Harvesting and saving seeds helps save money and promotes the continuation of heirloom variety crops.
Saving your own seeds can help you save money and help rescue endangered heirloom varieties from the possibility of extinction. It's also a lot of fun, and doesn't take a ton of work or an investment in much more than time.
The harvesting of seeds to start next year's crop begins with this year's plants. You need to check your seed packets for the words "hybrid" or "F1" to see if your seeds are collectible. Without getting into too much about genetics and plant breeding, hybrid F1 seeds will not grow true to their parent plants characteristics (they can also be sterile, and not able to germinate at all), so they don't make the best seed-collecting specimens.
In your hunt for the perfect plants to save seeds from, look for open-pollinated varieties. Older plant breeds (sometimes referred to as heirloom or heritage) are open-pollinated, meaning they only need pollen from themselves to make seeds. In fact, one of the only reasons many heirloom varieties still exist is because of the seed-saving efforts of past generations.
For a pure strain of seeds from your garden plants, you need to keep the pollen of other varieties away from the one you want to save seeds from. This is especially true of veggies such as corn, which has been known to cross-pollinate from crops as far away as the next field over. You can either choose to grow just one variety of the plant you want to collect seeds from, grow the varieties at opposite ends of your garden, or choose varieties that mature at different times. Insects and wind represent the main vectors of cross-pollination, so you can also erect a cloth barrier around your plants to lessen the chance of contamination.
To insure pollination from only the variety you want, you can also hand-pollinate. Using a fine-bristled paint brush, you can easily paint pollen from the stamens onto the pistil. For varieties that have male and female flowers, you'll have to move pollen from a male flower to a female to assure good pollination. This process can also speed up or promote good fruit production.
Once seed pods and fruit form, you can start collecting your seeds. Timing is everything with seed saving; you don't want to harvest immature seeds, but you also shouldn't wait until pests pick your plants clean, a killing frost damages vulnerable seed tissue, or all your produce is eaten for dinner. Generally speaking, nature will tell you when seeds are ready for you to pick them, so watch carefully.
Look for seed pods with a slight crack, but don't wait too long because pods can split overnight and spill your sought-after seeds on the ground. To completely avoid this, you can cover the seed head or pods with a paper or plastic bag, tying it around the stem to keep seeds from falling when they mature. You can also take some seed pods before they completely dry. Finish the drying process indoors in a warm, low-humidity spot.
Seeds with pods or seed heads will need to be separated from the accompanying chaff. You can do this fairly easily by placing everything on a screen, then using a hair dryer to blow the lighter chaff away. Screens can also be a handy way to sift out undesirables. Choose a size that lets either seeds or chaff fall through into a bucket below. Use different gauge screens for different sized seeds.
Fruit should be disease-free, firm and ripe prior to seed harvesting. You should pull the seeds out of the fruit or vegetable, and then rinse them to remove any residual fruit membrane. For some fruits such as tomatoes, it's best to perform a fermenting process to separate the seeds from the fruit. First you need to dump the guts of the fruit into a bucket of water. Cover the bucket, and let it sit for three days, stirring daily. When you come back to it after the third day, the container will have an icky coating floating on top of a liquid bottom layer. Skim off the cruddy top layer, and then slowly strain out the seeds, which will have sunk to the bottom. You can then dry the seeds.
All seeds will need added drying time before storage. You can easily dry them in the sun or any warm, low-humidity spot placed in a single layer on a screen. Another excellent drying option consists of spreading the seeds out on a baking sheet in a gas oven with only a pilot light on. You can also dry seeds on a paper towel, but you run the risk of them sticking.
To test for the correct amount of dryness, try to bend a seed in half with your fingers. If it is still pliable, or you can dent it with a fingernail, you should continue drying. If it snaps in pieces, the seeds should be dry enough to store.
Small envelopes, film canisters (which can be bought in bulk from camera shops), baby food jars, plastic baggies (the little snack ones work well), and small plastic leftover food containers all make great storage vessels for seeds. Mice will be attracted to and steal seed not sealed in a hard plastic container or glass jars, so be sure to put baggies or envelopes in a protective outer container.
You'll want to store your seeds in a cool, dry place, away from light. A dry root cellar and the refrigerator both make excellent storage spaces. To keep things dry, you can add silica gel packs or dry rice grains to your seeds. Make sure also to label everything as you collect and store the seeds so you don't get confused about which seeds are which. You can even include planting information from the original seed package (or the packet itself) for ease of planting next year.
Before you plant the seeds the following year, it's a good idea to check the germination rate so you can see just how viable the seeds are, and not waste time preparing flats of seed that just won't sprout. Testing germination is easy. Simply place around 100 seeds on a wet paper towel (you'll want to have an exact count of your seeds to determine percentages). Set another wet paper towel over the top of the first, and then roll the whole thing up and place in a plastic zipper bag with a few holes punched in it for ventilation. The top of a refrigerator or cupboard make an excellent spot for testing because of the relatively even temperatures, so pop it on up there. After a week, count the number of sprouted seeds. If the ratio of sprouted to unsprouted is high, your seeds should be good to go. If you don't have a lot of sprouts, place the bag back for another week. After two weeks, you should be able to determine whether your seeds will germinate well or not, with 70% germination usually the cutoff.
As you can see, seed saving can be quite enjoyable, especially for sharing your plants with friends or saving a special variety. Many groups exist both online and offline for seed savers to exchange varieties. You'll also find many excellent books on the subject to help you with the subtleties of harvesting and saving your own seeds. So, get growing, and have fun saving your own seeds!
