Build a firm foundation of seed saving knowledge with this introductory, 101 style video. Bevin Cohen of Small House Farm gives an overview of how to save seeds for next year. Learn the difference between heirloom, hybrid and gmo seeds, gather the equipment you’ll need for successful seed harvesting and discover why this traditional practice is still so valuable today.
Transcript: How to Save Seeds
(00:00:21) In this video, we’re going to be covering some seed-saving basics. We’re going to talk about things like terminology, equipment needs, that sort of thing to set up a good foundation so you can succeed in your practice as a seed saver. Hello, friends. I’m Bevin Cohen, owner of Small House Farm and the author of the book “Saving Our Seeds: the Practice and Philosophy”. Now, the first thing that we’re gonna cover really is.
Why do we want to save seeds?
(00:00:41) We live in a pretty convenient time. Everybody’s got a cell phone in their pocket and we have access to seeds from all over the world.
(00:00:47) With very little effort can we order seeds online and have all sorts of exotic, beautiful and delicious things delivered right to our door. So in this time of modern convenience, why is the ancient art of seed-saving so important? I think that we need to cover that first. So first of course, community right. And that’s the topic that we’re going to cover throughout this entire series of videos is the importance of community and how saving seeds helps enhance the communities that we live in. It also gives us a local and reproducible food supply, right? That’s crucial. When we save our seeds in our communities, the food that we grow from that seeds is local. Food is only as local as the seed that it grows from.
(00:01:24) We also get improved flavors and varieties, right? You only say the seeds from the tastiest tomatoes. You only say the seeds from the juiciest melons, or the earliest peppers, whatever it may be. When you choose these traits in your garden, when you select for these traits and save those seeds, your garden will continue to give you these traits year after year, right? So in essence, as a seed-saver, we’re plant breeders.
(00:01:47) Saving and sharing our seeds also gives us the ability to maintain a seed bank. Right now, we’re all familiar with Svalbard [Global Seed Vault], the Doomsday vault, and that sort of thing, and we’ll talk about that in another video, certainly. But when we save and share our seeds amongst our communities, we create in essence a local seed bank right here in our own communities — localized, locally adapted seeds that we could save and share and grow right in our own communities.
(00:02:11) Saving sharing our seeds also gives us self-reliance, right? Not necessarily as individuals, but as a community.
(00:02:20) When we save and share our seeds, we also celebrate diversity, right? Look at this picture. Look at these beans. Oh, my gosh, this is absolutely beautiful. Look at all the different sizes and the shapes and the colors. This is Phaseolus vulgaris, right? The common bean. I don’t think it’s so common. Look how beautiful that is. When we save the share of seeds we do our part to save and celebrate diversity just like this.
(00:02:41) And how about local adaptation, right? And when we save our seeds, we encourage local adaptation of our plant varieties, which prepares us for changes in our climate and our weather.
(00:02:51) Pest and weed pressures, right? As the climate changes, our pest pressures are also going to change and we need to be able to adapt to that. We need to be prepared for these changes that are coming for us. And there’s no better way to prepare than with locally adapted seeds. And that’s what we get every time we save our seeds in our gardens.
(00:03:07) We also have the opportunity for preference selection. Like I mentioned already, we only save the seeds from the best producing produce. We only save the seeds from the things that we enjoy. We have that opportunity to choose what we like in our gardens, develop the things that we enjoy, and continue to get that year after year without having to rely on a seed company or anything like that. We can do it right at home in our own gardens.
(00:03:29) And the preservation of history. Now this is when I get the most excited about seeds, right? Every seed that we save has a story inside of it. These seeds have been passed down for hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years, these seeds have been saved. And the songs and the stories and the history of every person that has grown and saved that seed is locked inside of that little time capsule. And we become a part of that story every time we grow that seed. Every time we save that seed, every time we share that seed that story continues to grow.
Terminology
(00:04:02) All right, let’s breakdown some terminology. So when we’re talking about seeds throughout these videos, when we’re talking about seeds in your communities, we’re going to use some certain words. And I want to make sure, we can all define them properly. We’re gonna start with these basics. As you can see here on this list: open-pollinated, hybrid, heirloom, organic and genetically modified. Now we don’t necessarily have time in this video to find every single one of these words and have that conversation. Some of these conversations could go on for quite some time, but we’re gonna cover the most important ones.
