For the past few years I have been gradually increasing the amount of
seed saving that I have been doing, returning to this important part of
the cycle of growing vegetables that I had been so interested in where I first started growing.
This started with some of the easier crops to save seeds from, including lots of different
varieties of tomatoes and green beans, as well as bulking up the quantities of peas,
broad beans and runner beans for the usual variety that I have been growing.
And a few years ago I also grew a big batch of carrots specifically for seed saving,
but this year I decide to do even more, to expand the types of vegetables and
the amount of seeds that I was producing. And scaling up my seed saving activities,
and saving seeds from a lot of the trickier types of vegetables, requires a better understanding of
what different vegetables need, additional growing spaces, and figuring out some techniques to make
some of the processes easier and more effective. I have quite enjoyed this additional focus on
seed saving in the gardens, and have saved a lot of seeds, and have learned a lot,
but I am still not sure where it is all going, and what will happen to all of these seeds.
For all of the beans, peas and tomato seeds that I have saved in the past,
and even more this season, it is fairly easy to save some seeds from the general crop,
as I grow them to produce the pods, seeds and fruit that the plant naturally want to produce.
I just need to avoid eating them, and to wait a little longer,
or process the seeds a bit, and to know when cross pollination may be an issue.
But with a lot of other vegetables, seed saving is a different phase of the plant growth entirely,
and eating the crop typically means that I can’t save seeds from it, or it at least means that I
need to leave the plants for an extended period of time before getting the seeds.
With so many other thing going on in the gardens, and to avoid messing around with
the other planting plans, I find it easier to separate out the seed saving crop,
to move it away from the other explorations. Up until this season I haven’t tried saving
seeds from lettuce and other types of leafy vegetables, as I have generally wanted to harvest
most of the leaves and pulled out any plants that showed early signs of bolting, because
early bolting was not a characteristic that I wanted to encourage in the seeds that I saved.
But this year I decided to grow rocket or arugula plants in grow bags specifically for seed saving,
sowing them earlier in the spring in one of the polytunnels, and moving them outside as they got
bigger and started produce a flower stalk. I like the idea of using bags or moveable
containers for seed saving like this, as it is more flexible, and separate from the usual
planting plans for the main garden spaces, but I underestimated how large the plants would get.
There were lots of insects visiting the flowers, but I wasn’t worried about cross
pollination in this case as apparently rocket won’t cross with other brassica species.
I wanted to grow quite a few plants, to make sure that the diversity of the genetics of the
variety was included for seed saving, but I had probably left too many plants in each grow bag,
which became quite crowded, and I struggled to keep them watered.
And I should have supported the heavy seed stalks with a better kind of structure or frame.
I wasn’t so successful at gathering up the seed pods as they dried,
and many burst open, losing a lot of seeds on the ground,
but the processes of podding and winnowing to separate out the seeds was fairly easy,
and I still ended up with about 100 grams of rocket seeds, which will last quite a while.
I also grew one variety of radish for seed saving in the same way as the rocket plants,
but I did thin to fewer plants per bag. And I was really surprised how big the roots
got and how long they grew before they started to develop a seed head, especially compared to
the usual dense sowings in the gardens which often prompt plants to bolt quite quickly.
These big roots eventually developed huge flower stalks,
most of which fell over, so some kind of support frame would be useful next time.
And the seed pods took a lot longer to develop the I had thought, and I only cut off the seed stalks
in September, 5 months after sowing the seeds, and hung them under cover to cure some more and dry.
Even after drying the pods inside for a while they were still fairly difficult to break open,
at least compared to the brittle seed pods of the rocket plants.
There were way to many pods to break open individually,
and I researched a few different options, but ended up just stomping on the seed pods
with clean boots inside a big pot to crush them enough so that most of the seeds were released.
I then used a battery powered blower to blow out the chaff and dust,
which was a little bit trickier than with the larger bean seeds
that I had cleaned in this way, but doing it on a very windy day helped.
I probably lost a fair amount of seeds along the way, but it was relatively quick and easy,
and I ended with about 150 grams of radish seeds which will last quite a few seasons.
We have been growing 6 or 7 different types of lettuce, often mixed together
in a single sowing, and I quite like one of the varieties, a small cos lettuce type.
So earlier in this year I decided to transplant 12 immature plants from a
mixed sowing of lettuce heads into a space in the side bed of one of the polytunnels.
The flowers of lettuce plants are apparently self pollinating, so a possible lack of insects in the
Polytunnel would not have been a problem, and it seems I could have saved seeds from
several varieties at a time, especially if I could give them a bit of distance.
But I haven’t saved seeds from lettuce before, and I was not sure how they would do in this
warmer and more humid environment, but I figured that protection from the wind and rain would help.
The plants seemed to grow well, even if the plants were initially stressed by the transplanting,
and eventually produced tall seed stalks with numerous unremarkable flowers that
opened in stages rather than all at once. I didn’t really know how easy it would be to
collect the seeds, and tried picking a few but hand as they matured, but this would have been
really time consuming, and because of the lack of wind and rain, I was more comfortable leaving the
stalks until most of the seed heads were dried. Then I cut off the large clusters and hit them
against the insides of a clean tote container, and I was surprised how quickly a lot of the
seed pods emptied, filling the bottom of the tote with lots of chaff, fluff and seeds.
