How to Save Seeds: A Guide to Harvesting and Storing Seeds
There’s nothing quite like managing to complete the whole process from sowing seeds to saving and storing your own ready for next year. With a bit of planning and know-how, you can get even more from your harvest this season. We’ve put together some easy tips and suggestions to help you start your seed saving journey.
What Seeds Can You Save?
One of the most important things to note when it comes to saving seeds is the life cycle of your plants. Annual vegetables like lettuce, tomatoes, and peppers, will flower, set seed, and die in one season. Biennial vegetables like onions and carrots won’t flower until their second growing season once they’ve gone through the cold winter period. Perennial vegetables like asparagus will keep flowering and producing for many years. This is the same for flowers as well. Knowing the lifecycle of your plants helps you to understand when you will be able to harvest your seeds. This makes a big difference when it comes to the planning stage. You also want to make sure that you are saving your seeds from the healthiest plants to ensure that the next crop will also be strong.
Easy vegetable Seeds to Save
Peas and beans are two of the easiest vegetables to save seeds from. This is partly due to the fact that they generally self-pollinate before the flowers are open, which greatly reduces the risk of cross-pollination from insects. This helps to keep the variety the same when you grow it again without the attributes of another species. You want to harvest the seeds after the pods have gone brown and papery but before they’ve split open and spilled everywhere. The peas or beans should be hard and will rattle inside the shell. If the weather is particularly bad, you can dig up the whole plant and hang it upside-down in a greenhouse or conservatory to finish ripening before harvesting your seeds.
Other Easy Vegetable seeds to save
Peppers
Once your peppers have reached their final stage of ripeness, cut them in half and scoop out the seeds. There will be a lot of extra tissue attached, so remove any excess fibres and rinse them clean using a fine sieve. You can then dry them on kitchen towel for around a week before storing. Peppers are more likely to be cross-pollinated with other varieties, so it’s recommended to isolate one variety as it comes into flower to stop that from happening.
Tomatoes
Open-pollinated tomato varieties are one of the most popular types of vegetable seeds to save. Wait until the fruit is ripe and scoop out the insides into a jar of water. Leave them to soak for a couple of days and then strain and rinse the jelly off of the seeds. Spread your seeds out on some kitchen towel on a sunny windowsill to dry for a couple of weeks and then you can simply store them attached to the paper. Just plant your seeds as you would a seed tape and they’ll grow no problem.
Squashes, Pumpkins & Courgettes
It’s important to note that squashes, pumpkins, and courgettes all have the ability to cross-pollinate, so they will require a bit of work to stop you getting crops that aren’t true to type. Hand-pollination is your best bet when it comes to these cucurbits. Once they are ripe, cut them in half and scoop out all of the seeds. Wash them in a colander and rub them with your fingers to get rid of all the mushy fibre. Shake out as much of the water as you can and let them dry on a plate. They need to dry quite quickly, but it cannot be too hot. Once you think they’re dry, try and bend one; if it snaps, then your seeds are dry and ready for storing.
How to Save Flower Seeds
There are a huge variety of flowers that lend themselves to seed saving, and lots of them are very easy to do. You can find out more about saving sweet peas on our Guide to Growing Sweet Peas blog. Sunflowers, poppies, calendula, and cosmos are all excellent examples of easy flower seeds to save. The key is making sure that you save them at the right time. Generally, you need to leave anything in a pod until the outside has dried and gone brown. If it’s a flower where the seeds form in the centre, wait until the petals have dropped before snipping off the dried heads. Rub them between your fingers to release all of the seeds and store them carefully until it’s time to sow again.
Whatever seeds you've saved, make sure you store them in a cool, dry place in well-labelled, airtight containers. Adding silica gel to your storage can help remove any excess moisture from the air, helping to keep you seeds dry and safe.
It’s important to note that saving seeds should only be done with open-pollinated varieties as F1 hybrids have been bred for specific characteristics that are not guaranteed to be passed on to future generations of the plant. F1s have often been bred for disease resistance, to combat tougher climates, or to ensure a specific flavour or appearance, and they are fantastic in their own way.
