Want free plants forever? Save your seeds! (here's how)
Part 3 of my four-part spring seed sowing series
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Hello and welcome back to the third instalment in my four part spring seed-sowing series. Today we are talking all about saving seed. If you’re interested in the pragmatics of growing from seed, today’s newsletter is for you.
How to save seeds
There are a few hurdles to get past when it comes to saving your own seeds. The first is simply knowing where to look to find them. Recall from part 1 of this series that (for successful fertilisation) the male pollen has to land on the female parts of the flower and make its way towards the ovary. The ovary contains ovules which are what become the seeds. Once the flower has been pollinated, the ovary will start to develop into the fruit that encases the seeds, while the flower will start to wither away. Which is a long-winded way of saying: if you want to work out where to look to find your seeds, look at where the flowers used to be.
Once you start to look for flowers dying away and leaving their fruit behind you’ll see examples everywhere. Pea flowers wither, revealing tiny immature pods in their wake; tomato flowers die back exposing little green tomatoes and zucchini flowers - once cheerfully large - shrink back, leaving behind tiny baby zucchinis. These are the fruit that have formed from the plant’s ovary and they contain the seeds you want to save .
How do you know when to save seeds?
Once you’ve located your seeds the next sensible question is when should you save them. It can be tricky to know when to harvest your seeds, and if you pick them when they’re too young they won’t germinate successfully next time you sow them. This is because the seeds need time to mature on the plant while they’re still receiving its nutrients.
Cool fact: did you know that the first leaves a baby seed shoots out are actually already partially developed within the mature seed? These leaves are called cotyledons; they don’t look like the adult leaves and usually have a very simple form. Most plants send out two cotyledons before they start producing their ‘true’ adult leaves.
Much like an egg yolk sustains baby chickens before they hatch, these semi-developed cotyledons are fed by the nutrients stored within the seed and can begin to grow without any additional nutrients coming in from the environment. The whole thing is perfectly timed - the seed feeds itself while it waits for the cotyledons to burst up out of the soil. Once those first baby leaves emerge, the plant can start to photosynthesise and it begins to feed itself. This is one reason you can germinate seeds in wet cotton wool or tissue paper - they don’t actually need nutrients for the first little while because the seed provides them itself!
So, long story short, you want to make sure the seed is mature enough that all those good nutrients are stored and the little cotyledons are ready to go once the seed is sown. How do you know when that’s happened? There are two things you can look for:
First, the fruit should look plump and ripe. This is easier to pick with things like tomatoes or chillies, because the fruit changes colour when ripe. It’s a little trickier with things like pea pods or beans.
In these cases, you want the pods to look plump and you want to be able to easily see every individual pea or bean inside the pod. If in doubt, feel free to simply leave your pea or bean plant (or sunflower, or marigold) in the ground until it starts to turn brown and crisp - then the seeds are definitely ready!
For vegetables that grow on vines - like pumpkins - watch for when the vine starts to wither away and naturally detach itself from the fruit. Once the vine is shrivelled the seeds are receiving no more nutrients from the plant and can be harvested.
Types of seeds (and how to save them)
You might have noticed already that there are many different kinds of ‘fruit’ that can encase a plant’s seeds. Every plant stores its seeds a little differently, and knowing about how the seeds are stored is really helpful when it comes to harvesting and saving those seeds for next year. Broadly speaking, you can group seeds into two main categories; wet seeds and dry seeds.
Wet seeds
Wet seeds are those that are housed inside the fruit. Plants like tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, capsicums, chillies and zucchinis are all wet-seeded, because their fruit encases their seed.
But not all wet seeds are created equal and some are wetter than others! Some seeds - like tomatoes and cucumbers - have a jelly-like coating that surrounds the seed. This coating has evolved to temporarily inhibit germination and will only break down once the fruit surrounding the seed begins to ferment. The fermentation removes the jelly-like coating and the seed is ready to germinate.
How to save tomato seeds
If you want to save seeds from tomatoes (or cucumbers) yourself, it helps to replicate the fermentation process that would naturally occur in the wild environment. You can do this really easily - just chuck the seeds in a jar of water and leave (with the lid half on) for 3-5 days. The seeds will begin to ferment in the water and this will remove the jelly coating. Then you just drain the seeds and leave them to fully dry on a paper towel before storing them.
For wet seeds that don’t have the jelly coating (like pumpkin seeds, zucchini seeds, chilli seeds or capsicum seeds), the process is much easier. Just cut open the fruit, remove the seeds, spread them on a paper towel and leave them to fully dry in an airy location for a few days.
