How to Save Carrot Seed [NEVER Buy Seeds Again] Plant, Harvest & Collect Heirloom Carrot Seed

in this video I'm going to share with you guys how we seed save our carrots here on the homestead and then also how we go about planting them during the different times of year so that ideally we'll be able to have carrots to pretty much harvest almost year-round and during the parts of the year where we can't really harvest them that we have grown enough that we have got them preserved and inside the pantry if you're not make sure that you hit subscribe and hit that little bell for notifications as we put out new videos every Wednesday and sometimes a few surprised ones in between there so when it comes to growing your carrots and seed saving it's important to know that your carrots are a biennial so what that means is they are not going to produce any seed in order for you to actually save it until the second year of growth so they're a little bit different than when you're working with just regular annuals which most of the vegetables that we plant in a vegetable garden are annuals you're going to be able to get seed from them from that very first year but carrots and quite a few or your root crops are different in that aspect another thing that's really important that you know with seed saving well there's actually two factors one is with seed saving you really want to be starting with an heirloom or heritage or open pollinated seed so most of the time you will see heirloom listed on seed packages sometimes they'll use the term heritage usually it says heirloom but open pollinated is another thing that you could look at the reason you don't want to use regular hybrid seeds that you're purchasing from the store when it comes to seed saving is because those are in the kind of the DNA of plants of the way that we look at the genealogy of them most of the time the seed that you're purchasing from the store if it doesn't say heirloom but it's a hybrid it's an f-1 so that means that they have taken the best characteristics from a couple different types they usually will look at different types of carrots so it's all within the same plant family so for example when they are looking at cucumbers or zucchini they're gonna pick one that usually is more disease-resistant has those type of characteristics and they'll look at another one that is a prolific plant or produces very uniform looking type they look for different things and they take the best characteristics from two plants and they put them together into a hybrid but within that first year so it's what we call the f1 if you try to seed save from that the seed that you save when it regrows the next year it's going to revert back to one of the parent plants so it means that you're not going to get the same produce it's not gonna be the same as from the plant that you see to it from because it's gonna revert back so that's why when you're doing seed saving it's really ideal that you use something that is an heirloom because it's going to stay very close to we're gonna talk about cross-pollination though where that can differ but it's going to be very close to pretty much the same type that you saved it from so we're gonna get the same type of tomato the same type of zucchini that type of thing so tomatoes are actually self pollinating so we need to talk about pollination next when we're talking about seed saving so starting with an heirloom seed is ideal for your seed saving but then you need to know how that plant pollinates itself so if something is cross pollinating then it's trickier when it gets to see it saving if it's self pollinating those are ideal as your first ones to see it save with so for example tomatoes and beans are self pollinating that means the blossom that's then going to form into the food that we eat and that we harvest there is male and female parts inside that blossom and so they will pollinate one another while it's still closed and then form and become the fruit by the time that blossom opens the pollination has already happened so it doesn't cross if bees come in insects or the wind it doesn't cross pollinate with other pollen it's already been pollinated but when you come to plants that will cross pollinate with other varieties and you're wanting to seed save you have to take extra precautions so luckily with our carrots carrots actually cross pollinate with very few other varieties when we're talking about summer and winter squash those will cross pollinate with a lot of other varieties and we're gonna have some more issues but with your carrots they will cross pollinate with wild carrot or Queens and lace so you have a couple of options if you have a wild carrot or Queen Anne's lace that's growing around you if you get your carrots going and they begin to blossom and they have bloomed before the Queen's Island lace blooms then you're just using a time buffer so if the blossoms aren't blooming at the same time so they can't cross pollinate that way so that's definitely one option is to stagger your plantings you also have to think about not just in your yard but your neighbor's yard and down the road usually up to about a half a mile or so they can cross pollinate with one other when were talking about carrots and Queen Anne's lace so that's something to keep in mind so luckily for me we do have some Queen Anne's lace that grows around here but my carrots were blossoming and blooming and in full bloom before they opened and were blooming so I don't have to worry about mine being cross pollinated another option though if you have a ton of Queens and lace around you or if you have different carrot varieties I'm only growing one carrot variety but say I wanted to do multiple different varieties then that would be an issue too so you can get bags that you actually put over the blossom that you are saving for your seed and so you can put like cages or bags and that type of thing over them in order to keep them curious if they don't cross pollinate now if you have a couple of carrot varieties and you love them both and you don't mind that they cross then there's no Reed to worry about that and that's how we can get still new varieties even today is by