Hello, it's mid-July and today I'm out in the garden and I'm saving seeds.
I'm Liz Zorab and this is Byther Farm.
Propagating your own plants is one of
the most satisfying things you can do as a gardener. Creating new plants from the
stock that you have in your garden has some real advantages. Firstly, you're
going to save money because if you're getting your plants from your garden,
they're now free, and you get the satisfaction of knowing that you're
creating your own plants. But not only that, when you propagate from your garden -
so whether you're taking cuttings or runners or layering or saving your own
seeds , those plants would have started to acclimatize to your microclimate and
therefore should be stronger, healthier, more robust plants.
And to save your own seeds
you don't need many tools. You need pencil or pen and some paper envelopes
or paper bags and that's it! And the only other thing you need is a little
bit of patience.
I'm back in my favorite hidden spot in the garden. I wanted to
talk today a little bit about remembering to save seeds not just at
the end of the year, but right through the year.
And in this video Huw Richards,
author of Veg in One Bed and Grow Food for Free will talk a little bit about
his seed saving. But i just want to show you all, to remind you, that you can save
seeds all year round. So I'm going to get my gloves on and we can have a little look
at some of the seeds that I've been saving.
It's quite windy in here today
and the covering of the polytunnel is making quite a lot of noise, so I hope
you can hear me. This is mustard Ruby Streaks, it's one of my favorite salad leaves.
I forgot to water it enough here in the polytunnel,
it started going to seed, so rather than waste the plants I thought I would let
it flower and collect some of the seeds to be able to sow another time.
I've kind of just tied them up to get them out of the way,
but they had these lovely mustard yellow flowers, as you would expect with a
mustard, and they produce these little seed pods. So there's lots of seed pods
are coming off the stem. I can see the little seeds in them and now I need to
leave these to dry out completely before the seeds come out of them. What I'm
going to do is cut the plants and put all this into a large paper sack and
hang it upside down so as the pods dry out and the seeds pop out and they'll
pop right into a large paper sack and I can collect them all at a later moment.
So next step is to get the sack on to the plant and then I can tie that and
take it away. I've used some bailing twine, just to gather the top, but it's
still quite loose and another piece to tie that up.
I've left a long piece on it so I can hang it and for now I will hang it here
in the polytunnel, but later on I will take it through to the cool shed and let
it hang in the dark in the shed.
So, it's mid-July, let's have a look and see
what that bag of Oriental Ruby Streaks seeds looks like. I didn't check before I
started filming, so you are seeing it at the same time as I am. So what I have in
here now is masses of dried seed pods with tiny seeds in them.
I had hoped these pods would open and empty themselves into the bag, which they
haven't done, so what I'm going to have to do is split them.
I am actually going to do this in the bag. I will scrunch them and shake
them into the bag to get those tiny little seeds out, but they're dry and
they're ready to store. So I'll do lots of scrunching and breaking up those seed
pods and just a few minutes of doing that is going to give me masses of seeds.
I can then either store them in small
airtight containers or in paper envelopes ready for use next year.
Hey Liz, thank you very much for having me on. I'm going to start with the worst example
to begin with, just to get it out of their way. And this is Swiss chard,
I grew Bright Lights here last year, so this is a second year and all of them
were actually looking pretty healthy like these two and then we got that
frost earlier on in May and you can see the rest of these, for example, this one
here has been hit really hard by frost and they're looking a little sad so I'm
hoping that they will pull through and I'm letting these bolt. Now the thing
that I love about Swiss chard, just a little note, is even if it bolts these
are still perfectly edible, unlike when lettuce bolts - it turns bitter -
it doesn't happen with Swiss chard. So I'm letting these grow ,they'll grow into
really tall flying stems, perhaps around, I don't know six foot tall, you'll see
some footage of a tour that I did last year at the moment, where you can see an
example. Let them dry and then I'm going to save them.
So just make sure if you
are trying to save seed that you have at least four, six, preferably more plants
that are all going to seed because this means they can cross pollinate with each
other and it's really important to have that pollination
rather than saving seeds just from one.
I'm going to show you
another example which is swede.
I've only got four swede plants and that's
mainly because I got a bit hungry over winter, but these are now running to seed.
So we planted these or sown them around May last year, May 2019, it's now
May 2020 you can see what stage they are at. The thing about swede is that you
have these flower tops, which are edible and really delicious, and then
you let them flower - the pollinators absolutely love it. Now swede is a
brassica and the thing about brassicas when it comes to seed saving, is that
it's very difficult because they very easily cross pollinate with other
brassicas. For example, swede can cross pollinate with kale etc., but because I
have no other brassicas pollinating at the moment I'm letting these and these
are going to pod up and I'm going to, kind of, just let them again dry on the
plant, take them off and stick them in a bag and I'm just really excited to see
how this goes and I've never saved swede seeds before - bit of a tongue twister
there, and yeah it will be cool to see what happens.
This very beautiful, little, white flower is 9 star broccoli. That's a perennial
broccoli and I've let it flower and go to seed so I can collect the seeds. And it
was only after it had started going to seed, I remembered that a little way
over there, there is an Asturian tree cabbage that's also gone to seed, so
there's a very real chance that they've cross pollinated. I'm still going to save
the seeds, I'm going to give it a go. So I've got an envelope, I'm going to just
write on it before I put the seeds in there. 9 star broccoli and today I'm only
going to collect the seeds from the very driest of the pods you can either save the pods
and then when you get inside empty them all out or you can empty them as you go.
