Before free … the joy of home grown, fresh picked, so beautiful, so healthy. Today’s brunch.

This is the last pickings of chard and parsley, lightly sauteed with a fresh, neighbor’s “girls” egg, adorned with one of the indoor ripening tomatoes gathered by my friend when I was in the hospital. As I cut the veggies, delighting in their beauty and the tangible nourishment that I held in my hands, I thought “I grow food to eat!” A garden is habitat, providing food for many beings above and below ground. A garden is a refuge for those beings and for me. And, my garden is my grocery store, providing at least ten months of produce for moi, plus what is given away. Friends, I don’t know about you, but that makes me smile with every meal!

Now …

Free. That’s right. A lot of vegetable and flower seeds are easy to save which means  free produce and flowers next season. This is due to Mother Nature who has the design of abundance and proliferation for all that She has created. Due to this aspect of Nature, every being on Earth, in the earth, and in the waters of this planet thrive. When left to natural processes, Mother Nature provides for all and does so for free. Mother Nature makes no money on anything. Leaves or pinecones are as precious as apples, mangoes, or tomatoes. And, you can share in this abundance by learning to save seed and use them next season. It’s easy! This post will focus on veggie seeds.

Let’s start with a short list of common garden produce that are usually not ones to save seed from and why.

• Summer squash: All varieties of summer squash will cross-pollinate with each other. The zucchini and yellow squashes will taste perfect this season, but the offspring grown next season will a) be sterile, b) produce leaves but not mature fruit, c) produce something that looks edible, but is not tasty, or produce something that no one will want to eat. If you grow only one type of summer squash, but your neighbor is growing a different type or varieties, and you want to try capturing seeds, let at least two grow to be huge before scooping out the seeds, washing and drying them for storage. But, remember, no guarantees but also possible success.
• Winter squash: Same issue. Summer and Winter will not cross pollinate with each other, though. Whew! So, you can grow summer and winter varieties in the same garden but I never grow them near each other due to the space that each requires. I do keep seed from winter squash, but I now only grow one or two varieties each season. (Learned my lesson!) If two, they are grown at significant distance from each other PLUS separated by various other plants that the pollinators will get to first between both winter squash varieties.
• Corn is wind-pollinated which is why it is grown in stands of 10 plants or more together. Pollen drops from the tassels growing at the top of each plant, and the wind and gravity help the pollen find the little corn silks. They deliver the grain of pollen to inside the developing corn ear. Thus, cross-pollination of different varieties of corn is easy to occur. Grow one variety, and no less than ten plants properly spaced. I have found that growing a square plot with the plants in Z rows gives each plant enough room for their leaves.
• Cucumbers are slightly less risky, but do not grow different types near each other. The other issue is that a cucumber for seed has to be quite over mature for possible viable seed.
• Chards and their beet cousins need a long season to flower, set seed, and dry the seed.

What vegetable seeds can be collected?

• all tomato varieties that are not hybrid – like bought at Walmart
• all types of beans – string and drying
• all types of peas – shelling, snap, black-eyed and such, bush and climbing varieties
• all types of tomatillos
• most herbs: the conditioning factor is if the herb has been allowed to go to seed or has a long enough season to do so. For example, basil flowers are often plucked off in order to promote abundance of tasty leaves. Fair enough; but at some point -well before frost- let the plant complete its natural processes and make seed. Another example is parsley which often will not flower until its second season – if and only if – the winter does not kill the roots. Deep mulch will possibly mitigate this as well as how cold your winter is.
• carrots will seed but usually the second season, if the parsley-type mitigation is followed
• kales will follow the second-season gig. Being cold-hardy, the root system of most kales will survive the winter and come back on their own with fresh leaves for eating and then flower in late Spring, setting seed by Summer.

For beginner gardeners: many bean and pea seeds are also the fruit that is eaten. For example, pinto or butter beans or garbanzo beans are both the seed to be planted (if properly dried and stored) as well as the dried bean to be soaked, rinsed, cooked and eaten. However, it is unlikely that a bag of dried bean or peas bought at the grocery store will produce a crop in your garden. Why? Because they were likely irradiated for long shelf-life, even if grown organically.

How to collect seeds? Let’s save that for Pt. 2 since it’s probably already too late to do anything about it this season. But, using the lists above, please consider what plants you would like to keep seed from next season.