Open-Pollinated vs Hybrid Seeds
As you can see, open-pollinated and heirloom. What do these two words mean? Let’s get into it. Open-pollinated in the most basic sense is when a plant in your garden is left to pollinate openly with the plants around it as nature intends.
(00:04:41) And the seeds in these fruits will then come back true to the maternal plant. Now what does this mean? Let’s break that down a little bit more. I like Amish paste tomatoes, so I grow Amish paste tomatoes in my garden. I save those seeds. It’s open-pollinated variety. I know that when I plant those seeds the next year I’m going to get Amish paste tomatoes, right? Real simple stuff.
Now this is converse to the hybrid, the second thing on our list here. Now, what is a hybrid? A hybrid is when you take two plants of the same species — and that’s key, of the same species — we cross pollinate these two plants to produce the hybrid, right? It’s called the F1. The first generation hybrid.
(00:05:14) Now when we save the seeds from the F1 first generation hybrid and plant them again the next year, it produces what is known as the F2, right? Second generation. And inside of that F2 those fruits that that will produce is every potential genetic expression that could have come from the first initial cross.
(00:05:30) What does that mean? We don’t know what we’re going to produce. It could be like the maternal plant or the paternal plant, a long lost cousin. It could be very similar. It could be drastically different. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when we’re saving and sharing our seeds amongst our communities, it’s nice to have that reliability to know what our seeds are going to produce. When we’re trying to grow our own food to survive, or for taking the market, or whatever your case may be, knowing what your seeds are going to produce, that predictability, is very, very important. So as seed savers we want to stick with open-pollinated.
You’ll find it on seed packets labeled quite often as OP. If you’re unsure about that, or if you’re participating in a local seed library, know that your seed libraries work very hard to make sure they’re only sharing open-pollinated seeds.
What are Heirloom Seeds?
(00:06:12) Now my second highlighted word here is heirloom. What does heirloom mean now that word gets tossed around quite often all the time, but the simplest definition in this case is a seed that has been saved and passed down for 50 years or more. Once it’s hit that benchmark that’s considered an heirloom. Does the seed need to be heirloom in order for me to save it? Absolutely not.
(00:06:32) Absolutely not open-pollinated. That’s the key. And there are new open-pollinated varieties being developed every year, right, every year. And those things are delicious. We could save the seeds from them and they’ll come back true. But at heirloom, if somebody’s been saving a seed for 50 years, and sharing it?
(00:06:49) Well, maybe there’s a reason that we want to share it too. You know, maybe it’s a sentimental or historical. Maybe it’s just the taste is bean I’ve ever had. Whatever it may be, if it’s been that important for that long, it’s worth considering saving and sharing those seeds as well.
Importance of Saving Organic Seeds
(00:07:02)Now organic and genetically modified, we’re not going to necessarily get into, but I will touch on this when we talk about organics.
(00:07:10) We know how plants adapt, right? And let’s say just for the sake of the story, that all of you folks that enjoy the mother Earth news fair are going to grow your gardens organically, right? Let’s just say that for the sake of my story here.
(00:07:23) If we start with seeds that we’re growing conventionally, not by organic standards, seeds that have come from plants that were going with synthetic inputs, synthetic pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, synthetic herbicides, whatever it may be, right, these plants have adapted to that type of treatment. It’s conventional treatment. So you take these seeds that have adapted to conventional treatment home to your gardens and you grow them organically.
(00:07:45) They’re not going to produce quite as well as you would like them to because that is not the environment they’ve adapted to. So if you want to grow organically at home, why not start with organically grown seeds? Give yourself a little bit of a head start because you know Mother Nature’s always trying to throw us a curveball, right?
(00:08:02) That’s just my two cents on that topic. Let’s move on.
Annual vs. Biennial Seeds
(00:08:05) All right, here’s some more terminology that we need to understand annual or biennial. So the the plants in our gardens are typically either annuals or biennials, and we need to understand this as seed savers and annual is a plant that will live its entire life cycle, flower, fruit and then seed in the first year that it lives. A biennial needs two years and needs to be overwintered, vernalized in order to trigger that plant to move into the flowering cycle, to then produce fruits and then seeds. We also need to understand pollination. How are our plants being pollinated? In the pollination video that’s a part of this course you’re going to learn all sorts of things about how pollination happens, but we’re going to touch on it briefly right now because it’s important to understand the terminology here, right. So some of our garden plants are self-pollinating, while others are pollinated by wind or insects. What this means is the way that the pollen moves from the male portion of the flowers to the female portion of the flowers in order to fertilize that plant to trigger to then produce its fruits, right. We need to know these things about our garden plant because we need to know how and when and why to get involved in order to be seed savers.
