Fall is here. The valley is awash with golds and reds. There’s the special crispness in the air that only comes with the changing of the seasons. Our harvests have been coming in and many of us are starting to think of what we will do for the next growing season. One easy and great thing you can do for your garden is to start practicing seed saving. The majority of our society has forgotten the importance of seed saving, but this is not how things have always been. Many English families immigrating to the united states would bring seeds with them. They were so preciouses that they would smuggle them into the country sown into dress hymens, or hat brims. These seeds were important to them. They were part of their heritage. There are many reason why it was so important for these English immigrants to saving their seeds, and these are all great reasons why you should start saving your own seeds as well.
Benefits
There are a number of ways that you can benefit from saving seeds. Probably the biggest benefit is the specialization that you can get from seed saving. Through seasons of seed saving, you can begin to get plants that are best adapted to your growing climate. This is easily done through saving seeds from the strongest healthiest plants from your garden each year.
Another benefit to saving seeds is the financial benefits. Depending on the plant, it is easy to save dozens, if not hundreds of seeds from a single plant, as opposed to buying new seeds each season.
Saving seeds from your garden also helps you to keep higher genetic diversity in the food system as a whole. It limits your dependency on large seed producing companies, and is a more traditional and sustainable gardening practice.
Getting started
Seed saving can be a little bit of an intimidating thing to get into. Like many things with gardening, there are levels of complexity to it, and what you want to get out of it will depend on what you are willing to put into it. I’ll explain some of the basics here, as well as things to consider if you are interested in taking your seed saving to the next level. Regardless of how much experience you have as a gardener, I believe that everyone should try seed saving.
Knowing your plants
The first and most important step to seed saving - at any level - is knowing your plants. Are they hybrids? Open pollinators? Heirlooms? What family and species are they? How do they pollinate? Is this an annual or a biannual plant? These are all important questions to know before saving seeds from you garden. The answer to these questions will also tell you how difficult it will be to keep the seeds from these plants. These questions have to be answered on an individual basis for each plant that you intend to save seeds from. But first, let me break down what these all mean.
Hybrids vs Open pollinators and heirlooms
Understanding whether your plant is a hybrid or an open pollinator is very important when seed saving. The reason for this is that hybrid plants are a mix of two or more plant species, and like mules, these hybrids are often not genetically stable and often cannot reproduce. If you are saving seeds from a hybrid plant, it might be the same plant next season, it may grow into one of the parent plants, or it might be a sterile seed.
Open pollinators which include heirloom can openly breed with other plants, and will always produce a viable seed. As long as you know what the plant is breeding with, you can also know what kind of plant your seed will be grow to be. Heirloom varieties are just specialized breeds of plants.
What Family, Genus, and species is the plant.
It is important to know what family, genus, and species your plant is. This is important to know because plants of the same family can cross-pollinate to produce unwanted hybrids. It is also important to know what “weedy” cousins are in the same family, because this can also cause unforeseen cross breeding. An example of this is carrots and Queen Anne’s lace. Queen Anne’s lace can be found all over the Gunnison Valley, and if it mixes with your carrots, it can produce a bitter and woody cross breed that will disappoint you as soon as you try to bite into it.
How Do Your Plants Pollinate
Understanding how your plants pollinate is a key factor in ensuring that there is not any cross breeding between plants in your garden. Figure out whether you are working with a self-pollinating plant, out-crossers, or diacious out-crosser. I’ll get into this more later.
Annual vs Biannual
Many of the plants we grow in our gardens are annuals. We grow them because we can harvest them the same season, but many of these plants are actually biannual in their whole life cycle. We think of them as annuals because the part that we want to eat develops in the first half of their life cycle. Some bi-annuals include carrots, beets, chard, rutabaga, cabbage, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale, brassicas.
Just Getting Started
As I mentioned above, seed saving, like many things in your garden, can be as easy or complicated as you want to make it. It all depends on your goals. If you are just starting, or have a little bit of experience under your belt with this, here are my recommendations.
Check to see if you are saving plants from a hybrid or an open pollinated plant. I would recommend sticking to open pollinators, because it can be discouraging to go through all of the effort of saving seeds, only to learn the next year that they are not fertile.
Stick to self-pollinating plants. Self-pollinating plants are the easiest plants to save seeds from, because they most likely have not crossbred with anything. This is not a guarantee that they haven’t crossbred, but they will most likely be breeding true. Self-pollinating plants have a complete flower which means that they have a pistil and anther, or the female and male parts of the flower. Most self-pollinating flowers will have a closed section, like with tomato flowers. Note how the center is closed off. This is to insure that cross pollination doesn’t happen. Some common self-pollinating veggies are legumes and tomatoes.
Stick to annuals such as Beans, squash, tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, peas, radishes, spinach.
More Experienced Seed Saving
If you have some experience with seed saving, and you are looking to start saving seeds from a larger variety of plants, here are some things that I would recommend.
Branch away from self-pollinators. If you are feeling confident about saving your pea and tomato seeds, try branching into some outcrossers such as squash. With outcrosses we need to start asking ourselves more questions about our plants and our gardens. Since we are now opening up the possibility of cross-pollination, we need to learn more about the plants and pollinators around us and utilize some isolation techniques.
Understanding the family, genus, and species of the plants around you can help you understand what kind of isolation you should be doing. Be careful, because the common names for plants can sometimes be misleading.
It is also important that we understand how our plants are being pollinated, and what is pollinating them. If they are being pollinated by the wind, then we are going to need something to cover the flowers that won’t allow airborne pollen through. Something like a paper bag tied around the flower. If our plants are already being pollinated, then we only need to keep the insects out.