Dry seeds
Dry seeds, as the name suggests, aren’t stored inside a big fleshy bit of fruit, so the harvesting process is much easier. Instead of fruit, dry seeds are stored inside pods or seed heads. If you leave the plant in the ground these pods or seed heads will eventually dry completely. They turn gradually brown and the pods will rattle with stored seeds. Examples include broccoli, mustard greens, rocket and other brassicas, lettuce, flowers like poppies, marigolds, calendula, borage, sweet peas, cornflowers and herbs like basil, parsley, fennel, dill and coriander.
How to save broccoli seeds:
Broccoli seed pods (and seed pods from other plants in the brassica family) can be left on the plant until they turn very dry and brown. Unfortunately the plant tends to start looking pretty ratty around this time, so you might not really relish leaving it in your garden. What’s more, these plants take up valuable real estate and you’re probably itching to clear the bed and start planting the next crop. If you’re impatient to pull the plant just make sure to wait until the seed pods start to change colour. As they mature, the pods will turn from green to yellow or brown and the individual seeds inside each pod will become easily discernible. Instead of picking the individual pods, cut the plant towards the base of each stem, tie some twine around the stems and hang them upside down in an airy location to dry fully.
How to save bean seeds:
Green beans, broad beans, peas and other seeds that form inside pods are best left to dry on the plant before harvesting. These pods are usually bigger and juicier than brassica seed pods, so it’s better to leave them attached to the plant and wait for them to dry naturally. If you’re keen to get your next crop underway you can always start new plants in seedling punnets or little pots and get them growing while you wait to harvest your bean seeds.
How to save coriander seeds:
Coriander seeds, parsley seeds, fennel seeds, dill seeds and caraway seeds all belong to the same family (along with carrots and Queen Anne’s lace!). These seeds are best left on the plant until fully dry. The seeds tend to be quite small and, unlike seeds that form in pods, it can be difficult to tell when they’ve reached full maturity. I prefer to leave the plants in the ground until the seeds look very dry and fall easily off the plant when rubbed between your fingers. Again, if you’re keen to pull the plants out before the seeds form, remember that each plant will produce hundreds (if not thousands) of seeds, so you really don’t need to leave every single plant in the ground to form seeds - just one plant left in the ground will keep you well supplied.
How to collect and store seeds
Once your seed pods/seed heads are nice and dry, the seeds should burst out with very little coaxing. If you’ve ever turned a poppy seed head upside down you’ll notice how, like a salt and pepper shaker, countless tiny seeds pour merrily out of it. Dry seeds are so easy to harvest that the main challenge becomes managing to catch them before they fly all over the place.
I like to crumble dry seed pods or seed heads over a big bowl, let the seeds collect at the bottom, pick out the leftover bits of dry pods/leaves and then tip the seeds into a paper envelope.
Paper envelopes work well for homegrown seeds because they’re breathable, so if there’s any residual moisture in the seeds it won’t stay trapped in the packet with them. Seeds like to be kept cool and dry and will remain viable for longer if stored at temperatures below 10˚C.
Speaking of! Have you heard of the ‘doomsday vault’? It’s a global seed storage vault buried under an icy mountain in the Arctic, housing over 930,000 varieties of food crops - a stronghold protecting our planet’s agricultural diversity. Millions of seeds are kept cold and dry; an attempt to insure ourselves against what seems to be an inevitable loss of plant species. But what the seed vault reflects, more than anything, is just how beige and homogenous modern agriculture has become.
According to Time Magazine, the U.S. has lost over 90% of its fruit and vegetable varieties since the 1900’s. Across the globe the vast majority of human nutrition now comes from only 30 crop varieties. Thirty crop varieties. When we have over 930 000 to choose from! It’s INSANE. But that’s large-scale agriculture. In order to feed all 8.2 billion of us (an impressive feat), agriculture has become increasingly streamlined, routinised and simplified.
The problem with growing monocultures (which you may have even noticed in your own garden) is that a single pest or disease can easily chew through your entire crop, totally decimating it. When we start to increase diversity, we inoculate ourselves against these doomsday scenarios. Growing many different plant species together also improves insect diversity, which leads to a more sustainable balance of different species (and reduces the likelihood of insect plagues that destroy a whole crop).
There are many other reasons to embrace plant diversity. For one thing, diverse diets tend to be better for our health. For another, when we have access to hundreds of thousands of amazing fruits and vegetables, why on earth would we voluntarily choose to fill our beautiful brief lives up with only 30 of them?? What a wasted opportunity for culinary delights!
Start growing your own food and saving your own seeds and you can take back control over what you eat. You can grow 15 varieties of zucchini! You can become a pea aficionado and taste every kind there is. When you grow from seed you get access to a heap of interesting vegetable varieties that are much harder to find at the shops. The whole world of vegetables open up to you and, well, it’s really fun.
Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!
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I'm guessing we can save the seeds from tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchinis we've bought at the fruit & veg shop and plant them? Or do they not work as well?
Very interesting read, thank you Casey 🐞🐝