Seed-saving is a homesteading skill that takes time and practice. Many feel intimidated and overwhelmed with what can feel like endless information on the topic, but with this seed saving for beginners guide, you can start with the basics.
Saving the seeds from tomatoes, cucumbers, melons and squash can be fairly difficult, but saving seeds from corn, lettuce, beans, peas, flowers and herbs is simple.
You certainly don’t need a college degree to get started with some seed saving on your homestead! Read on to learn how to gather these seeds from your garden and prepare them for next year’s growing season.
Why Seed Save?
Seed saving has deep roots dating back as far as man has existed. Our ancestors relied on viable seeds for the best food production year after year to feed their people and sustain their culture.
- Preparedness: We do our best to be prepared on our homestead, knowing that unexpected things happen in life. The lost art of seed-saving is making a comeback, and seed-saving communities are sprouting up around the country, allowing homesteaders to increase self-sufficiency.
- Save Money: We take garden planning seriously and use strategies like starting seeds indoors to extend our growing season. We can close the loop from relying on seed companies (while saving money) if we can save seeds and plan out the following year’s growing season ahead of time.
- Learn About the Plant: There’s no better way to learn about a plant’s life cycle than by learning it from seed to seed (planting the seed to seed saving). Knowing how to read seed packets, handle common seed-starting problems, and transplant seedlings into healthy, nutrient-rich soil gives our plants the best possible start.
- Land Raising: One of the most important things to remember when you are seed saving, or even thinking about keeping your own seeds, is that when it comes to seed saving, you’re always either breeding better or breeding worse; you are never just maintaining. You need to think through the entire process to consider what seeds are well-suited to your climate, soil, or specific pest pressures. You must also be sure that you are always only saving seeds from the best of your plants, the ones showing the positive traits that you want in your plants, and none of the negative characteristics.
Many gardeners just continue to buy seeds to ensure high-quality plants, but we recommend learning the basics of seed saving and building your knowledge and skill with each growing season.
Open Pollination, Cross Pollination, and Hybrids
Open-pollinated plant varieties produce the parent seed, which reproduces offspring, giving you that “true” species of vegetable or fruit for years to come.
Heirloom plants are just open-pollinated plants with a long history. With good seed saving techniques, both heirloom and open-pollinated seeds keep the best traits of the parent plants and later generations of these plants stay true to type, being the same type as their parent plants.
Hybrids are plants that are a cross between two or more parent varieties. These plants are often very strong and vigorous in their first generation, due to a phenomenon known as hybrid vigor. Unfortunately, this hybrid vigor is not passed on to its offspring, and the offspring will not predictably resemble the parents. Hybrid varieties of plants are not ideal for seed saving, as their results will vary greatly from the parent plants.
If you purchase heirloom seeds, this is your guarantee that you’re getting open-pollinated seeds. These are the best options, keeping the best traits of the parent plant passed down to the offspring for generations.
We try to attract pollinators to our gardens, but natural pollination creates a problem for seed savers. Plants that are pollinated naturally, from plant to plant, can also cross-pollinate from variety to variety, creating hybrids instead of plants that are true to their parent types.
So, what are you to do if you want to save seeds from your own plants and perpetuate a single variety without worrying about cross-pollination? The answer is easy! Just start by saving seeds that do not cross-pollinate easily or are self-fertile!
Seed Saving by Vegetable
Saving seeds from the best, healthiest plants, whether an herb, flower, vegetable or fruit, will reward you with the strongest, hardiest-producing plant year after year. If the plants are not self-pollinating, grow multiple plants to gather more seeds from various plants.
Herbs & Flowers
Some of the easiest herbs and flowers to start with are annuals like cilantro and calendula. And harvesting couldn’t be easier.
The timing of each plant’s harvest will vary. Some plants will be ready to harvest mid-summer, while others you’ll need to wait until the fall. Your eye will tell you when it’s time, which is also a great way to learn how to identify seeds.
Many of these self-seeding varieties should be harvested before the seedhead dries completely; otherwise, those seeds will scatter and may come back next year in areas you don’t want them to.
We like it when plants self-sow in our cottage garden, but we don’t want this in our terrace gardens or the main crop garden because we end up with plants scattered throughout our neat rows and beds. Just know, if you don’t harvest all the seeds, this is a risk you’ll be taking.
To harvest seeds, simply allow the plant to flower and die back. Before the seed pods are completely dried, harvest the seed by clipping off the stalk with the flower head attached (or just the flower head) into a brown paper bag. Write the name of the herb or flower on the bag and bring it inside.
