Another gardening season is upon us. This is my favourite time of the year: Pouring over seed catalogues, planning and scheming what to plant and where to plant it. If you’re a seed saver, this is also the time of year to start planning what type of seeds to save for next year. I first started saving seeds about four years ago. I had been gardening for a few years and I came across a book by Salt Spring Seeds owner Dan Jason called Saving Seeds As If Our lives Depended On It. The title of the book alone inspired me to start saving my own seeds. I also learned a lot about plant biology in the process.
Saving seeds is a relatively simple process but there are some important facts to know that will help produce viable seeds. When choosing seeds to save, you’ll need to get open-pollinated seeds (op).
These plants will remain true to type. F1 hybrid seed varieties are the result of cross-pollinating between one or many plants and will not remain true to type if saved over time.
There are two types of plants you can save seeds from: Self-pollinated and cross-pollinated. Self-pollinated plants are pollinated successfully within one flower and rarely cross other varieties. Lettuce, beans, peas, tomatoes, peppers, and herbs are all self-pollinating. Cross-pollinated seeds however need two flowers for pollination to occur and will cross with other varieties of the same species. For example, if your cabbage and broccoli (both members of the brassica family) flower at the same time, the seeds will produce few plants that look like the parent plants. You can eliminate these problems by planting them far away from each other, staggering plantings or by allowing only one variety to flower at a time.
Most seeds can be successfully harvested when the vegetables have passed the best time for eating. If the vegetable looks good enough to eat, it’s usually ready for harvesting seeds. Only harvest seed from healthy good-looking produce. This ensures the seeds you harvest and the plants you grow next year will be more likely to produce good results. It is easier to harvest seeds from some vegetable plants compared to others.
There are some great books at the library that can fill in the gaps for anything I’ve missed. The Seed Garden: The art and Practice of Seed Saving by Micaela Colley and Jared Zystro breaks down each species of plant and gives you step by step instructions on how to grow and harvest seeds. The Manual of Seed Saving, by Andrea Heistinger and The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds, by Robert Gough and Cheryl Moore-Gough are also great resources as well.
Hopefully all of this doesn’t sound too daunting. It’s actually quite easy and super satisfying to grow your own produce from seeds that you’ve saved. Once you’ve successfully saved your seeds, bring them down to the Summerland Seed Library to share with your community.
Crystal Fletcher is an enthusiastic backyard gardener and an Auxiliary Assistant Community Librarian at the Summerland Branch.
