Seed saving is becoming a larger part of this RED Gardens Project, taking up more of the time and
space that I have available, and I'm returning to that activity that really interested me when
I started my journey towards growing my own food more than 20 years ago. There are lots of reasons
for seed saving including saving money, becoming more resilient and self-reliant, preserving
heritage varieties, maintaining a diversity of seed supplies that are available, breeding new
varieties, adapting to climate change, or even just exploring and enjoying this fascinating part
of food production. Most of these were part of the reasons why I started saving seeds so many years
ago, but then I went through a quite a long period where seed saving wasn't a part of the vegetable
gardens that I was managing, where I saved a very few seeds. But for the last few years I've
been saving lots of seeds, both from the easy crops and the ones that are more challenging,
including onions, where producing too many seeds is one of the issues that I need to deal with.
Onions are biennial plants, where they grow for one season and store up a lot of nutrients
and energy in the swollen part of the onion itself, and then use that energy and nutrients
the following year to produce a lot of seeds. So in order to save onion seeds we generally
need to grow an onion first, and not eat it, and then find place in our gardens to grow it,
to save seeds from it the next year. Onion seeds can be saved in one year with plants that bolt,
or prematurely send up a flower stalk, but it's generally considered to be not a good idea to use
these seeds, as it increases the likelihood of selecting for that bolting tendency, which would
impact future crops. Onions and related crops like leeks produce tall beautiful spheres of flowers
in the second year, which are insect pollinated, which means I can only save seeds from one variety
at a time to avoid cross-pollination, or to separate the varieties by considerable distances.
Each small flower on the sphere produces a cluster of seeds, like segments of an orange,
which creates the angular shape of the onion seeds. With several seeds in each flower, and
many seeds in each globe or sphere, and each plant sending up multiple flower stems, there's usually
more than enough seeds for most people from one plant or even one globe. But we need to save seeds
from many plants in order to maintain the genetic diversity and health of the variety. I know some
people who save onion seeds from one plant or even one globe, in order to have enough seeds for
the next few years, but the more this process is repeated without getting fresh seeds, it greatly
increases the risk of inbreeding the strain, and ending up with poorer crops. But if I want to
maintain an onion variety and continue to produce the highest quality seed for myself, and to share
with others, and potentially even refine or adopt a variety, then more onions need to be set aside,
more space in the gardens need to be taken up with seed saving, and a lot more seed will be produced.
Last year, in 2022, we grew a large trial of 15 different varieties of onions in one of
the large beds of the simple garden. And we grew even more of three of the varieties in
some of the other gardens, selecting these three varieties based mainly on the description from
the seed suppliers. I decided to save seeds from one of these three varieties this year,
as they were the only ones that we had enough onions to work with. As we can't save seeds from
a hybrid variety, we haven't had good success growing red onions in these gardens, I was
left with the one open-pollinated variety, and this one seemed to produce a reasonable crop. In
hindsight this wasn't the best option, as some of the other varieties produced more in the gardens,
stored for longer, and we preferred using in the kitchen. But this was a reasonable variety and
it was all we could really work with for saving seeds this past season. We set aside 20 of the
best bulbs that we had harvested from this variety from the different gardens, which all seem to be
in good shape and large size and characteristic of the variety, but we only ended up using 18 as
two of the onions started to show signs of rot by the time we got to replanting them.
Late last year, I replanted these onions in the corner of one of the polytunnels taking
up about 2 meters of the bed. I felt that a polytunnel was a better option in our climate,
as there were drier conditions and faster growth and maturity, which would hopefully lead to better
quality seeds. I tried to save leek seeds outside in the previous year, but that didn't work out
very well. The soil of the bed had good fertility, but I didn't amended it any more as I didn't think
that this would be necessary. By spring the regrowth of all the plants was really strong,
sending up multiple stems per plant, which I wasn't really expecting, but it makes sense
is this is similar to how the closely related garlic and shallots will grow. This produced a
lot of flower stems, and crowded out the bed a bit, and I ended up removing about a quarter of
the smaller stems to reduce the crowding, but I'm not sure if this was useful. I was worried
that there would be enough insects coming into the polytunnel to pollinate all these flowers,
but I placed them near the door and some of the other crops were attracting in pollinators,
and I often saw bees and other insects at the onion flowers. By mid August most of the seeds
in a lot of the seed heads seem mature, and some of them were falling out onto the soil below, so
I carefully cut the stems and tried not to shake them anymore to lose any more seeds. I tied up the
stems in clusters and hung them over a large tote to catch any of the seeds that fell out,
and set them aside in a well ventilated space out of the sun to dry some more.
