Saving Seeds

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You can shell small amounts of beans by hand. Thresh larger collections by spreading the pods on a clean sheet and whacking them with a rubber hose, broom or flail (Fig. 6). By the way, if your seeds ripen slowly and unevenly, your soil may be short on zinc.

Lima beans, dry beans and soybeans should be treated like snaps. Bumblebees like lima flowers, so the plants are likely to cross-pollinate with other limas. But they won't cross with snaps, peas, soybeans or other related legumes.

Eggplant. This crop self-pollinates but it may also be cross-pollinated by row-hopping insects. If you intend to save seed from more than one variety, grow them at opposite ends of the garden. Leave the fruit on the plant until it has lost its glossy sheen and firmness — well past the point when you'd want to eat it. Eggplant seeds can be scraped and rinsed free of pulp without much difficulty.

Escarole and endive. Spring plantings of these biennials may perform like annuals and go to seed in summer heat. However, the leaf quality is best in fall crops. Keep autumn starts alive till spring by covering them with a deep mulch (applied when crowns are dry) or a portable cold frame. Each small seed fleck has a wispy parachute which you can rub off if you wish when you package the dry seeds.

Lettuce. This self-pollinator goes to seed once the weather turns warm. First the heads elongate. Leaves turn coarse, dull and bitter, as though to protect the reproducing plant from being eaten. Then a seedstalk emerges from the leaf crown and soon bears clusters of small yellow flowers. After two or three weeks, when the blossoms change to tufts of fluff, pull off the down with its attached seeds. One stalk on a large lettuce plant can produce up to 30,000 seeds. (One of the most useful traits for which you can select is late bolting, so always save seed from the last lettuce to go to seed.)

Okra. This usually self-pollinates but will sometimes cross. Let okra pods dry on the plant, but catch them before they shatter (dry and fall), then shell the rounded seeds and let them air-dry for another week or two before packaging. Select for early- and heavy-bearing plants.

Peas. In the tangle of the viny pea row it's hard, if not impossible, to distinguish between separate plants. For this reason, most seed keepers designate a stretch of row for seed production and let all the pods in that section mature. You can expect about one pound of seed from each 15 feet of row. Pods should dry thoroughly before harvest, and even then it's a good idea to pile the pulled vines loosely in a dry, well-ventilated spot to air-dry further before threshing. Regular peas will only rarely cross with sugar peas, and this isn't common enough to concern the home gardener.

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