Saving Garden Seeds

Judging from the number of published books on the subject, you might get the impression that saving and storing seeds from crops growing in your garden is a complicated affair. That’s certainly the impression I once had. But over the years I began saving a few seeds from things I especially like: a flavorful tomato, a prolific melon, some beautiful French marigolds. Pretty soon saving garden seeds became a habit. It’s easy. It’s fun. And it’s important.

Why bother saving seeds at all, when you can buy them in just about any store?

Why Save Seed

Not so fast! The seeds sold in colorful packets at the corner store are usually not the best quality. Big seed companies don’t consider backyard gardeners to be in the same “critical market” category as farmers and market gardeners. Seeds packaged for these growers are of much higher quality, but they are usually sold in bulk.

Our local feed-and-seed store repackages bulk seeds into smaller quantities for backyard gardeners. The plain white envelopes don’t have pretty pictures on the front. But the seeds produce more reliably than seeds sold in picture-perfect packets. You can find other reliable sources online using a search phrase such as “best sources for garden seeds.” When I buy seeds, I get most of them from High Mowing Organic Seeds.

Another reason to save seeds from the varieties you like is that the available seed selection gets slimmer every year. Big industrial companies keep buying out the small independent seed sources and discontinuing some of our favorites. That happened to me with Gusto bell peppers, among other things.

Open pollinated varieties are among the first to disappear. Big Ag wants you to come back every year to buy their hybrid seeds. But the same hybrid variety from the same source may not grow exactly the same vegetable every time.

Selecting Seeds to Save

Plants you grow from seeds saved from your own garden also change over time. So you need to carefully select which plants you save seeds from. As a result, your future plants will be better adapted to local growing conditions than plants grown from seeds shipped from outside your area. Save seeds only from healthy, vigorous plants that produce a good yield of quality fruits or flowers. Your garden will grow better each year.

The ideal plants to save seeds from are open-pollinated (OP) varieties. OP plants are naturally pollinated by wind or insects, and their seeds produce seedlings similar to the parent plants. By contrast, hybrid (F1) seeds are created when plant breeders cross two compatible plants to combine the best features of both into one plant.

Seed catalogs sometimes, but not always, indicate OP varieties by including the letters “OP” following the variety name. By law hybrid seeds must be labeled as “hybrid” or “F1”. Thus, any variety not specifically identified as hybrid or F1 is open-pollinated, even if it is not so labeled.

Saving Hybrid Seeds

Seeds saved from hybrid plants may revert to one or the other parent plant. But not always. When seeds for our favorite F1 cucumber became unavailable, I saved some seeds from one of the cucumbers growing in our garden. The next year I sowed some of the original seeds and some of the saved seeds. At harvest time I could not see any difference between the quality or quantity of the cucumbers they produced. When you save seed from hybrid plants, you may not always get what you expect. But, at least in my experience, you could be pleasantly surprised.

Hybrid seeds are not the same as genetically modified (GM) or genetically engineered (GE) seeds. GE seeds come from plants that are genetically altered using such molecular genetic techniques as gene cloning and protein engineering. The safety of GM produce is highly controversial, and at any rate saving seeds from patented GM plants is illegal. Buy seed from companies that have signed the “safe seed pledge” stating they will not knowingly sell GM seeds.

People may warn you against saving garden seeds from supermarket produce, because they are most likely hybrid. Well, one year I bought a delicious cantaloupe at the supermarket. The next year fantastic volunteer cantaloupes sprouted up near our compost pile. I saved some of the seeds and they grew to produce luscious cantaloupes. I’ve been growing and saving seed from that line for ten years and they’re still just as good as ever.

So this year when you grow a garden, pay attention to the quality of each plant. At harvest time, be sure to save seeds from the best plants for next year’s garden.