The garden season is just getting going so why am I talking about saving seeds already? Well, what you plant and where you plant it impacts your ability to save seeds that will come true later on. Why save seed, you may ask? Another good question with many good answers. Maybe the most significant is that human beings have been saving seeds for thousands of years. That’s thousands of year’s worth of partnership between plants and humans’ aiding each other’s evolution and it is a relationship in need of renewal and preservation. It is our birth right to save seeds.

Saved seeds provide better nutrition, creates economic security and food independence. It is a simple action every gardener can take to help preserve crop diversity and help create a sustainable future. You have all heard the stories of how we are losing crop diversity, and it is fairly startling if you consider not just the statistics, but the deeper implications. Consider, people all over the globe have been saving the best seeds and replanting them for the past 10,000-15,000 years. In the year 1900 people were eating 1500 different kinds of plants and thousands of varietal cultivars of each of those plants. Today, 90% of what we eat comes from just 30 plants. How do you think that affects the earth and us?

In the not too distant past there were many diverse strains of plants that were adapted to local ecosystems. Today there are only a few hybridized varieties, and increasingly these are artificially genetically ‘modified’, being mono-cropped all over the planet. Think about the implication to both the health of the planet and ourselves. Everyone knows that an ecosystem’s health depends on the biodiversity of life in it. The more genetic diversity the healthier the ecosystem.

Case in point, the Irish Potato Famine. Now there were some political consideration involved too, but for the sake of this discussion I want to point out that only 1 potato variety was being planted in all of Ireland. Along comes a disease that this variety is susceptible to and the entire crop is ruined. Same thing happened to bananas in Central America in the 1960’s, and here in the Southern United States in 1970 we lost a billion dollars worth of genetically uniform corn to a single disease. Only when many varieties of a crop are being grown do you have genetic diversity, then when a disease or pest comes in, you have a better chance at getting a harvest since not every variety will fall prey.

It’s really very simple to get started, so start small and slow, you don’t have to save seed of everything you grow, although once you get into it you will want to! Here are some really easy plants to start with, and remember, you must start with open pollinated seeds. Open pollinated varieties are stable varieties that are the result of pollination between the same or genetically similar parents. Hybrid varieties are a result of pollination between two genetically different parents. Hybrids produce seed that is often sterile or produce offspring that do not resemble the parent plant. It can be fun to try to un-hybridize them but that’s another column.

Peas, lettuce, beans, peppers and tomatoes are all easy to save seed from. All of these self pollinate and need very little distance between different varieties. Ok, what did that mean?

Plants that self pollinate do just that, pollination happens inside the flower just before it opens. No other plants or flowers are needed for pollination, so the seed resulting from this will be true to the parent. It is recommended that you separate different varieties of the same plant by certain distances though, in case some well meaning bee tramps in pollen from another plant. This doesn’t usually happen, because as we said, the pollination already happened inside the flower.

We will look at peas and lettuce this week and I’ll follow up with more in weeks to come. With peas it is recommended that you separate varieties by 50 feet. Another technique you can use if space is in short supply is to plant varieties that bloom at different times, or stagger the planting of varieties that bloom at the same time. The fun part is in the choosing of plants you want to save seed from. You want to save seed from plants that have beneficial characteristics, like overall vitality, big pods, vines that produce really sweet peas etc. So here’s the hard part, you have to leave some of the really great tasting peas on the vines you’ve chosen to fully ripen and mature! You’ll know this is happening when the pods begin to dry and look brown. Once the pods you have chosen are dry on the vine, you can cut the entire plant at the base, place the plant upside down in a paper bag and tie the bag around the stem of the plant, then hang it someplace that’s dry and wait for the seed pods to open. When they have opened, all you have to do is shell the dry peas and store them in an airtight container in a dry, cool, dark place until next year’s planting time comes.

Lettuce is really fun and easy too. The separation distance is 20’, and again you can stagger planting different varieties or plant varieties that bloom at different times if space is short. Choose the plants that display good characteristics and let them bolt or go to flower. It is possible to harvest a few outside leaves before they go to flower but you need to make sure that the plant has enough energy to flower and ripen seed. Once they have flowered they need another 3 or so weeks to ripen and mature the seed. When you see that half the flowers have dried up it is time to cut the plant down and hang it upside down in a paper bag. The flowers will dry at different rates so every few days you can give the bag a shake and collect the seeds that fall. Make sure they are good and dry before storing them in an airtight container in a cool, dry, dark place.

See that’s pretty easy. It really doesn’t take much extra effort than planting the garden and soon you will have developed a locally adapted variety of your own helping to increase the genetic diversity in your mini ecosystem.