I’m an ardent advocate for saving heirloom seeds from your own garden. Letting your garden propagate itself is a step toward self-sufficiency, potentially freeing you from making that annual seed order. It allows you the chance to create progressively more site-adapted seeds with every passing generation. It can even be a part of creating local food security if folks in the same community grow and share seeds among each other freely.
Can I Save Seeds for Next Year?
Now, it sounds glamorous to talk about saving seeds, but it’s another thing entirely to put the messy process into practice. You see, saving seeds isn’t something you just decide to do as a weekend project – it sometimes requires more than a year to get from start to finish. Chunks of your garden will be rendered “out of commission” for food production while you wait for overwintered biennial seedpods to ripen. Your garden will never be picture-perfect, because seed stalks are often gangly, awkward, and floppy shapes that look more like a squiggle than something from a garden magazine. And most of all, if you’re serious about saving seeds, you’ll have to plan.
I’m someone who almost always has another batch of seeds to sort and a garden that’s never photogenic. But if you’re ready to plan your own seed garden, here are my tips to help you along the way.
Knowing the Plants You Grow
The first step is knowing the plants you’re working with – their idiosyncrasies, family ties, and life cycles. This will, very often, determine where you plant them in the first place. So, let’s say you want to save seeds from ‘Walking Stick’ kale, ‘Golden Acre’ cabbage, ‘Jimmy Nardello’ pepper, ‘Aleppo’ hot pepper, ‘Cherokee Purple’ and ‘Classic Beefsteak’ tomatoes, ‘Chioggia’ beets, ‘Bright Lights’ Swiss chard, ‘Black Beauty’ zucchini, ‘Kinshi Noodle’ spaghetti squash, and ‘Waltham’ butternut squash.
The kale and cabbage plants are, technically speaking, both the same species (Brassica oleracea) and need to be overwintered before they flower. Furthermore, they’re insect-pollinated, which means they’ll cross-pollinate and make “cabbale” and “kalebage” if you don’t isolate their blossoms from each other through alternate-day bagging: For this, you’ll put the bag on one plant on one day, and then the other plant the next. The pepper plants are also the same species (Capsicum annuum). However, if you keep each cultivar 300 feet apart from the others, there’s little risk of your sweet ‘Jimmy Nardello’ peppers turning spicy from cross-pollination with ‘Aleppo.’ The tomatoes can cross with other tomatoes, but if your different cultivars are at least 35 feet away, you’ll have no worries there. The beets and chard are the same species (Beta vulgaris), and their wind-carried pollen is nearly impossible for the home grower to contain. The best method with those may be to only choose one to save this year (I vote for chard!), and then to save the other next year.
Finally, there are those squash plants. Though they look as dissimilar as can be, zucchini and spaghetti squash are the same species (Cucurbita pepo), and they’ll mix with each other. To get pure seeds from both, you’ll either need to plant them 1/8 mile apart or learn how to hand-pollinate and tape blossoms of selected female flowers. The butternut (C. moschata), however, won’t mess with your efforts to save seeds from the zucchini.
Though all of this might sound like a setup to an agricultural SAT question, planning ahead will become second nature after you’ve saved seeds for a year or two. In the meantime, ample resources are available to the novice, from websites and books to knowledgeable gardening mentors, especially if you happen to live near an active seed library or local seed bank. Check below for more ideas; I’ve also started my own growing guides.
Armed with this knowledge, your next step is to plan where your plants might best fit in your garden plot. It’s a lot easier to erase a word than to try to transplant a 10-foot-long vine!
Select Plants for Success
All of your garden plants will produce seeds if given the chance, but not all plants are the best candidates for good seeds. When you select your seed-makers, choose plants that exhibit the traits you want in successive generations. Look for plants that grow exceptionally well, show healthy foliage, didn’t succumb to diseases, and produce fruit that has the flavor or color you want.
With biennials, this may result in your selected plants being awkwardly placed around the garden – three excellent parsnips here, two there, and five to the left, for example. You have two options here.
On one hand, you can leave your seed plants where they are, plant different plants around them, and just accept a bit of garden disorder. My garden often has beans growing around last year’s cabbages, fall bok choy around maturing zucchini, or seedling peppers starting at the bases of my spring-planted snap peas. On the other hand, you can relocate and consolidate your selected plants – both ensuring they cross-pollinate each other and creating a more pleasing visual. If you choose the second option and have a climate that suits overwintering your seed plants, relocate them well before frost hits.
Mixing, Matching, and Bolting
Once you’ve selected your plants, you may have to do a sort of botanical square dance to deal with all the seeds in the making. Sometimes, you’ll have to use cages with mesh barriers to keep plants from cross-pollinating and mixing, but other times, you can use creative timing to keep strains separate.
I wanted to save two kinds of radishes this year, daikon and ‘Cherry Belle.’ In the past, I’ve planted ‘Cherry Belle’ in spring and daikon in fall, but the daikons left to bolt usually freeze to death. I opted to plant them both in spring this year so I could get seeds from both. I was able to do this by waiting until the daikon began to bolt, and then planting the ‘Cherry Belle’ radishes. The daikon finished flowering right as the ‘Cherry Belle’ began to, which kept them from cross-pollinating.
In another example, I’ve found that my part of Ozark Springs is too hot for bok choy, which bolts before it reaches full size. My fall-planted bok choy grows well but often gets frozen before the seedpods have fully ripened. With that in mind, I grew bok choy in spring specifically to let it bolt and make seed, which let me freely enjoy all of my fall-planted bok choy without worry. I may be accidentally selecting bolt-prone seeds, but I find the potential risk is outweighed by the advantage of being able to save seeds at all.
As you begin to know your plants year after year, you’ll likewise start knowing how to organize their life cycles to your advantage. I heartily recommend you keep a garden journal where you can record your realizations, triumphs, and failures. Through your notes, you may just discover the key to timing success in your garden.
The Long Haul
You’ll be hosting your seed plants in your garden a lot longer than if you were merely growing them for this season’s eating. Even lightning-quick radishes can end up lingering in the garden for months until their seedpods are ripe and dry. This can particularly be true in a drought-prone area, as the stress seems to slow down plant progress. Be patient and make sure the seeds are fully mature before harvest.
However, with plants that are harvested when their fruit is ripe, it’s really easy. Tree fruits and tomatoes are literally ripe for the picking when they’re harvested, which means their seeds are, likewise, ripe for the saving. You can get their seeds and enjoy the fruit.
With plants we typically eat immature, such as zucchini, cucumber, or eggplant, it’s a harder call. Should you allow this strong, healthy zucchini or cucumber plant to grow its first fruit to maturity? That means you’d be allowing the plant to complete its life cycle and shut down production, resulting in fewer of those young, tender treats for your dinner table. On the other hand, if you harvest the first immature fruits for eating and let later ones be your seed bearers, you’ll run the risk of the plant succumbing to drought stress, insect pressure, or freezing temperatures before the seeds are ready. I know no trick for making this judgment call – only experience will tell you what’s right to do in your climate. Again, your garden journal will come in handy here.
The result of all of this planting, planning, and waiting is that you’ll get to enjoy multigenerational plants growing, sprawling, flowering, and sprouting, full of the wonderful chaos of plants doing their thing. You may feel like you’re juggling a botanical circus, and you’ll have lots of seeds to thresh, ferment, dry, and sort once they’re done, but the resulting self-reliance will be worth it.
Get Started with Seed Saving
Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange’s Growing Guides
Wren Everett and her husband live off-grid in the Ozarks in a home they built with their own hands. They try to grow as much of their own food as possible and rediscover the old skills of self-sufficiency.
