Collecting and saving seeds for next year’s garden is an age-old tradition. Use these general guidelines to get started.
Know what you’re saving. If your garden is filled with heirloom vegetables and flowers, which are open-pollinated, you’ll have lots of plants to choose from. (See Seed Types and Terms on page 14 for more information.) Open-pollinated, or OP, plants are much more likely to yield seedlings that reproduce the fruit or flowers of their parent plants. Seeds collected from hybrid plants do not generally “come true.” That means the seedlings do not necessarily resemble their parents, and even if they resemble them superficially, they may not carry specific disease resistance or other characteristics. Refer to your seed packets to determine whether you have hybrids or OP plants in your garden.
Seeds to start with. A good way to begin seed-saving is to start with self-pollinated plants. Plants like peas, beans, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and snapdragons pollinate their own flowers, so seed collected from these will come true, meaning the seeds you collect will produce plants that resemble their parents. Also, large seeds, such as those produced by marigolds, zinnias, beans, and peas, are easy to collect and handle.
Plants where wind or insects carry pollen from flower to flower are likely to produce hybrid seed, so these aren’t the best choice when you’re just starting out. Experienced seed-savers take steps to prevent wind or insects from carrying pollen to flowers that they want to collect seed from. They do this by growing plants away from ones that could pollinate the flowers or by protecting specific flowers with paper bags, and cross-pollinating by hand.
In order to be viable, seed needs to mature on the plant, but it also needs to be collected as soon as it is ripe. Otherwise it will be dispersed or lost to birds or insects. Use the following steps to collect and store seeds.