(00:09:06) Here’s a breakdown of a flower so we can kind of see the parts. Here you can see the male parts portion the stamen, as you can see on the right, the anther and the filament those are the pollen shedding portions of the flower. And then on the left is the pistil. This is the pollen-receptive female portion of the flower which contains the ovary of the style and the stigma, and then at the bottom there is where the fruit will come.
(00:09:26) Taking the time to understand these parts of the flowers and how your plants produce is crucial to seed-saving success.
Vegetable Genus and Species
(00:09:35) Now let’s talk about some more terminology: genus and species.
(00:09:39) Understanding the difference between these two words is going to help us in our planning for our gardens to understand the planning. Remember when we talked about a hybrid at the beginning and we talked about plants, two plants of the same species, they’re crossed to create this F1 hybrid. Understanding what species even means is going to help us succeed in our garden planning. Right. So here we’ve got Solanum lycopersicum: tomato.
(00:09:58) Right now the genus is Solanum, right, and there’s a number of plants that we growing our gardens that fall into the same genus. We could say Solanum tuberosum, potato. We could say Solanum lycopersicum, tomato. We could say Solanum melongena, eggplant. Right now, they’re all of the same genus, but these are drastically different species, and we do not have to worry about cross pollination happening between my eggplants and my potatoes or my potatoes and my tomatoes. That just doesn’t happen. But now let’s look at that second word. This is when we get specific.
(00:10:31) With species lycopersicum right? Now, other things that are of the same species, that’s when we have to worry about cross pollination here’s an example. I grow Amish paste tomatoes, right? We’ve already covered that. That is the variety of tomato that I grow. It is of the same species. Solanum Lycopersicum, Amish paste. If I were to go two different varieties of the same species, the likelihood of cross pollination exists and I need to be aware of that as a seed saver, to ensure pure seeds to avoid cross-pollination to make sure the seeds that I get are not hybridized so I can plant them again the next year and they come back true every time.
(00:11:06) Right. We’re going to cover pollination in the pollination video. You’re going to learn all about how different species are pollinated and how to avoid cross pollination and ensure pure seeds.
How to Plan Your Garden for Seed Saving
But let’s keep moving on with this terminology and planning right? So now let’s talk about planning the garden for seed-saving. These are the steps that we want to take to ensure great success in all of our gardens, regardless of the size. So first we want to think about proper spacing. Now when we’re planning out our gardens, we obviously ensure proper spacing for our plants to thrive and grow and produce fruits for us. But we also want to ensure proper spacing for seed production, right?
(00:11:38) Now, a lot of the fruits and vegetables that we eat in our gardens, we eat when they’re immature. They haven’t reached physiological maturity yet, and they have not produced any viable seeds. Some great examples of that would be cucumbers. Um, lettuce, lettuc we eat the leaves at a young stage. Kales, those sorts of things. A lot of these plants, when they move into the reproductive cycle, when they then flower or when they mature their fruits, they take up significantly more space in the garden. So planning ahead, so these plants not only have room for producing fruits, but having room to produce seeds is important. And we got to think about that in the spring. We don’t want to have to think about that in the fall when it might be a little too late.
(00:12:17) We have to think about potential isolation, distancing right? When we’re dealing with plants that cross pollinate and we’re going to cover more of this again in the pollination video. But when we’re dealing with plants that cross pollinate that are pollinated by insects, right, insects travel a long ways.
(00:12:33) And we need to make sure that we give our plants in our garden enough space. Between one plant to the next to avoid cross pollination from happening. So understanding again how these plants can producing their seeds, how these plants flower and are pollinated is important not just in the fall when we’re planting our seeds, but even in the spring when we’re planning our gardens.
How Many of Each Plant to Grow
(00:12:53) We need to have this understanding of the plants that we’re growing so we can prepare for that. Population size, and this is important too. And in a couple of different ways going to talk about population size that that’s important. Now in one aspect, we want to make sure that we have enough plants in our garden of a particular species to ensure that genetic diversity, right? We want to make sure that especially with plants that are pollinated by insects or by wind. We want to make sure that we have enough of them that the pollen is getting well-mixed and that we have enough of that diversity in each of those fruits, right? So when we’re dealing with things like squashes and melons and that sort of thing, we want to have at least five to six plants in our garden to ensure that we’re getting good genetics mixed up in there.