Understanding both of these things will help us decide which isolation technique will be best for our plants. The easiest way to avoid this is to only plant one species in our gardens. Instead of three different kind of zucchini, maybe settle on just one zucchini. If you are wanting more diversity in your garden, you are going to have to isolate your plants. There are two main ways to do this: timing, and isolation cages.
Timing.
If you know that your plant flowers at a very specific time in its life, you can stagger your planting so that your varieties are not all flowering at the same time. This is a difficult technique for us in the Gunnison valley considering how short our growing season is.
Isolation cadges
Isolation cages are used to limit the access of pollinators to the flowers on the plants. The isolation cages are kept around the plants until they are ready to pollinate. Once they are ready to pollinate, you open up the cages for one species to pollinate each other, and close this cage before you open the cages of another species.
Population size.
Plants, just like anything, require genetic diversity. This can be problematic if you are saving seeds from a small population of plants in your garden. You won’t notice the signs of inbreeding for a couple years, but if this is something that you are going to get into, you should look into the needs of the population size to ensure genetic diversity. This varies for each plant.
Biannuals
If you are up for the challenge, you can always try biannual. Biannuals require a cold season to reach the level of maturity where they will produce seeds. This can be difficult in the Gunnison valley. The two main techniques for overwintering plants in harsh conditions are to leave them covered in the ground, or to store them in a root cellar. Overwintering plants in the ground can be risky because of the cold outdoor temperatures, but over wintering them in a root cellar is difficult to ensure that the plant stays alive through the transplants. If you are doing this with one or two plants, it can be easy to move them to a large pot and over winter them with a grow light in a garage. It is important that they stay in a cooler environment to ensure that they develop seeds. If they stay too warm over the winter, they will not move on to this phase of their life. Biannual include carrots, beets, chard, rutabaga, cabbage, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, kale, and brassicas (need to get cold before they can go to seed).
Storage/ prep of your seeds.
Knowing how to get the seeds from your plants is only half of the process. Now that you have your seeds, you need to know how to store them. For this process, it is important to remember that a seed is a living thing, and though it doesn’t have terribly complicated needs, it does have some needs. The first thing to figure out is whether your seeds need to go through a fermentation or not.
Fermentation
Fermentation is done with seeds from fruits. There are two important things that this simulates for the plant. Many fruit plant seeds have evolved to germinate in the rotting, decomposing fruit. Fermenting the seeds simulates this decomposition and the microbes in the ferment help to kill any bacterial infections that the seed might have on its surface. Fermenting seeds is actually much easier than it seems.
The first step is to remove the seeds from the fruit.
Once the seeds are removed, put them in a small container and fill it with water. Somewhere between 100% - 200% by volume will do. It is not an exact science, you just want to make sure that it is not too much water. If you dilute it too much, this will stop the fermentation process.
Cover the lid of the container with either cheese cloth or a t-shit. You want to make sure that there is still air flow into the container, but no bugs can get in.
Ferment for about a week
Once the week is over, there should be a small layer of mold on top of the water, something resembling a scoby. This is a good sign.
Pour out the seeds at this point. You want to discard the mold on top, as well as any floating seeds. Floating seeds are bad seeds that won’t germinate. Next, be sure to thoroughly wash off the seeds.
Be sure to dry the seeds quickly. High temperature and humidity will make the seeds germinate or mold. Do not dry on paper, cloth, or non-ridged plastic as they will stick. Do not dry in temperatures over 95˚ since this will cause damage to the seeds (don’t dry them in the oven, no matter how low the oven setting is). From here, the seeds are ready to store.
Storing
These are the steps that you should do for storing the seeds whether you needed to ferment them or not. The most important thing with storing seeds is for them to be dry. If they are not fruiting plants, you want to let the seeds dry as much as possible on the plant, but once you harvest them, you will probably need to dry them more. Seeds need to contain less than 8% moisture in them, as this will insure that no microbes will grow in them. The easiest way to check to see if a seed is dry enough, is to see if it will bend at all. If you can bend or indent a seed, it still has too much moisture. Once they are dry enough, they will crack rather than bend.
The easiest way to dry out your seeds is to use silica beads (like the ones that you get with beef jerky). Place the seeds with an equal amount of silica into an airtight jar. You want to make sure there is a barrier between the silica and the seeds, so either leave the silica in the packets, or put the seeds in a paper envelope. After a week, the seeds should be dry enough. Take them out and check them to see if they break or bend. If they are dry enough, transfer them to another airtight container. It is important that this is an airtight container, so that it does not let in moisture. Note that light plastic such as zip-lock bags are not moisture proof. Once you have your seeds in an air tight container, you want to store them in a dry, cool place. Dry is more important than cool, but a good rule of thumb is that the humidity and the temperature added together should not exceed 100. If your seeds are stored in these conditions, they should last for a very long time.
This is a lot to unpack here. If you are new to the world of seed saving, I am hoping that this did not scare you off. Regardless of your experience, I would highly recommend that you try seed saving, even if you do something as simple as harvest some dried peas in a mason jar. Luckily, like everything with our gardens, there is no harm in just trying it out. So get out there and find those dried up plants in your garden and see if there are any seeds in them.
If you are interested in digging deeper into the art of seed saving, here are some amazing resources that you can start diving into.
Resources
Seed to Seed Seed saving and growing techniques for vegetable gardens by Suzanne Ashworth is an amazing book that is a wealth of knowledge about seed saving.