time. These are the varieties that farmers and gardeners saved seed from each year because the variety was especially good for something. They might have the best taste for fresh eating, or baking or they would keep in the root cellar all winter. Thousands of fruit and vegetable varieties have been lost over the years because they have been dropped by the seed salesmen in favor of hybrids. That is because the hybrids must be bought new each growing season so the salesman makes more money. They don't make much money from seeds that anyone can save year after year for themselves.

Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO's for short are a new phenomenon. In this case in a laboratory scientists are taking some genes from one kind of plant, animal, fish or insect and using a virus are shooting those genes into another organism. While their motives are laudable, to provide more food at less cost, the method is very questionable. In some cases they are inserting the genes of a bacteria which kills caterpillars into corn plants. The corn plant then replicates the poison the bacteria makes to kill the caterpillars that feed on it. Sounds good, doesn't it? Well there are some problems with this. Animals that eat the corn are then ingesting the poison. Because the ability to make the poison is now in the DNA of the food the bacteria in the animals gut gets in on the act. There is some evidence that the gut bacteria are now picking up and replicating the DNA for the poison!

In other cases fish genes are inserted into things like strawberry plants to make them more cold resistant. But what if the person eating the strawberries is allergic to fish? They could die of the allergic reaction! Some plants are modified so they will not die if certain weedkillers are sprayed on them. This was touted as a way to reduce the use of weedkillers and to reduce the expense to the farmer. In reality this has not happened. Farmers are now actually spraying MORE weed killer on their crops and now there are weeds that resistant to the weedkiller and don't die when it is sprayed on them.