(00:13:32) Conversely, when we’re dealing with self-pollinating plants, things like beans and peas and that sort of stuff, the self-pollinators, we want to make sure that we’re saving seeds from enough plants. We want to save seeds from 10 or 12 plants if we can to mix all those potential genetics together. So we have a great diversity in our seed sets to enure that we don’t bottleneck our genetics. So these are healthy, viable seeds. They’re going to grow healthy productive plants the next season. We want to make sure we understand that we need good population size. Alright.
How to Select the Best Seeds for Saving
Now let’s let’s talk briefly about the requirements we’re looking for when we select the fruits that we want to save our seeds from. It’s crucial that we understand that we only save seeds from the healthiest, best producing plants, right? Those are the traits that we want to pass on to the next generation. You don’t want to save seeds from sickly plants, or diseased plants, or off-type plants. If you’ve got one rogue plant that’s coming off, and it’s a little bit different than what you expect it to be, that’s not necessarily what you want to save seeds from. You want to make sure that you save the seeds from the true to type, and the healthiest plants, right?
(00:14:30) That’s going to ensure that all of that passes on to the next generation. Remember, when you select these things, when you select these traits as a seed saver, you’re breeding your plants. You’re making those choices for what’s gonna happen the next year, so take the time to make good choices on the plants that you save your seeds from.
When to Harvest Vegetables for Seed Saving
(00:14:47) And let’s touch on fruit maturity, right. And I I talked about this briefly already, but a lot of the things that we eat a lot of the fruits and vegetables that come out of our gardens, we eat in an immature stage and as seed savers, we want to make sure that we understand what are mature version of that fruit looks like so we know to wait and let those plants continue their life cycle to make sure that we give viable seed. A great example of that is cucumbers, right? When we eat cucumbers, you know, think about the thin, translucent, weak little seeds that you’re gonna get out of those guys. Those aren’t gonna grow anything. We need to leave our cucumbers until they get, you know, big and wonky and yellow. It’s a significantly different fruit.
(00:15:20) It’s got a thick, bitter skin. It’s not enjoyable to eat, and you’re gonna notice dark, hard brown seeds. Now, those are the seeds are gonna grow us some cucumbers, so we gotta leave some of these fruits on these plants to finish maturing. Right. So again, understanding the life cycle of the plants that we grow for our food, not only is just good for us but as seed savers, it’s crucial that we understand this information.
Green beans are another great example. When we harvest them from our gardens for fresh eating or pickling or canning or whatever we’re doing, there’s no viable seeds in these things. We want to leave these on the plant until they’re well-matured. You’ll be able to tell because the plant will die back, will start to turn yellow, the pods themselves will be plump and full of seeds. They’ll get leathery, yellow. They’ll turn brown. That’s how we know that this plan has reached physical maturity very similar to for growing beans for a dry harvest, right for soup beans. That is seed right. When we grow our beans to a mature state, that’s how we do it for seed.
Think about corn. Sweet corn obviously is not going to produce any seed for us. We need to leave this corn on the plant until it is well-matured. The husk will turn yellow. It will actually turn and start to point to the ground when it’s finally mature. So understanding again, the maturity of these plants is crucial to make sure that we’re going to be harvesting good viable seed. We don’t want to harvest a bunch of immature seed that’s not going to grow. That’s a lot of time and effort. Understanding these plants is crucial to success. Understanding these plants is crucial to success.
Seed Saving Equipment
(00:16:33) Now it’s actually a relatively simple list of equipment that we’re going to need to gather to be seed savers. I’ve put together a list here that’s going to be basically everything that we need and stuff that pretty much everybody already has a home. Maybe with a few exceptions, but for the most part, this is everything that we may have lying around and we can use what we have available at very little cost to ourselves to be seed savers with pretty much anything that we’re interested in saving seeds from.
You know we’ve got things like harvest baskets, we’ve already got something like that if you’re collecting produce out of your gardens. Knives and scoops, yarn and labels, screens and drying racks, tarps, paper plates, box fans, hose, some running water for washing our seeds, jars and buckets and storage containers. This is a very, very basic list.