It was quite easy to use the blower to gently blow out most of the lighter fluff,
but the chaff and some of the seed pods that had broken off were a bit more difficult to blow out
without also blowing away a lot of the seeds. I used a colander to sieve out some of the
larger pieces but I ended up picking out a lot of the chaff by hand in
order to end up with relatively clean seeds. No doubt I could have got a lot more seed if
I had used better methods for harvesting and cleaning, but I still ended up with over 100
grams of lettuce seed from this one variety, and assuming that it is good quality seed,
that is more than I could use ever before they get too old to germinate.
We ended up with a lot of fairly large beetroot in one of the gardens last year,
of an open pollinated variety that I have grown for a while, and last autumn I decided
to transplant 20 of these roots into the separate bed beside the older Polytunnel
I knew I that I probably never need the amount of seeds that this number of plants would produce,
especially as I am not convinced that this is the best variety, as I haven’t
been able to do a proper variety trial yet. But I have read that with this type of wind
pollinated plant, saving seeds from too few plants can cause problems with inbreeding over time,
and we had a lot of large roots, and a fair amount of space, so I though I’d try it out.
The original seeds for these plants were sown in early summer last year,
then transplanted in early winter into a separate seed saving bed, where they regrew to produce
tall flower stalks this year, and the seeds were only ready to be collected this autumn,
more than 16 months after the original sowing. The seed stalks became really tangled,
and I started collecting some of the seeds as they dried, but found that untangling the
mass of seed stems caused a lot of the ripe seeds to break off and fall to the ground.
So I waited until most of the seeds were dried, cut off all the seed stalks,
and hung them to dry protected from the rain. I wasn’t sure about the easiest way to remove
the seeds, but I found that I could use a glove to roughly brush the bundle of seed
stalks over a tote container, and this removed most of the seeds, which seemed good enough.
I was able to use a colander to further clean the seed clusters,
with the chaff and smaller seeds falling though holes to be discarded,
and I removed a lot of the remaining twigs by hand, and I ended up with a huge number of seeds.
Going through the original plants and carefully picking off the largest seeds would have been
an easier way get the relatively small number of seeds that I would need in
the gardens for the next few years, and I could also select only the largest seeds.
But by doing it this way, and collecting a lot more of the seeds I ended up with
over 400g of beetroot seeds from this one variety, which is a huge amount of seeds,
more than enough to share and to use for growing microgreens, which will go through a lot of them.
I also transplanted 40 extra leek seedlings last summer into the spare bed beside where
the beetroot would end up, and the leeks grew all last year and over the winter,
and sent out a tall flower stalk this summer.
I probably could have planted them a lot closer together, and I ended up having to tie up a
lot of the very tall and beautiful flowers stalks to prevent them from falling over.
These large globes of numerous flowers attracted a lot of insects to spread the pollen around,
and I kept an eye out for other leek plants that were bolting or going to seed in the surrounding
area to reduce the risk of cross pollination. I was surprised at how long the seed heads
seemed to take to mature, and as the wet weather of autumn came,
I cut off half of the seed heads and hung them to dry in a windy shed, but a couple of months later
it seems that they may have been cut too early, as they don’t seem to contain a lot of seeds.
And the seeds heads that I left on the plants seem to be in better shape, and the seeds seem to be
forming but not ready to harvest, but now that it is November, and more growth is unlikely, I
cut off the rest of the seed heads that were still in decent shape to dry in the warmth in the house.
So I still don’t know if I will get any good quality seeds out of these plants,
after all of this time, and I think next year I will try to grow leeks for seed saving in one of
the polytunnels, where the extra warmth might speed up the development of seeds the seeds.
I just need to make sure that the plants are close to the
polytunnel entrance so that the flowers are more likely to be visited by insects.
So, after this season, I have ended up with loads of pea and bean seeds, and more than
enough seeds from quite a few different varieties of green beans, to add to my expanding collection.
I have lots of rocket and radish seeds, more than enough for quite a few years, and a huge number of
lettuce and beetroot seeds from one variety, and assuming they are all good quality viable seeds,
I won’t need to save any more seeds for quite a few years, at least from these varieties.
But I am not yet sure if I will end up with any decent leek seeds this year.
I plan to store a decent sample of all the seeds I saved into the freezer for longer term storage,
especially with the different varieties of beans, and to set aside enough seeds of the
varieties I like to grow for a few years, and then anything that is left over I will
divide up into envelopes for sharing with other growers in my community.
Sowing seeds to produce microgreens is probably a good way to make use of
the excess amounts of beetroot seeds, and even the rocket, radish and lettuce seeds,
and extra bean seeds can end up in the kitchen, so there isn’t really any waste with any of this.
But I am still a bit wary of the amount of effort, space and time that is taken up by all of this,
and in a lot of cases it is just easier to buy in a lot of seeds and store them properly.
But I think that it is a useful thing to do, to explore how to save seeds from so many
different types of plants, growing enough to preserve the varieties, and knowing when cross
pollination may be an issue, especially after having serious issues with cross pollinated
squash seed that I bought this season. And I like the challenge of figuring
out methods and techniques for supporting the plants and harvesting and cleaning the seeds
in ways that are appropriate this scale that I am working at, and producing such an abundance
of seeds definitely increases resilience, especially when there is enough to share.
But in the end the value that I have put into all of this work will only be realised if the seeds
are actually used to grow crops, and I really hope that a lot more people in my community
will start growing more of their own vegetables. Because even now, at the beginning of what will
likely end up being many years of seed saving and exploration, I already have too many seeds.