Self-Sufficiency Through Seed Saving

      Since the advent of COVID-19, I’ve written a few articles about stocking up and self-sufficiency through gardening.  Yet another way to ensure that in the future you will have food, or at least the potential for food, is through saving seeds from this year’s garden.  As a bonus, you’ll also avoid the cost of buying new seed.

      Some seeds are easy to save.  You just wait for them to dry on the plant and collect them.  These easy-savers include peas, beans, edamame, and many herbs and flowers.

      Other seeds take a little more effort to save.  Plants like tomato, squash, cucumber and eggplant, whose seeds are surrounded by moist flesh, germinate better and are more resistant to seed diseases if they ferment for a few days after they are collected but before they are dried.  Scrape the flesh and seeds into a pint jar or other glass container, add about half the volume of water and swirl it a bit.  Cover the container and let it sit for three or four days.  When mold begins to grow on the mixture, remove the seeds that have sunk to the bottom of the container to save and discard the rest.  Rinse the good seeds and spread them to dry on a paper plate. 

      All dried seeds should be stored over winter in a cool, dry place.  The refrigerator is ideal.

      When collecting seed, choose from the biggest, best, healthiest vegetables.  If you have more than one plant, take seeds from several.  In the case of tomatoes and squash, you’ll probably end up with many more seeds than you’ll need next spring, so choose the largest, healthiest looking seeds to plant.

      Some seeds don’t even need to be collected if you don’t mind where the plants grow the following year.  Radishes, arugula, bok choy, borage, cilantro, dill, lettuce and tomatoes are some that reliably self-seed.

      Some vegetables are biennial plants and do not go to seed until their second year so you need to leave them in the garden over winter.  Beets, brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, kale, leeks, onions, parsley and parsnips fall into this category.

      There are a couple caveats to seed saving.  First, seeds from hybrid plants do not come true to their parents and shouldn’t be saved.  For example, you wouldn’t save seeds from the Big Beef Hybrid tomato or the Giant Marconi Hybrid pepper, but you could save seeds from the Mortgage Lifter tomato and the Beaver Dam pepper, both of which are open-pollinated.  Hybrid plants usually have the word “hybrid” or “F1” in their names.

      The second caution is that seeds of the same species, but of different varieties, need to be separated when they are planted so that they don’t cross pollinate.  Different plant species require various separation distances.  For example, tomatoes need be only 10’ apart while beans require 150’ and squash a whopping 500’. 

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