(00:17:16) Lying around the homestead, you probably have all of these things, and we’re going to be able to implement all of this to be very productive and active seed savers.
(00:17:23) Now, if you don’t have a seed-saving screen and you’re not necessarily in the mood to purchase one, you can construct one yourself, simply. You can buy the screens of different gauge gauges, the different size holes there on various websites that are available online, or you can even repurpose a Windows screen if need be. I’ve got some window screens at our place that are absolutely perfect for sifting out brassica seeds, broccoli and cabbage, and those sorts of things. The window screen right out of your house is going to work just fine, so keep an eye out for that sort of thing.
(00:17:51) We could repurpose things that we have around the house and make good use of it.
(00:17:55) Now these types of screens are useful for a number of things. We can use them for sifting out our seeds, right? We can either choose a gauge where the seed is going to fall through and the chaff is going to be left behind or vice versa, one where the seed is going to be left onto the screen and all the smaller debris is going to fall through so they work really, really well for sifting out seeds, in particular small seeds that are more difficult to work with. But also we can use these screens for processing our wet seeds, right? We can use them for rinsing our seeds off and setting them out to dry.
(00:18:24) We can use them for sifting watermelon seeds and removing them from the flesh. There’s a number of different ways that we can use these screens, so this may be something that you don’t have light around your house and it is worth considering either constructing one yourself or purchasing one from an online source, because this is a very, very handy piece of equipment. When you get into some larger scale seed-saving, maybe you’re gonna get an automated version of this. As you can see here, this one came off of Craigslist. It was probably just a couple hundred dollars, but it’s certainly gonna save you a lot of time and effort if you’re processing dry seeds or on a large large scale.
(00:18:56) We’re thinking grains, corn, soybeans. Dry beans of that nature. Something of that sort.
Now this is an aspirator machine. This is a pretty, pretty handy thing. You can find plans for making this all over the Internet. What this is essentially now is we’ve hooked up a shop vac, right. As you can see at the top there, we’ve got a shop vac to it. And what that does is it creates the air flow. You pour the seeds through the funnel there and as they drop through the air flow is going to create a vacuum, right. And the the small seeds are gonna fall down through the the main shaft down into the bottom to be collected in the bucket and the small debris the fluff, the chaff and that sort of thing is gonna be pulled up and out and separated from your seeds. So this is a great way to clean a large. Portion of seeds, particularly things like lettuce, brassicas small seeds that have a lot of difficult to clean out parts. One of these aspirators is going to really save you a lot of time, but you got to take the time to build one. You got to be handy like that. If you are certainly look one of these up, it’s going to. Save you a lot of time in the long run, construct an aspirator at home.
(00:20:00) I just thought this was fun. I wanted to share this. This is a nice vintage photo. This is an old school seed extractor. If you’re doing a lot of cucurbets, in this case in this picture here we’re looking at cucumbers, but you can use this for pumpkins, melons, that sort of thing. This is a large machine that’s used to really extract these seeds in an efficient manner. You load the the fruits into the top, it comes through, it gets chopped and tumbled through that tumbler, and the seeds are removed with some running water. Again, this is a large scale type of thing. A lot of us at home we don’t need anything like this. This is kind of a commercial thing, but I thought it was a fun picture and I just wanted to share with everybody.
(00:20:32) Because well, it just looks like a fun way to spend an afternoon if you ask me.
When to Start Seed-Saving for Next Year
Now it’s important to know. But as seed savers, our work does not begin and end in the fall. Right. Seed-saving is a year-round activity. This is something that from the moment we plan our garden in the middle of winter when the sea catalogs are coming in as we’re planting our garden all the way through until we’re harvesting our crops and extracting our seeds, we need to have seed-saving in mind. Right when we’re we’re plotting out where our plants are going to go. Understanding the species and isolation distances and all these sorts of things, we need to have seed-saving in mind 365 days of the year.
(00:21:16) And that covers the seed-saving basics that we need to have. Now we have a strong foundation for getting our seed-saving work started and we’re going to move on to some some technical applications of wet and dry seeds and how to process these seeds at home.
(00:21:28) Thank you. If you’d like to stay connected, you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, on our YouTube channel, or at smallhousefarm.com. Thank you.
Seed Saving Master Course
Save more seeds with this master course from Bevin Cohen. Members get access to all seven videos, which detail:
