May 30th, 2010 by admin

For many years, the best way for a gardener to ensure a good crop in following years was to save the seeds from the strongest plants. It’s still the best way but for years, few people practiced this as it was easier just to buy new seeds from suppliers. (Speaking of suppliers, if you want to see some beautiful garden-related art, go browse the Seed Catalog collection at the Smithsonian. Click on explore if you want to waste an hour browsing!)

In addition to ensuring the plants are hardy for the region, the practice of seed saving also ensures a greater variety to the global seed stock. At a time when corporations like Monsanto expressly forbid seed saving by farmers using their “products,” seed saving has also become a political act.

Back in 1603 it was not political; Richard Gardiner, in Profitable Instructions for Kitchin Gardens, has this to say about “The best way to obtaine seede Beanes for Gardens”:

There be three kindes of Beanes, whereof there is but one perfect good for Gardens, that is the great and large white Beane: and when your Beanes are fully ripe, choose yearely the greatest of them for seede, and you shall finde great profit in so doing, if you have cause to sowe many of them, and your Beanes will prove very profitable in the common wealth.

About lettuce, George Johnson had this to say in The Kitchen Garden (1836):

To produce seed, some of the finest and most perfect plants of each variety that bave survived the winter, or from the forwardest sowing of the year should be selected. The seed from any that have run up prematurely cannot be depended upon. All other plants must be removed from their neighbourhood, themselves being left at least a foot apart; neither is it allowable for two varieties to flower near each other, or only mongrel varieties will be obtained. Each stem is advantageously attached to a stake as a support in tempestuous weather. It is to be observed that the branches must be gathered as the seed ripens upon them and not left until the whole is ready, as some will ripen two or three weeks before others, and consequently the first and best seed will be shed and lost. It must be particularly well dried before it is beaten out and stored.

Both Gardiner and Johnson describe methods for saving seeds of the most common vegetables and herbs. For the modern equivalents, check the International Seed Saving Institute (ISSI) which also classifies plants in to beginner, experienced and expert levels for seed saving.  Closer to home, read and watch how it’s done at Salt Spring Seeds.

seed saving