Saving Seeds for Next Year
Gardeners have been saving seeds from one season to plant the next as long as people have been growing their food. While it may sound challenging and extra work for you at the end of the season, the results are rewarding.
Advantages of Saving Vegetable Seeds for Future Plantings
- Saves you money since you aren’t purchasing new seeds every spring.
- Helps preserve the particular variety you are growing, which is excellent if you are growing heirloom plants.
- Over time, it helps that vegetable variety adapt well to your local climate, increasing yields.
Selecting Which Seeds to Save
When choosing which plants to save seeds from, you want to avoid biennial crops, F1 hybrid varieties, and plants with separate female and male flowers.
- Biennial crops like beets and carrots produce vegetables in the first season and seeds in the second, so you need to keep plants healthy for two years.
- F1 hybrids combine traits of two separate parent plants. These seeds are often infertile, but if they germinate, the resulting vegetables will have different characteristics than the parent plant.
- Plants that produce separate female and male flowers, like many cucurbits and corn, may cross-pollinate and create hybrids instead of keeping the variety pure. Cross-pollination may affect the quality of the seeds produced and the flavor of the vegetables grown.
Always look for the most vigorous plants that have produced the best vegetables. Avoid weak plants or those with unusual-shaped fruit. The goal is to encourage traits you want to see in your crops.
Harvesting Seeds at the Right Time
One of the critical aspects of saving seeds is knowing when to harvest them from plants. You need the seeds to be fully mature, which isn’t always the case when you usually harvest the vegetable for eating.
- Many cucurbits (cucumbers, summer squash, eggplants, zucchini) are harvested and eaten when the fruits are still young, and the seeds haven’t matured. If you want to save seeds, you must leave one or two in the garden to fully mature.
- With peas and beans, you can leave pods on the plant until they start to turn brown and then harvest them.
- For vegetables like tomatoes and peppers, let the veggies ripen fully on the plant, and then harvest them to collect seeds.
Proper Seed Storage
The length of a seed’s viability depends on the plant type and the storage environment. For instance, tomato seeds may be viable longer than five years, but squash seeds are usually only viable for less time.
After collecting your seeds, remove any pulp from around them, and ensure they are correctly dried. Once ready, you should store each type in individual envelopes that are well labeled.
Then put these envelopes in an airtight container and place the container in a dry place, up off the ground.
Putting your seeds in the freezer can extend their viability and help some plants germinate better. Just ensure the seeds are properly dried, and the freezer temperature doesn’t fluctuate wildly. Put the container in the back of the freezer instead of in the door.