21.07.2023 - 23:10 / awaytogarden.com

thinking about saving seeds, with ken greene

MY BEANS AND LETTUCE replant themselves most years, and when some sprouted recently—volunteers, but who knows what they’d produce in the end—it got me thinking: I ought to learn to save seed in a slightly more orderly manner, shouldn’t I? (Understatement!) But where to start? A phone call to Ken Greene of the Hudson Valley Seed Library seemed like a good first step, and sure enough, he had some simple advice for getting started saving seeds. As I plant my vegetable garden, he recommended I think about what I’ll want to save.

First, of course, you want to make sure the crop you’re considering saving seed from is open-pollinated, not a hybrid. Hybrids won’t “come true” from saved seed one generation to the next.

“Start with the super-easy things,” said Ken, “like anything with a perfect flower and a pod—beans, and peas, for instance.” Perfect flowers contain both male and female parts, or stamens and pistils, such as lettuce, tomatoes, brassicas, beans; in imperfect ones, such as on squash and cucumbers, there are separate male and female flowers.

“Before you even transplant your first seedling, you can start thinking about seed saving,” Ken said, and also wrote in a new article on the Seed Library blog.

For beginning seed-savers he recommends trying your hand at a few easy crops: bush beans (“these cross-pollinate less than pole beans,” says Ken) and peas (“eat to your heart’s content, but be sure to leave some pods to dry on the vine, too”) and cilantro, for instance, or tomatoes. Among the flowers and annual vines: calendula or balloon vine (Cardiospermum halicacabum) are good places to start.

For those with a little experience—or at least willing and able to enforce some isolation to prevent cross-pollination between

tomatoes how-to vegetables edible plants from seed Saving county Hudson county Valley