And so I've just opened the pod and I'm just taking out the seeds and collecting
them in the envelop.e I don't really want to store a lot of the pod in there,
because there is the potential for it not to be a hundred percent bone-dry and
therefore go mouldy. So if I can, I just want to save the seeds. It's really
tempting to save the seeds, all of the seeds, but actually I don't really need
that many plants of nine star broccoli, so I'm gonna save maybe 20 seeds at the
most and then we can see over the next 18 months whether this had cross
pollinated or not.
And then I'm just going to seal the envelope so they don't
get mixed up with others. The seal hasn't worked very well, so I'm going to fold it
over, knock all the seeds down into one end and fold it in half . And there, in
my very scribbly writing, I now know what that is and I can store these away.
I'm standing in what, up to now, we've called the Chicken Palace and when we
first moved here, this was a very big log store and during the first year I put
some pallets along the front and chicken wire and created a space for the
chickens and turkeys, so they could be inside and undercover. We also had their
house in here
Well we've taken all of that down and we've mucked out as much as we can
over the last few weeks on the floor and we've leveled it off as best I can.
And I've now put down this slightly noisy plastic sheeting. It's actually a
dampproof course membrane. That gives me a kind of cleaner space to be in.
I've brought in this table and another table there and we've put those
small shelves up on the wall and the idea is that this
be my new potting room.
On these small shelves I'm going to store seeds I've collected.
So I've got loads of little pots,
these are pill pots, that's pill bottles, that are saved for me by my
neighbor and I've put a label over the prescription label, so that I'll be able
to write on it what seeds are in each bottle. And I'll also be able to put envelopes
of seeds on here I feel so lucky to have this dedicated
space for potting, for planting up seeds and for storing with seeds. Now this is a
huge space, but you could replicate something like this in a shed and just
give yourself a really nice storage space.
So this is a different example of
seed saving where I haven't actually stored the seeds in envelopes indoors.
The seeds have been storing in the ground over winter. This time last year I
was growing lettuce, I then let it seed in summer. I did collect some of the
seeds, but I let the rest of them fall on the ground and then in March I started
to see little lettuce begin to appear and we've already taken quite a nice
harvest today. And yeah, it's just a prime example of sometimes just letting things
go to seed and not doing anything, just sitting back and seeing what happens. You
can get some amazing results.
This wild garlic is going to seed and what I'm
doing is, I'm bending the stems over just encouraging them to drop the seeds onto
the soil here and then, like these ones over here,
and then I'll plant these modules out under the trees a bit later in the year.
Sweet Cicely seeds are quite large so they're fairly easy to handle and
although I'm tempted to keep masses of them, I'm also going to scatter some of
them on the ground around the plant. I'll know that's what they are because
they're right next to the plant and they will have that telltale paleness on
their young leaves.
I still consider myself to be quite new to seed saving
and I started with the basics and that was with legumes. For example these
runner beans, I've got scarlet runner beans here, and also with peas. In fact
peas are the easiest, you just save them after they've dried at the end of the
year and grow them the following year. The same is with runner beans, I'm going
to let these grow and I'm trying to grow extra runner beans this year, just so I
can save a lot more seeds and also use those in seed swaps as well, to perhaps
swap with seed varieties that I can't quite save seed from. And the plan is I'm
keeping these run of beans away from the other climbing beans and
runner beans, because even though they're very unlikely to cross-pollinate
because they're self pollinating - this is the same with peas - just to reduce any
likelihood of adventurous bees going between the flower,s I'm just keeping
them around 10 metres away from the rest.
Here are my runner beans, it's a variety
called White Lady and I'll leave information about all the plants I've
talked about today in the video description.
Some of these beans. like
this one are growing from seed, others like this one, I grow as perennial beans
and if you haven't seen those videos yet, I also leave a link for those.
This lovely old variety of runner bean will cross pollinate with other runners and
behind me just over here, I have the Greek gigantes beans and they are also
white flowered with a white bean. And there's a very real chance that
over the last four years they have cross pollinated and that I'm now growing a
cross between those two. It's a gamble I've chosen to take and I have found
that the beans inside the pods of these runner beans are getting bigger, which
would imply to me that they are cross pollinating. So I may end up with two
rows of of mixed beans - I'm okay with that. If it gets the point where the
Greek gigantes beans are getting too small inside their pods, I'll buy some
fresh seeds from a seed seller.
I collect seeds from nasturtiums from the moment
they start producing them. You can collect them when they first appear, in
the green like this and dry them out, or you can wait until a bit later in the
year and they will start to go much darker and brown and collect them then.
The other thing you can do is, if you collect them when they're green, is that
you can pickle them and use them as an alternative to capers.
And calendula seeds are also easy to collect now. I would prefer to wait until they are
browner, so they've already started drying. You can collect the seed heads when they
first start forming, but it is better to wait until the seeds are more developed
and then just remove any green parts or orange parts of the flower and just save the seeds.
Our first flush of chive flowers are now well and truly in seed.
And all I do is pick up one seed head, it makes it very easy to collect.
When it comes to seed saving something you've got to do is, you want to pick seeds or
you want to save seeds from the plants that show the most vigor and the most
health because if you choose the best examples, chances are the seeds are going
to perform the best. If you save seeds from just weak plants or plants that have
bolted prematurely, like lettuce, chances are they're not going to perform as well
as you'd expect, when it comes to sowing those seeds the following years.
Thanks Huw! The last thing for me to do is to put away my pencil, store away some cosmos
and the nine style broccoli seeds. The Sweet Cicely I'm taking indoors so I'm going
to pop it in a pot. I will make sure I've labeled the pot and put the date on it.
There we go, 13th of July 2020. I'll get these into there and get them in the fridge.
And so wherever you are in the world and whatever you've got planned
for today, I hope it's good one and I also hope you'll join me again next time.