From there, you can lay the seeds out on a paper towel until completely dry (this may take up to a week), then store them in a Mason jar or small bag and store out of direct sunlight and away from any moisture.
Lettuce
Lettuce is easy to harvest seeds from for future use. We do our best to grow greens year-round, so gathering and saving lettuce seeds is very cost-effective.
Let the lettuce bolt and produce the flower you want to gather seed from. Cut the head directly into a brown paper bag as the flower dies. This way, it won’t scatter seeds all over the garden.
Separate the seeds from the dead debris on a tray or screen and thoroughly dry the seeds in a cool place with good air circulation.
Peas and Beans
We leave the beans on the lowest part of the plant we want to remove the seeds from, allowing them to mature and dry on the plant. We grow so many beans for long-term storage supply that it’s easy to choose the best plants and harvest seeds from them for future use.
We pick our peas as often as possible, leaving a few dedicated plants for seed saving. Once again, we leave the peas on the vine until completely dry or just before the first frost.
Make sure the beans and peas are completely dry by laying them (removed from the pod) on trays or screens with good air circulation and small fans blowing on them if needed.
Cucumbers and Tomatoes
Cucumber and tomato seeds have a gelatinous protective coating on them. Fermenting the seeds removes the gel-like coating so the seeds dry thoroughly and don’t become moldy when stored. These aren’t the best crops to try and seed save if you’re just getting started.
Corn
Heirloom corn is best for seed saving, and gathering the seeds is easy. Just let them dry out on the plant, then remove the dried kernels from the cob. Make sure all seeds are completely dry before storing.
If other types of hybrid corn are being grown in your garden (or even in a neighbor’s garden within close proximity), it will affect the corn’s ability to reproduce true seed and grow more corn when planted. Grow heirloom corn to get “true” seed for next year’s crop.
Peppers, Melons and Squash
These plants require more advanced seed-saving techniques. I recommend buying pepper, melon, summer and winter squash seeds from your favorite seed company until you have mastered seed saving successfully, especially if you are growing multiple varieties.
There are many great seed companies out there, some of which are SowRight Seeds, Botanical Interests from Epic Gardener, Survival Garden Seeds or Territorial Seed Company.
Biennial Plants
Many plants, such as beets, carrots, Swiss chard and parsley, are biennials, which means they require two years to complete their life cycle. The plant produces flowers after it overwinters and then produces seeds.
After planting biennials and going through their first year of growth, planting again the following year will give more options for gathering the best seeds. You will need more plants and space to grow them to obtain a broad genetic base to work from.
How to Know When Your Seeds Are Dry
You will know the seeds are thoroughly dried when brittle and hard. They won’t bend or break apart easily. Pushing your fingernail into the seed won’t leave a dent, indicating it’s dried and ready for storage.
Storing Saved Seeds
We have been saving seeds for centuries without refrigeration, without air-tight containers and without special glass or plastic seed-saving packages. You do not have to get complicated with your systems.
I like storing larger amounts of seeds in glass Mason jars. They come in various sizes, and if you have a larger quantity of seeds, they keep well with ample room, and you can see the seeds in the jars, monitoring any changes.
There are different storage containers to save different types and sizes of seeds. I like inexpensive plastic photo boxes when storing larger seeds like sunflower, corn, beans, and peas. They hold just the right amount and are easy to stack and store.
Smaller seeds like herbs, flowers and poppy seeds are stored well in small containers like small paper seed envelopes.
I recommend labeling your seed containers with the date and seed variety. Keeping records in a notebook of how productive your seeds were is helpful. It takes time and practice to save seeds successfully.
Note productivity, flavor, quality and if the plant is more or less susceptible to pests and disease. If you see a decline in these areas, start again with store-bought seeds and try saving some of the seeds from your new crop for the following year.
Moisture, direct sunlight, and excessive temperature variations are enemies of seeds. If you can avoid these three things, you’ll have a sound seed storage system.
Permaculture for Your Homestead
Now that you have explored the option of seed saving from your home garden, would you like to learn more tips for a healthier and more productive garden?
Join us for our Permaculture for Your Homestead Workshop. This 50-minute video crash course includes a workbook to help you make your garden and homestead produce more with less effort.
Other Articles You May Enjoy
- Garden Planning for Serious Food Production
- Learn to Extend the Growing Season
- How to Read Seed Packets
- Transplanting Plants – How to Plant Tomato Plants, Cucumbers, and Peppers
- Choosing the BEST Vegetable Seeds for Your Garden
- How to Start Seeds Indoors
- Common Seed Starting Problems
- How to Make Compost the Easy Way
