When I first started growing vegetables here in Ireland, I also started seed saving even
though I only had a small garden, as I thought it was a very cool and an important thing to do.
For a few years, seed saving was a regular part of my seasonal routines in the gardens,
but generally only for vegetables that it was easier to save seeds from such as peas and beans.
But then I didn’t save seeds for almost a decade for a variety of different reasons,
but more recently I have become interested in starting to save seeds again.
This season I saved seeds from quite a few different varieties and vegetables,
which has been really interesting, as well as a bit distracting and time consuming.
And now I am again faced with the question of what to do with them all.
Like many new growers, seed saving was one of the things that really inspired
me to start growing vegetables. And looking back at it, I find
it interesting that I stopped doing what I once felt to be so important.
And the factors that are prompting me to start seed saving again are quite
different from before, and based on the evolving context that I find myself in.
In the past I was very interested in saving seeds from heritage varieties, but a lot of
the seeds that I saved I didn’t end up using, and ended up throwing out a lot of the precious
seeds that I had spent time and effort saving. In hindsight this was perhaps an inappropriate
use of valuable growing space in the small garden that I started with,
and a distraction from other important tasks when I started growing in much larger spaces.
When I shifted my focus to this larger RED Gardens project, exploring multiple different
gardening methods, I found it was an added hassle to include seed saving as I already
had too much to keep track of and look after. And it was more difficult trying to fit the
seed saving into the planting plans of these gardens, where plants designated
for seed could occupy the space for quite a bit longer, and saving seeds from one garden would
make more difficult to really compare the yield and productivity between the gardens.
I also found cheaper sources of seeds, buying in larger quantities that better suited the
increasing scale of the growing space I was managing, and buying in all the seeds I needed
was an easy way to reduce my workload and the diversity of things that I needed to manage.
I have been thinking a lot more about seeds in the last few years, with a focus on supply
constraints, seed quality and resilience. Brexit has been a big issue over the past
few years because most of the seeds that we use to get in Ireland come through the UK, and now
that those suppliers are outside of the European Union, they cannot ship seeds back into the EU.
I saw this coming to a certain extent, and ordered additional supplies a few years ago,
and have been sourcing seeds from other suppliers in Germany,
but this is not ideal as it is quite a different climate in Germany.
And then there was the supply chain issues caused by the global health crisis,
which also prompted a lot of people to want to start growing vegetables, which was great
but definitely impacted the availability of seeds and other supplies needed in the gardens.
I have also been disappointed with the quality of some seeds I had been getting,
some from the larger suppliers in the UK, as well from a few smaller suppliers here in Ireland.
I have also been doing a few variety trials with some types of vegetables, now that I have more
growing space, and I figure that this was a good opportunity to save seeds from this diversity
of different varieties for use in the future. Finally I feel that I have a bit more capacity
these days, with the existing growing spaces doing well and with newer spaces being established there
is more room to explore this fascinating part of vegetable growing that I have been missing.
This past year I saved seeds from the beans and pea plants, which are perhaps
the easiest crops to save seeds from. The crop of climbing beans that I grow
each season in the Polytunnel Garden have self pollinating flowers, where pollen is rarely
transferred between one flower and another, and I only grew one variety in that space this year,
so there was virtually no chance of cross pollination with another variety.
I left a cluster of pods at the base of one group of plants to continue to mature and develop seeds,
and I removed some of the leaves from around them so that the sun could get in to help dry the pods
and prevent any mould form forming in the humid environment.
And I picked them when they were almost dry, and allowed them to dry completely inside
before shelling, sorting and storing the seeds. These types of beans are perhaps the easiest
vegetables to save seed from, and I only need a small amount of seeds for each season.
But I have resisted saving seeds in the past few years,
partially because I had thought that letting some pods mature would prevent the plants from
producing additional pods later in the season, but I am no longer convinced that this is the case.
Peas are another self pollination plant, and I wanted to collect more
of these seeds as I grow a lot peas each season in the different gardens.
So I left all of the pods growing in one section of a row of pea plants in one of the outside
gardens, picking them when they were mostly dry. This meant that we had fewer fresh peas to enjoy
in the summer, but that is one of the downsides with saving seed, and I have
to extrapolate the possible total yield of this batch in order to make
comparisons with the crops in the other gardens. With one of the batches of broad or fava beans
I left a few of the lower pods on a bunch of plants to produce mature and dried seeds.
These are also self pollinating flowers, but apparently cross pollination by insects can occur.
I only grew one variety, but a neighbour grew another variety about 30m away so
there is a possibility that some of the seeds will have been cross pollinated.
And there was more of a chance that the runner beans seeds that I saved were cross pollinated
as I grew two different varieties of this vigorous plant, and at least one
other variety was grown not so far away. Because the varieties were quite similar
any cross pollination will not likely have much of an impact, and I think it is probably fine
to use these seeds for the next few years, but I don’t want to save seeds from this
new generation of seeds as I don’t want to risk messing with the characteristics of the variety.
