How To Save Vegetable Seeds For Next Year

[TTL News 308]

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Many of the vegetables we grow in our gardens produce seeds, which, if harvested and stored correctly, have the potential to grace us with free plants. And late summer is the perfect time to start collecting them. 

A few notes: Make sure the plants from which you’re collecting seeds are heirloom, or open-pollinated, varieties. These are plants in their original forms whose seeds will produce plants with the same qualities as their parent.

Hybridized varieties, on the other hand, are created by breeding two or more different types to capture the best qualities of each. Attempting to grow seeds collected from hybrids will yield a harvest of disappointment, as the resulting plants will not have the expected attributes but rather carry the traits of only one of the parents -- and there’s no way to know what that will be. For this reason, it’s best not to grow seeds from supermarket produce.

Many plants become cross-pollinated in the garden when pollinators, other insects, animals and wind transfer pollen from one plant to another. To ensure the seeds you collect will grow into plants that match their parent, different varieties of the same crop should be kept anywhere from 100 feet to a mile apart, depending on climate, weather and other variables. This is often impractical, if not impossible, in the home garden.

To avoid cross-pollination surprises, plant only one variety of the category of plants from which you plan to harvest seeds. If you want to save tomato seeds, for example, grow only one type of tomato in your garden.

 

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[Chris 2,161]

I rarely use all the seeds I buy from one year to the next. So I haven't bothered with this, because I have some already. Usually they're good for a couple years. 

I still have some of the heirloom seeds I bought off that guy a couple years ago. Those may be worth saving.