Saving seeds was one of the things that inspired me to start growing vegetables in the first
place, as I felt it was a crucial part of being able to engage with the full cycle of
producing my own vegetables.
I started saving seeds on the first year that I had my own vegetable garden and continued
to do it for quite a number of years after that.
But then I stopped saving seeds for a few of reasons, mainly because seed saving didn’t
really fit into the research focus of the series of family scale gardens that I was
working on at the time.
Apart from a few bean seeds, I haven’t saved any seeds at all for the quite a number of
years, but this year I’ve decided to start again, and I've saved my very first batch
of carrot seeds.
Over the past few years I’ve been quite pleased with the carrots I’ve been able
to grow, most of the time, especially with a main crop variety called Autumn King, which
has been producing large yields of tasty carrots that I store overwinter.
It's become a variety that I really like, and I've developed the skills to be able to
grow this crop quite well, which are two of the criteria that I think are important in
determining what vegetables I'm going to save seeds from.
But more than many other crops, saving seeds from carrots can take a fair amount of time,
can be tricky to get right, and uses up a fair amount of space.
This is mainly because carrots are a biennial crop, which grow slowly in the first year
and store lots of energy in a root that overwinters, and then uses that energy to produce lots
of seed in the second year.
There is also the possibility that the insect pollinated carrot flowers can be cross pollinated
with any other carrots that are flowering at the same time or with wild plants such
as Queen Anne’s Lace.
This means that I need to be a bit careful about where and how I grow them, and I should
really test the seed to make sure that it’s true to the variety that I wanted to save.
And if I want to ensure that the seeds from this variety of carrot don’t become less
productive and inbred after successive rounds of seed saving into the future, I should really
save seeds from quite a few plants, which will take up a fair amount of space.
Last year when I was harvesting a decent crop of this variety of carrots from one of my
gardens, I set aside about 40 roots for seed saving.
I selected some of the best carrots, the ones that seemed to most closely match the shape
and characteristics of this variety.
This is one of the unfortunate things about saving seeds from crops like carrots, that
you don’t actually get to eat the some of best of the carrots that you grow.
I carefully re-planted these carrots in a patch of soil beside my polytunnel garden,
which was in a relatively sheltered spot, and wasn’t being used for any of my other
explorations.
It was also right beside a couple of honeybee hives which I thought would help with the
pollination these carrot flowers.
I re-planted the carrots about 30cm apart, with about 70cm between the rows, in a prepared
bed which took up about 8m2.
These seed carrots need to be re-planted at the spacing quite a bit wider than they were
originally grown in, as apparently the flower stalks of these plants can take up quite a
bit of space, and it's best to encourage good ventilation between the plants.
I’ve watched a lot of carrots grow from seed, but I’ve never seen a bunch of carrots
regrow in the second season like this, and it’s interesting how different the growth
and structure of the plants are.
During the summer the umbrella shaped flowers that are characteristic of this family of
plants started to form, with each umbrella made up of many tiny flowers.
It was also interesting to see how many of these umbrellas each plant produced, with
significant variation in size, and most of the pollination seems to occur in around the
middle of July.
A lot of different types of insects were attracted to these flowers, and apparently many of them
can act as pollinators as they walk across the umbrella clusters, or when they fly from
one cluster to the next, spreading pollen around.
We had a period of quite strong wind during the middle of August, as the seeds were starting
to develop, which caused a lot of the tall flower stalks to fall over onto each other.
In hindsight I probably should have put up a few posts and tied up the tall plants to
prevent them from lodging like this, but it still seemed that I would be able to harvest
most of the seeds.
In early September, I begin testing to see when the seeds might be ready to harvest.
I wanted to wait until the seeds were mature enough, but to not leave them so long as they
might shake loose and fall to the ground.
I was also concerned about the relatively wet weather that we had been having, so I
waited to harvest the seed until there was a breezy and sunny day, to try reduce the
amount of moisture that might be in these seed clusters.
Each plant had a least one larger umbrella, which apparently contains the strongest seeds,
but I also picked a lot of the other umbrellas that seemed to be ready.
I left the smaller seed clusters and the ones that didn't seem manure enough yet, and I
was planning to harvest these the following week, but I didn’t get back to the task
in time and I figured I probably had more than enough seed.
I carefully laid out all of the flower heads onto trays and placed them into a ventilated
propagation space so that they could completely dry.
Once they were dry I went through the methodical and relatively slow process of separating
the seeds from the seed heads, trying not to pull off too many tiny stems.
