Issue #107 - September/October 1987

Bring new pleasures and superior plants to your garden. and superior plants to your garden.

By Nancy Bubel

Gathering garden seed gives me a feeling of kinship with our ancestors who for centuries depended utterly on home-saved seed. For thousands of years, harvesting seed was a vital, often sacred, ritual. It was not until the early nineteenth century that seeds were packaged for sale in small envelopes and, soon after, sold through mailorder catalogues.

Today, filling out the seed order is a happy duty for the wintered-in gardener. Even so, I never fail to keep and use seeds from certain crops of my own.

Why? First, for quality. There are seeds money can't buy. Good ones. One of my favorite tomatoes, for example, is an extra-meaty Italian variety obtained from a friend, for which I could never buy seed if I let the strain run out.

A home gardener can also create superior cultivars in a back-yard plot. Want bigger fruits or more productive plants? Save seeds from outstanding parents. Want to develop locally adapted strains that will perform better in your particular microclimate? Propagate the seed from your hardiest, most frost-resistant plants.

Second, for fun. Gardeners who enjoy experimenting will find a world of challenge and satisfaction in trying different seed-saving and plant-crossing techniques, in watching subtle changes in the varieties they save and in keeping an eye out for unusually good new developments. It was an observant elderly gardener out for a walk who propagated the now popular Henderson Bush Lima — after discovering a volunteer specimen growing by the road.

Third, for preservation. When a certain old food-plant variety dies out, we've lost a part of the gene pool from which we might have retrieved valuable traits for breeding into new generations. Some hardy varieties of tomatoes, for instance, have been developed by introducing genes from small-fruited, seemingly worthless wild strains that carried genes for hardiness.

Then, too, if you prefer to plant untreated seed, or would like to increase your gardening independence or simply save money, seed saving should be high on your list of skills to learn. And it's not difficult to do. After all, generations of people who had no choice but to be self-reliant managed to keep seeds going with fewer resources and less understanding of the process than we have.

A Bit of Botany

What kinds of seeds should you collect? Eliminate hybrid plants right off the bat. Hybrids are created from two different parents in a special selective (and often intricately mechanical) process unlikely to be duplicated in natural random fertilization. Plants grown from the seeds they produce will not duplicate the good qualities of the original specimens and may, in fact, be greatly inferior. Except for some frankly experimental ventures, seed savers work with open-pollinated (also called standard) varieties. These can be bred true to form by naturally occurring pollination.