Grow Your Own Seeds

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Today, good reasons remain to continue saving seed of your own best garden vegetables. Open-pollinated pre-1970's vegetable varieties are fast disappearing from the commercial marketplace, pushed out by the "latest and greatest" new hybrids. Saving and sharing seed of such older varieties helps preserve their rich genetic heritage for farmers and gardeners of the future, and allows you to rub shoul ders with your ancestors. And if these varieties are to be saved, home gardeners will have to do it; most of the professionals are headed another way.

Many home gardeners feel a sense of empowerment and satisfaction when they rely on their seed-saving abilities—one of the oldest basic human skills—to build up personal seed stocks as they strive for self-sufficiency. And with many seeds now costing $2 or more per packet, saving some of your own also can save you cold hard cash.

Seed saving also helps you develop a better working knowledge of your crops and even improve varieties to meet specific contemporary needs or growing conditions. (For examples of how you can create exciting new varieties, see "Making Good Seeds Better," Page 57.)

Three basic factors you need to consider when you want to save seed from a particular crop: 1) establishing the right separation distance to keep seed plants from crossing with other varieties of the same species; 2) correct population size - saving seed from more than just a few plants to maintain genetic diversity; and 3) harvesting when seed is mature, then cleaning and drying it properly. The chart on Pages 60 and 61 gives these details on seven easy-to-save crops.

Beans, peas and Southern peas are easy to save because they make harvestable seeds in the pods being produced as the vegetable crop. All you need to do is to let the pods fully mature on the plant in order to gather seeds. Tomatoes also are an easy beginning crop; they bear mature seeds as a natural consequence of producing ripe fruit.

These four crops and lettuce also are naturally self-pollinated, which means each plant is pollinated primarily from its own pollen, making it much easier to maintain distinct varieties. Such a seed crop plant is called a "selfer." In contrast, other common crops, including corn, squash, carrots and beets, are called "crossers" because before they can produce seeds, one plant usually is cross-pollinated with pollen carried by wind or insects from a different plant.

GROWING A SEED CROP

To properly manage selfers and crossers, seed savers need to know the minimum distance that each variety should be from any other sexually compatible ("crossable") varieties growing nearby. Called "isolation distance," this spacing depends on whether the variety is self-pollinated or cross-pollinated.

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