Vegetable gardening and home canning have had a resurgence, so it was only a matter of time before seed saving became the next new trend (of course, it’s not really new at all). Seed saving is really easy, at least for certain types of veggies. Right now all the arugula plants that I let go to seed are now presenting me with their easy-to-open seed pods:
I’ll just need to pop open the dried pods into a little envelope and I’ll have all the arugula seeds I need for my fall crop and beyond. Likewise with any string beans I let dry on the vine, either accidentally or on purpose. Cilantro seeds, aka coriander, are even easier to harvest. Just let the cilantro plant go to seed and dry out, and then pull the little balls off the seed stalk. I’ve also had great success saving tomato and pepper seeds by just letting some of the fruits dry out on the vine for a few months (or even over the winter) and then prying the seeds out of the leathery remains. Maybe not the most regimented way to do seed saving, but it works.
There’s also the method of just letting the seeds/fruit/pods fall into the soil and sprout up as volunteers the next year. One of my more robust-looking tomato plants this year is a volunteer that probably came from a red or orange cherry tomato I had planted in that corner last year. This year’s plant could have some genetic problems if it’s the parent were from an F1 hybrid – the offspring of hybrids can turn out a bit wonky. But I like to hope for the best.
If you’d like to learn more about seed saving, I just found out that Ecolocity DC is doing a seed saving workshop later this month.
Seed saving is interesting, but like you said, they have to be kept and properly recorded unless they are the only seeds we saved for the moment. I did that for sunflower, starting with one single plant, I got 35 seeds and after having germinating and growing all of them, I was rewarded with 2015 seeds….Huh, Life is wonderful. ~bangchik
The volunteer cherry tomatoes that come up in my parents’ garden are almost always the best of the season.
We grow heirlooms and this is our first year focusing on saving seed from a lot of them. Some plants we won’t be saving seed from, like the corn, because we can’t grow enough of it to keep the gene pool from becoming a puddle – you need a minimum of 250 plants to save corn seed.
This past winter my husband tossed all of our squash into one spot in the yard. I have no idea how many volunteers are in that spot, but even though we aren’t watering them regularly, they are by far outpacing our “planned” squash.
[...] Seed SavingSave seeds from fruits and flowers that have already finished flowering! About seed saving: http://bit.ly/mk1IV8 [...]