Seed Saving: What Is It, and How Can I Do It?

Seed saving is the act of storing and preserving seeds, or other reproductive materials like tubers, to grow a new crop the following year. It’s a pretty simple process in theory: when your plant produces seeds, you collect them, dry them, and store them until next year. But, there are a few important things to know and best practices to follow before you go out to start harvesting seeds from your garden plants. 

Things to Know Before You Start Seed Saving

1. Hybrids do not reproduce reliably, so check your seed packages. If they say hyb., or hybrid, don’t grow them for seed saving. It’s best to stick with standard or heirloom varieties for seed saving.
2. You can’t eat produce and save seeds from the same plant. Luckily, one plant produces plenty of seeds, so you only need to let one or two of each variety go to seed to stock up for next year. 
3. Some common vegetables are biennials, which means they don’t set seed until their second year. Cabbage, Swiss chard, beets, parsley, carrots, cauliflower, celery, Brussels sprouts, and many more are biennial, so you’ll only be able to collect from them if it’s their second year in your garden. Make sure you check to see that any biennial vegetables you want to collect seeds from are winter hardy to zone 7 for Powell River.

Easiest Plants for Saving Seeds

Naturally, the easiest plants to save seed from are ones that have big seeds. That includes plants like beans, peas, corn, squash, and pumpkins. Onions, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and chives are also fairly easy to collect seed from. 

You can also collect seeds from a variety of flowers in your garden if you like. Poppies might be the easiest, with sweet peas and sunflowers not too far behind. However, you might have to battle with the birds to save any sunflower seeds for next year! If you’d like to save seed from a particular sunflower variety, it’s a good idea to cut the head once the seeds are fully formed and bring it inside to dry, where the birds can’t get it. 

How to Save Seed

Most plants need to have seed heads left on the plant until they’re quite dry. The exceptions are tomatoes and squash—we’ll talk about those in a minute.

For plants like peas, beans, onions, lettuce, chives, corn, sweet peas, and poppies, the seed pods should be left on the plant until they’re dry and cracking. Corn should dry on the stalk before being harvested for seed.

For plants like tomatoes, squash, and pumpkins, you need to harvest the seed when the fruits are perfectly ripe. Squash and pumpkin seeds should be scooped out when you’re ready to use the gourd, and the seeds should be cleaned and dried. Tomato seeds are a bit of a different process; they should be squished up and left to ferment for 2-3 days before you rinse away the bits of flesh from the seeds.

Make sure you label your seeds as you collect them, so you don’t get confused which seeds are which.

All seeds need to be dried well for storage. Even if they appear to be thoroughly dried on the plant, there is still plenty of moisture inside the seeds from dew or rain. All seeds should be laid out to dry. You can dry seeds anywhere that you can lay them out flat, like on a plate or a baking sheet. A layer of newspaper underneath will also help to speed up the process. Leave your seeds to dry for several days, up to 10 days for thicker seeds. Once they’re dry, it’s best to store seeds in paper envelopes in a cool, dark, and dry location. 

Remember to label your seeds as you pack them up for storage, and you’ll be well on your way to growing a garden from your own collected seeds next year!