Each of the seeds has many tiny spines or hairs attached to it that are usually removed
in order to make it easier to sow the seeds, but apparently this isn’t necessary for
the seeds to germinate.
I had researched a number of different options for cleaning the seeds, and tried out a few
of them.
I found that rubbing the seeds gently between two pieces of sandpaper was quite effective,
as was rubbing them with my hand in a sieve.
I separated the seed from all of the dust and tiny pieces with this sieve, and then
gently blowing and winnowing, and removed some of the larger pieces by hand.
I wasn’t so concerned about having completely clean seed, as a bit of debris in with the
seed really doesn’t matter, as I'm currently sowing all the seed by hand.
No doubt there’s plenty of other ways of being able to do this task, especially for
larger quantities, but with the scale and context I’m working at I’m usually interested
in finding really simple solutions, even if they do take a little bit of extra time.
I ended up with about 120g of clean carrot seed, which is a lot, and I could have got
quite a bit more, perhaps even double that amount, if I had harvested all of the smaller
seed heads, but then these seeds might not have been as strong.
Apparently there is about 800 carrot seeds in each gram, so this means that I might have
harvested up to 100,000 seeds, which is a huge amount of seeds.
The small packets of seeds that most gardeners would buy, typically contain only about a
gram of seeds, but I generally purchase seeds in much larger quantities, typically purchasing
50g of seeds for this variety each year, though I generally don’t sow all of it in one season.
So I’d estimate that this one harvest of seeds could be enough to last 3 years of sowings
that I typically do in all of the gardens that I currently grow in, and three years
is apparently how long the seeds could remain strong and viable, if they're stored properly.
But looking at it in another way, if I was to purchase this much organic Autumn King
carrot seeds it would cost between 15 and 40 euro, depending on the supplier.
And given the amount of time that it took to grow, and care for and harvest all of the
seed, and the amount of space that it took up to grow them, it would be a lot easier
to simply buy the seed.
On top of that I wasn’t able to eat or sell almost 8kg of really good carrots that I set
aside in order to be able to produce these seeds.
I can certainly understand why many farmers and growers don’t bother to save their own
seed, assuming that they’re even growing open pollinated varieties, as it doesn’t
make sense financially, and it takes a lot of time.
But there are a lot of other reasons for seed saving, including gaining a better understanding
of the whole process and to develop the necessary seed saving skills, which is something I’m
really interested in doing.
So I have loads of carrot seeds of a variety that I like to grow a lot of, but I’m not
keen on using them just yet, not until I’m relatively convinced that they are good enough
quality.
The first test would be to check the viability of the seed, to ensure that the seeds germinate
strongly, and this can be done by simply sowing a certain number of seeds in a tray of seed
compost.
And then there’s the issue of testing them to make sure that they're true to the variety,
to make sure that the flowers hadn't been cross pollinated.
I had checked the area to make sure that there weren’t any other varieties of carrot or
related weeds flowering at the same time, but I can’t be certain of this.
So for next season I am going to continue to grow mainly seeds that I’ve purchased
in all of my gardens, which I still have a lot of, and to to sow a test batch of these
saved seeds in another piece of ground.
And once they mature next autumn, hopefully I’ll be satisfied with the quality of the
seed, and I can use it for all of my gardens in 2021.
So, saving carrot seeds takes quite a length of time, with three years from the original
sowing in spring 2018 to the spring of 2021 when I will be finally able to grow with all
of my own seeds.
I could of course use all of these seeds next year, but I want to make sure that I get a
good crop of carrots from all of my garden next season, as this is more important for
this research project.
I’ve been able to grow another really good crop of the same variety of Autumn King carrots
this season, and I’m planning to save seeds from another batch next year.
Assuming everything works out okay, from 2021 onwards I’m only going to be growing this
variety of carrots from my own seeds.
And then I’ll have loads of seeds from these two batches, and I won’t need to save any
more of this variety of carrots for a number of years, and this opens up the possibility
of saving the seeds from other varieties of carrots in the following years.
There are also lots of other vegetables that I want to save seeds from, and to really get
back into seed saving in a significant way.
But I only want to save seeds from varieties of vegetables and I’m really happy with,
so I’m planning to grow a few variety trials in order to figure out which ones work best
in my context.
And I want to start with the types of vegetables that I fee that I've developed the skills
and knowledge to be able to grow them really well, so that it increases the chance that
I can produce really high quality seed.