ON THE GARDEN PATH by Carolyn Herriot

There are many benefits to saving your own seeds. One is that you are collecting seeds from plants that have adapted to the specific growing conditions in your garden. Another is that you can choose the healthiest plants and select for the traits you want, such as high yields, large fruit, early ripening, great fragrance or wonderful flavour.
By saving your own seeds, you know you are starting with the freshest seeds with the highest germination rate – the best start a plant can hope for. You can also grow plants that may not be commercially available, such as hollyhocks that have been growing in your grandmother’s garden for 50 years.
Instead of paying a lot for a little pinch of seeds, you will have containers full of them for free to share with family and friends. Best of all, you can barter your precious seeds at a community seed show, such as Seedy Saturday, and exchange them for specialty seeds collected by other gardeners.
Most importantly, by saving seeds you are empowering yourself to look out for your future security. In these times of climate change, threats of war and rapid population increase, who knows what’s going to happen to the global food supply? It’s reassuring to know that you can collect the seeds you’ll need to grow your own food.
Saving seeds successfully
As a seed saver, you participate in the selection process to encourage those qualities in a plant you most value. Choose flowers for beauty, colour or fragrance. For vegetables, traits such as early ripening, disease resistance, high yields, size and good flavour are all important. Of course, it always makes sense to select seeds from the healthiest and best-performing plants in the garden. These seeds will grow plants displaying the greatest vigour.
Here are a few basics about saving seeds:
1) Choose open-pollinated rather than hybrid seeds to guarantee that you get the same plant year after year. Hybrids result from crossing two distantly related parent plants. If you save seeds of hybrids, the plants will not grow true in the next generation. The resulting plant may revert to characteristics from one or the other of the parent plants or display an undesirable mix of both. Species of plants that have not been hybridized will reproduce to the original plant. Open-pollinated vegetables will grow into the same vegetable as the parent plant as long as cross-pollination with a different variety of the same species has not occurred.
2) Determine whether plants are self-pollinating or cross-pollinating: Plants such as tomatoes, peppers, beans, lettuce and peas have “perfect flowers,” which means their flowers hold both male and female parts so they can be pollinated without the assistance of bees, insects or the wind to carry the pollen. This allows the gardener to grow different varieties in close proximity to one another.
3) Use isolation distances to be sure accidental crossing does not occur: Different tomato varieties should be separated by a distance of six feet (30 feet if they are heritage potato-leaf varieties). Different varieties of lettuce should be 10 feet apart. Bush beans need to be separated by 10 feet, and pole beans by 30 feet. These are all self-pollinating vegetables.
Many plants, such as squash, have “imperfect flowers,” which means each plant has separate male and female flowers. In this case, the gardener must take further isolation distances into account when planting. Squash needs to be isolated by a quarter of a mile to prevent insects spreading pollen from the male flowers of one variety to the female flowers of another variety. If you’ve ever had an unidentified squash volunteer in your garden, it was the result of cross pollination between varieties of squash grown there the previous year.
Biennial crops, such as beets, carrots and cabbages, produce their edible crop in the first year and set seed the following season. These crops need isolation distances of a quarter of a mile to prevent cross-pollination, as do brassicas such as broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, collards, kale and kohlrabi. Get to know your isolation distances for saving vegetable seeds or you will be harvesting a future crop of mutant veggies.
4) Collect seeds before they disperse naturally: The timing for seed collection is critical; observation is the key to success. Wait until the seed is ripe enough for collection, but don’t wait until the seeds have scattered all over the garden or the birds have swooped in and eaten them.
5) Label seeds: If you’ve ever found an envelope of seeds and wondered what they were or how old they were, you will know how important labelling is. For everything you collect, identify the species and variety, record any special features and record data, such as the place and date the seeds were collected.
6) Dry seeds thoroughly: I’ll never forget my friend’s dismay at discovering her container of precious hollyhock seeds had gone mouldy. Drying seeds thoroughly is critical before storing them in sealed containers or envelopes. The larger the seeds, the longer they need to dry properly. I spread mine out on ceramic plates and let them dry in a warm area away from direct sunlight. I allow two weeks or more for drying.
7) Clean seeds before storing: Remove the chaff and other debris by sieving seeds through screens of different sized mesh. Winnow seeds in a light breeze to remove any tiny particles, weed seeds or dust. I use a hairdryer on a low, cold setting for this. Tomatoes are cleaned by a wet process, where they undergo a fermentation process for a few days, which also eliminates seed-borne pathogens. Melons, squashes, cucumbers and tomatillos are also cleaned using water, allowing dead seeds to float to the surface and good seeds to sink to the bottom.
Store seeds in a cool dark area, away from fluctuations in light and moisture: The ideal temperature for storage is 55°F (13° C). Paper envelopes or airtight containers, such as yogurt tubs, work fine for seed storage. Keeping seeds in an airtight, waterproof container in the fridge prolongs seed life – longer if you freeze them.
This may sound like a lot of preparation, but you will discover that saving seeds is relatively straightforward. The satisfaction of taking out containers of your own seeds in spring to begin a new cycle of growth will more than compensate for your efforts the previous year.

From A Year on the Garden Path: A 52-Week Organic Gardening Guide by Carolyn Herriot. $29.95, Earthfuture Publications, Victoria, BC. Available at Banyen Books, Duthie Books or at (www.earthfuture.com/gardenpath).