In the other larger polytunnel, I planted most of one long bed with bush beans,
trying out 15 different varieties, in order to figure out which varieties would
be the most appropriate to grow in the future. Apparently the flowers of these plants rarely
cross pollinate, and because there were so few pollinating insects in this Polytunnel, I figured
it was fine to save seeds from each variety, even though they were right beside each other.
With plants like this I had to set aside pods for seed saving
before I had enough information to determine if it was really worth growing that variety again.
And it made sense to keep all of the different varieties,
or to at least bulk up and renew the seeds for each variety for possibly future use.
But with these bush plants, I found it more difficult to separate out what pods that I
wanted to leave for seeds, and it wasn’t easy to remove some of the surrounding leaves to allow
them to dry more effectively, as I did with the climbing beans in the other Polytunnel.
It would have been much easier if I had just selected one plant to save seeds from,
which I was hesitant to do, and if I had been able to keep the plants from falling over,
and it If I had looked after the plants a lot better.
I ended up leaving quite a few pods to mature, rather than setting aside only enough for seeds,
and a fair amount ended up rotting or failing to produce decent seeds.
This was a shame, as it meant that we harvested fewer pods to eat, and it was
a lot more time consuming separating out the good pods and seeds at the end of the season.
But now I have an abundance of seeds to continue to maintain the 15 different varieties,
more than enough for growing in the next few years.
In the same large polytunnel I also grew 28 different varieties of tomatoes,
as a second year of a large variety trial,
and I figured that it was a good opportunity to save seeds from all the different varieties.
Apparently the flowers of most tomato varieties are self pollinating,
but there are a few varieties with larger flowers where cross pollination is possible.
But because there were so few bees and other insects in this polytunnel,
I figure that there was a good chance to maintain each variety as a separate strain,
even though there is still a very slight chance that some of the varieties had crossed.
In some ways saving the seeds of tomatoes is easier than with the beans, as I can save seeds
from any tomato that is fully ripe, which is the same stage that I want to harvest them at.
But processing the seeds is more complicated, involving extracting the seeds,
allowing them to ferment for a few days until the gelatinous coating of the seeds rots away,
and then quickly drying them. And it was a fair amount of
effort to save seeds from the 28 varieties. I selected several tomatoes to save seed from,
which meant I ended up with hundreds of seeds from most of the varieties, and thousands of tomato
seeds in total, way more than I could ever use. I could simply discard most of the seeds,
and even get rid of the seeds from the varieties that I have decided I probably won’t grow again,
but this seems like a waste of the efforts that I had put in.
With the seeds I saved this season, I was careful to dry them thoroughly,
and sort through them to remove any that seemed poor quality.
And I did a basic germination test, sowing a reasonable number of seeds from each batch of
each variety of seeds that I saved into pots, and setting them to germinate under the grow lights.
I wanted to make sure that enough of the seeds germinated, producing vigorous and
fairly consistent seedlings, before I stored them, or planned to use them next year.
I was really pleased with most of them, though some of the bush bean seeds were less vigorous,
probably because the mature pods had not been able to dry out quickly.
And a few of the batches of tomato seeds had lower germination rates,
I think because the seeds had started to sprout during the few days they were being cleaned.
If I do grow these poor quality seeds I need to make sure I sow significantly
more than the number of plants that I need. But in total I saved seeds from 45 different
varieties of vegetables last year, mostly tomato and bush been varieties, some of which
I am unlikely to ever grow again, and with most of them there are way too many seeds for my own use.
And this raises the issue of what to do with them all, so that my efforts are not wasted,
and at the same time I need to accept that having way too many seeds is an
inevitable part of any seed saving, and that discarding surplus seeds is an ok thing to do.
I set aside a portion of the seeds from the varieties that I want to grow again this year,
and stored a reasonable amount for each variety in the freezer, where they will
continue to be viable for a long time. With the seed that was leftover,
I decided to divide them up into small envelopes, for sharing with other people in my community.
I think sharing surplus seeds is kind of inevitable for anyone saving seeds,
and if I’m going to continue to save seeds at this kind of scale, then this is probably
something I should focus on and organise. It also means that I need to be sure that
cross pollination does not occur, that I grow enough plants to maintain the genetic
health of each variety, and that the seeds are really good quality.
That is the challenge with one variety of beetroot and a variety of leeks that I am planning to save
seeds from, where I have transplanted quite a few of these biennial plants into a separate
area so that they can continue to grow and produce flowers and seeds this coming summer.
And when they are flowering I need to make sure that there aren’t any
other leek or beetroot plants in the area that are also flowering,
to avoid any cross pollination. And hopefully we will have dry
enough weather while the seeds are maturing so that they don’t end up being damaged or
degraded, and if I am successful I’ll end up collecting a lot of seeds from these plants.
This is what happened with the seeds that I saved from a batch of carrots a few years ago,
and I could have more than enough to share for several years, so perhaps I don’t need
to save all the seeds from these plants. And I need to make sure that all this saving,
cleaning, storing and sharing of all of these seeds, fits in well with all the
other tasks in the gardens, and doesn’t become too much of a distraction from the main task of
growing vegetables and sharing what I learn, which is my primary job.