A Few Tips on Saving Seeds

Saving garden seeds at the end of each growing season can be a great cost saving measure and a way to duplicate your favorite plants from last year’s harvest. Heirloom plants are available to us now because people have saved seeds for domestic use through many many years of sustenance farming.

Like many others, I’d like to cut down on some of my expenses and the idea of saving and swapping seeds from year to year as a way of doing this is appealing. Saving your own seeds increases your self-sufficiency; and they make great gifts! Saving heirloom seeds and the practice of seed saving is also a fun way to introduce children to gardening.

In this video, organic gardener Daniel Botkin gives some tips and suggestions on saving heirloom seeds.

There are a few general tips you should follow to increase your success saving seeds:

• Avoid collecting seeds from hybrids. If you don’t know if a plant is a hybrid, you can still collect and save seed, but just be aware you may not get the same plant from these seeds.
• When possible, allow the seeds to dry naturally on the plant.
• For bean and pea plants allow the pods to ripen fully on the plant, then remove the pods and pop out the seeds.
• Select the plants that have the best vegetative or fruit characteristics, not necessarily those that produce the most seeds.
• Use netting to keep out unwanted insects that may damage seeds, and birds that may eat them.
• Before you store your seeds, make sure that you have thoroughly dried them.
• Dry your seeds in thin layers on screens, or on nylon mesh screen if seeds are tiny. General rule is if you can bend your seed then it still has too much moisture in it and can rupture and die if frozen.
• When you remove the seeds from the freezer, allow them to come up to room temperature before handling for planting or sowing.

While some vegetable seeds can remain viable in storage for as long as 15 years or more, and grains may remain viable much longer under stable conditions, every year in storage will decrease the amount of seed that will germinate.  Once the seeds are dried / processed and are ready to package for the winter, consider buying desiccant packs for your storage containers to keep your seeds dry.

Of course I’ve barely scrapped the surface here, there are many more considerations (and work) to saving seeds and I’m still learning! Share your experience and stories on saving seeds by posting below and we can all learn from each other.