How to save seeds and best crops for beginners
Guest Contributor: Cassey Anderson, Horticulture Agent, Colorado State University Extension
Whether you're growing heirlooms or hybrids (or both!) saving seeds from your favorite veggies is a great way to save money, grow what you love, and share the fun with fellow gardeners. Learn how to start saving your seeds with these expert tips for for selecting, harvesting and storing seeds.
As the growing season begins to wind down it’s time to plan whether you want to put any of this season’s bounty toward next year’s garden. What am I talking about? Seed saving of course! Why should you save your seeds? Well there are many reasons that some people will do so, some of which include: saving money, developing your own varieties, food security, fun, for sharing, you know where they came from, providing a fun challenge, or allowing you to increase diversity in your garden.
Key terms
Technically you can save any seed from your garden, but some will work better than others. There are some key terms to recognize when planning to save seed:
Open Pollinated
Varieties that grow “true to type” from saved seed, they retain uniformity when being pollinated from genetically similar parent plants. Not all vegetable varieties are open pollinated which means you can get unreliable offspring when saving seed from some plants such as squash, cucumber, and melon.
Heirloom
Refers to plant varieties that have been passed down through generations. They usually require at least three human generations, or somewhere between 50-100 years of cultivation. All varieties of heirloom vegetables are open pollinated (see above) but not all open pollinated varieties are heirloom, they may have been developed recently or just not been on the market long enough to classify as an heirloom.
Hybrid
Vegetables that have been created by crossing the pollen of two parental types that were genetically distinct. The parents used to create hybrids are typically bred for specific characteristics and combining desirable traits leads to an ideal offspring. You may see terms around hybrid such as F1 or F2, these mean first or second generation hybrids. While hybrids are not GMO, they can be patented. Genetically modified plants are very rare in the home seed market. Hybrid seeds can, however, be patented by the company that develops them. Hybrid seeds can be bred for better heat tolerance, disease resistance, or faster growth. Hybrid seeds can be certified as organic as well. However, they do not grow true to type from saved seed, so are not good candidates for seed saving.
How to choose
Pick an open pollinated variety, plant enough of your crop so you have enough to eat as well as to save (5-500 plants depending on variety). For example, you may only need 5 tomato plants, but you may need 50 bush beans to get enough for both consumption and saving. When selecting fruit to save seed from, always select the most robust and best varieties.
It’s important to understand the process by which your selected plant goes from flower, to fruit, to seed, so in the crops below we’ll get into the details you need to know for success. First off, let’s define some terms.
Perfect flower
Contains both male and female parts in one flower. This means that they can potentially self-pollinate either from the same flower or the same plant. All flowers that are self-pollinated are perfect flowers. They can pollinate themselves but can benefit from cross pollination. Some perfect flowers may need cross pollination for successful fertilization. Examples of perfect flowers include tomato, bean, pea, carrot, cabbage, lettuce, and sunflower.
Imperfect flower
Imperfect flowers are those that contain only the male (stamen) and female (pistil) parts on each flower. These can be found either in one plant at the same time as in cucumber which we call monecious, or on different plants altogether as in asparagus or spinach which we call dioecious.
Why did I just give you a vocabulary lesson? Well, if you are planning to save seed from plants that require cross pollination, you may need to isolate from other plants in the same plant family. You can isolate by distance (which is hard in a backyard), you can use bags, row covers, cages or other means to isolate your plants. However, that does mean that you may have to bring in pollinators, or be the pollinator yourself!
With any seed that you plan to save, be sure to clean the seed carefully, wash off any debris, and dry thoroughly before storing. There are great resources online to walk you through individual crop seed preparation.
Easiest crops for seed saving
Before this gets too long, let’s look at some of the easiest crops to save seed from:
Tomatoes
Ensure that fruit and seeds are fully mature and ripe, for tomatoes this may lean toward the tomato being slightly overripe for our taste. Tomato seeds, and other wet seeds (such as eggplant and cucumber) can benefit from fermentation prior to drying and storage. To ferment, separate tomato seeds and store the in a jar with a small amount of water for 2-3 days. The pulp and infertile seeds will float the top, healthy good seeds will sink. After fermentation, rinse the good seeds and allow to dry thoroughly, stirring frequently to prevent sticking.
Beans
Pods should be dried down, but not completely dry as pods that are too dry could shatter during harvest leading to loss of seeds. Remove the seeds from the plant after they have dried. If weather is turning and a frost is threatening, you can bring the entire plant inside into a cool, dry space, to allow them to continue drying. Once fully dry remove the beans from the pods, clean any stems or debris that remain and allow to dry until you cannot puncture the seed with a fingernail.
Peas
Very similar to above, ensure that the seeds have fully matured. Often this is beyond the point at which we would like to eat the seed. There is minimal processing needed to successfully save seeds from peas and I highly recommend you give it as try this year or next!
Cucumber, melon, squash, or pumpkins
If you are only growing one variety of cucurbit (any of the above) you may be able to get away with seed saving, but cucurbits are monecious and have imperfect flowers which means they are much more likely to cross pollinate with others, potentially leading to undesirable offspring. But, if you’ve taken precautions, it is easy to save their seed. Let the fruit grow to maturity. For plants like a cucumber or summer this will be larger than we typically harvest, you want the seeds to be fully grown. Remove wet seed and rinse thoroughly. Allow to dry completely until seed snaps when bent.
Lettuce
For seeds of plants that dry in a flower head such as lettuce, dill, sunflower etc. you can harvest the entire flower head once it has dried and then screen out the chaff.
Other, more challenging
Some of our favorite garden foods are biannual plants meaning they grow in one growing season, overwinter, and then flower in the following season. Biannuals include carrots, beets, and onions. Saving seed from these crops is simple, if you are willing to dedicate the garden space to two seasons worth of growth.
Some seeds are likely to be challenging to get to saving seed for a variety of reasons. These crops include swiss chard, brussels sprouts, broccoli, kale, mustard, parsley, carrot, celery, and onions. Many of these are cross pollinated, biennial or need a very large population size to breed true.
Storing seed
If you’ve made it through and have a collection of saved seed for next season, take some time to consider how you will store the seed. You can use a variety of containers. Paper envelopes will keep seed dry, plastic containers or bags will keep air out of the seed, put some moisture absorbing packages in with the seed to ensure moisture doesn’t lead to mold. Glass jars are an inert and effective option as well if you have a good place for storage. Finally, when considering storage, be sure to label your seeds well, with variety name and any other details such as date harvested, and date prepared. Saved seed should last several years when stored carefully.
Of course I’ve only touched the surface of discussions that we could have about seed saving. If you are curious to know more please reach out to your local county Extension office, or check out www.GrowAndGiveColorado.org for more information.
As always, reach out to your local Extension office with additional questions and for further resources. Happy Gardening!
Gardening in Colorado? Check out Grow & Give www.growandgivecolorado.org and in particular our Colorado Vegetable Guide https://growgive.extension.colostate.edu/colorado-vegetable-guide/ for more crop information on all of the above plants.
What if every gardener planted just one extra plant to share?
One small donation can have a tremendous impact. Just imagine, if every gardener planted one extra plant to share, collectively, we would have an abundant source of fresh, healthy produce available to be distributed to families experiencing food insecurity in our own communities! The free Fresh Food Connect mobile app connects you to a local hunger relief program, then manages and tracks your donations of homegrown produce throughout the season. Download the app today!