About a month later there were lots of seeds at the bottom of the tote, and when I gently shook
the bunches even more seeds fell out. I was wondering if these seeds that fell out easily
were better, more ripe or better quality than the seeds that were held on more tightly by the
drying flower clusters, so I decided to keep them separate. I used a blower to remove some of the
chaff and dust and probably lost a few seeds in the processed, picked out a lot of stems by hand,
and used a sieve to separate out the larger heavier flower clusters that still had seeds
in them. And I ended up with a lot of seeds from this first batch, more than I think I would ever
use. I then rubbed the seed heads, and banged them against the side of the tote to try to remove the
rest of the seeds. Shaking the container allowed most of the seeds to settle to the bottom or the
stems and flowers to rise to the top where I could pick them off, and then I repeated the process
of blowing and cleaning, and I ended up with a similar amount of seeds from the second batch.
I decided to do a germination test on both batches and I selected 50 seeds from each batch and placed
them in a cut up coffee filter, lining them up in the fold of the filter paper, thinking that this
would make it easier to evaluate or separate them later. I dampened the filter papers and placed
them in a sealed jar on the kitchen counter, and I opened them every day to make sure they
were still damp, but not too wet. After about 8 days most of the seeds seem to have germinated,
so I opened up the papers and separated out all the seedlings from the ungerminated seeds,
in order to count them. There were about the same number of strong seedlings in each batch,
and a similar number of seeds that seemed to have just germinated, and a similar
number of seeds that hadn't germinated yet. The two batches seem very similar,
though there was potentially slightly stronger growth in the seedlings of the second batch,
which might be due to variable conditions within the jar when germination or some other factor.
But they were close enough that it didn't really matter if I mixed the seeds. I was
a bit disappointed that the germination rate was lower than expected with only 60% of the
seeds producing strong vigorous seedlings. Seeds that I've saved from other vegetables often have
close to 100% germination rate, but I don't really know what to expect from onion seeds,
and I wonder if saving seeds from only the larger flower clusters would improve things.
Combining the two batches I ended up with more than 200 grams of seeds, and apparently there's
between 250 and 400 seeds in every gram, so that means I ended up with somewhere between
50,000 and 80,000 onion seeds this year. And that is a lot, especially compared to the 200
to 500 seeds that would be an a typical onion seed packet that most gardeners would buy. So
if I was satisfied with this variety, I would have enough onion seeds to last me for decades,
if I was able to get the seeds to remain viable for that long, which is probably only possible if
I store them in the freezer. But I'm not sure if this is the best variety to grow. It produced a
reasonably good yield in the variety trials last year, and again this year, but it didn't store
as well as some of the other varieties, which is a key characteristic that I'm looking for,
and we preferred using other varieties in the kitchen. So I have all these onion seeds from a
variety that is okay, but but not necessarily the variety I would have picked to save seeds from,
if I had all the information I have now. I will probably give some of these seeds to my friends
and neighbours, and contribute some to the local seed exchange and I'll definitely be adding some
to my seed collection in the freezer for potential future use. But as I'm planning to save even more
seeds from other varieties over the next few years, I suspect that the only way most of the
seeds that I saved this year will end up getting used is if I use them for growing microgreens.
Onions are one of those crops that probably doesn't make sense for most people to save
seeds from, but I think I can justify it at the scale that I'm working at. Based on the
onion variety trials that I've conducted over the last two years there's probably three or
four onion varieties that I'd like to continue to grow into the future, each with different
qualities and uses. It makes sense to save seeds from one of these varieties next year,
and I've selected one that I like for its taste and aesthetic qualities, rather than its yield.
I've already set aside about 20 good quality bulbs from this variety for replanting for saving seeds,
and I hope that this is enough to maintain the genetics of the variety. And I will probably
be saving more seeds from the other varieties over the next few years as it would be nice to
have my own seed from all of the open-pollinated varieties that I want to grow. And if I want to
explore trying to refine and adapt a variety to our local context and climate I would need
to save seeds off of several different generations at least, which means that I'll probably be saving
onion seeds every year for the foreseeable future. I'm going to end up with way too many onion seeds,
so I'm looking at ways to reduce the amount of seeds that I save each time,
and the amount of space that the seed saving takes up in the gardens, while still producing
the highest quality seeds. I'm going to try replanting the onions a lot closer together,
and then in the spring to remove all but the strongest shoots and buds. I'm not sure how
well this will work, but there should be the same genetic diversity with the same number of plants,
but a lot fewer seed heads and less crowding, and fewer seeds to collect and clean. And I
wonder if this will lead to bigger seed heads and stronger seeds, which will also be a good
outcome. Hopefully this will be a way to get an appropriate amount of higher quality seeds from
a smaller space rather than getting way too many seeds that I don't know what to do with.
One of the ways that I can deal with all the seeds that I'm going to be saving,
is to focus on sharing with even more people, to become a seed supplier,
and that would be a logical progression. But I already have a lot to do, and I'm not really
keen on all of the administration, packaging and distribution that would be involved,
especially if it distracts me from all the explorations that I want to do in the gardens,
and all the videos that I want to make. Sharing experiences, trials, successes, failures, and
knowledge, is the core part of this RED Gardens Project, not necessarily sharing seeds. If you
like these videos, and have the spare resources to be able to support my work in the gardens,
and to help me make more videos like these, please check out the links to my Patreon
and PayPal account in the video description. but more importantly thank you for watching.