Save Your Own Garden-Grown Vegetable Seed

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Even children can have fun collecting garden seed. Uper left: The king family's lakefront garden.

by RICHARD P.KING

Cut your gardening costs! Become more food self-sufficient! Create new varieties of vegetables that grow best right in your own (and nobody else's) back yard! And have a lot of fun in the process.

One gardening encyclopedia tells its readers not to save seeds since they're so plentiful and inexpensive that it's not worth the bother. Oh yeah? Take a careful look at your colorful new seed catalogs . . . and then tell me that seeds aren't expensive. Until recently, my yearly order cost between $20 and $25 . . . and I suspect my case is not unusual.

It's not necessary, though, to spend $20 or $10-or even $5.00-each year on seeds. I've found that by saving seeds from my own garden and then planting them the following year, I've been able to cut my annual seed bill in half . . . despite the fact that the few seeds I do buy have risen sharply in price, and despite the fact that I like to experiment with exotic (and generally expensive) plant varieties. If you have a comparatively large garden-or if you can discipline yourself to resist those glowing seed catalog pictures and descriptions (something I haven't entirely been able to do)-you could easily save even more on your seed bill.

This year, then, why not plan to collect, store, and use some of the seed your own garden gives you for free? It isn't hard to do . . . and the rewards (if you ask me) more than justify the small amount of effort involved.

FIRST, A FEW BASICS

Before we get into the actual "here's !sow" of preserving seeds, I'd like to offer a few observations that could save you a good deal of frustration and-possibly - disappointment.

First of all, hybrid varieties (you'll see the word "hybrid" in the seed catalog description or in the vegetable's name) do not always breed true to type. Thus, the seed from last season's mammoth tomatoes may only produce scraggly plants bearing tiny red buttons next season. To avoid this problem, always start with standard (i.e., non-hybrid) vegetable varieties, or else stick with hybrids that you know will breed true.

Second, if you plant two or more standard varieties of corn (or squash or tomatoes, or any of the flowering vegetables) you're likely to have crosspollination by wind and/or insects, leading to seed of uncertain quality. (Of course, the resulting hybrid you end up with may turn out to be of higher quality than the two varieties with which you started . . . but that's highly unlikely.) You can-and shouldminimize crossfertilization by planting only one variety of corn (or squash, tomato, etc.) at a time and locating your plot as far as possible from your neighbor's patch.