letting some of your different varieties cross and kind of playing with them but usually when it comes to seed saving we want to keep some of our strains pure so that we always keep that strength so I hope you have a great basic understanding now of seed saving and cross pollination and self pollination and why we need to be aware of those things when we're dealing with seed saving so you could let me know in the comments below if you practice any seed saving or if you need a little bit more help I would love to know that as well so when you are planting your carrots like I said to seed save you actually need them to be on your so these carrots I planted in the late spring early summer and so these are ready to be harvested right now so this is what most people are used to seeing their carrots we grow them and we harvest them in the same year but when you're wanting to seed save them you need to make sure you have a crop that's going to be able to grow into the second year so if you're sowing your carrots for seed saving you have a couple of options depending upon your gardening zone if you're like me and you're gardening zone I would say pretty much gardening zone six through eight and nine then you're going to want to sow a late summer crop of your carrots so carrots if you want to be able to pull them and they're going to be horrible size in order for you to eat them late into the fall then you want to get those sown probably about six to eight weeks before your first average hard frost coming in the fall first seed saving you do need them to start growing so you need them to be germinated and growing a little bit but for seed saving you can actually sew your carrot crop about four weeks before your first average frost date that comes in the fall so you've got a little bit more leeway but you do need to be germinated they need to have some green chops that are growing ideally the tops will be about a few put about three or four inches in height but the root isn't going to be large enough to harvest yet when that first hard frost comes they're pretty much going to stay at that size as the weather turns colder and we have less daylight hours the reason that's important to know is because if you are hoping to harvest them throughout the full month and you only get them planted about four weeks before that first frost hits you they're not going to grow any more they're not going to be biggest to harvest which is actually what happened to me last year but it worked out great in order for me to seed safe carrots you can leave in the ground they will do just fine they'll kind of go dormant during those winter months we had over three feet of snow we got down into the temps that we're in the single digits Fahrenheit we don't usually get below zero but with June wind chill factor's during the winter months we'll definitely get down to about five degrees at least we're a few weeks out of the year and then in this bring time as soon as conditions start to warm up the ground begins to thaw and you have Sun and more daylight coming they will start growing again on their own so you leave them in the ground you don't have to do anything to them and they will start growing again in the spring and producing the flower now if you live in a really really cold climate other people other options depending upon your climate is to pull the carrots up and to store them in a controlled environment with certain humidity and temperatures that keep them dormant throughout the winter months and then come spring you'll just plant them back in the ground and then let them continue to grow in order to get blossoms and seed from them in that second year so it kind of even though they are a biennial and it does take two years it really is just one year because I'm planting them in about August or early September and then I'm harvesting the seed from them one year later so once you get the spring on that second part of it going into its second phase of its growing you will notice that you will start to get a lot of top of green growth so it's gonna get really tall and then it starts to produce these gorgeous blossoms and they get pretty high usually about between 4 & 5 feet high and you're gonna get these really pretty white blossoms so you want to make sure when you're seed-saving that your seed saving from the ones that are producing really well aren't showing any signs of disease and ideally are producing the earliest and that also works really well for your seed saving with the carrot so you're going to kind of mark and look at them pick out those plants and it's also important with students saying that you're doing diversity so meaning you don't save seed from only one plant you want to be saving some of your seed from as many plants as possible so that you have good diversity even though they're within the same you know variety you planted at the same side you same time and you probably planted them from the same packet of seed initially until you begin seed saving on your own so of course when they first begin to blossom and bloom you're going to have the really pretty white flowers and then seed head is gonna take on a green color and then as it gets closer to being mature and ready to seed save those seed heads are going to darken up and they're drying and they're turning that brown and that's at the point that we want to begin harvesting those to actually save for our seat whenever your seed saving you always want to let it go beyond the point of maturity or if we're talking about something like a being where you would normally be eating it but even with the tomato and that's also why we are doing this with our flower seed heads is you're letting it get completely dry or as close as possible to being completely dry on the plant and that helps you have more viable seed and a much higher germination rate when you go to plant them again to grow the plant so to harvest your see it's pretty easy if you've got a brown paper bag these work great for putting the seed heads in and then some scissors or some type I've just got my pruning shears here gardening scissors work great and so we're gonna go through and harvest the seed heads that are ready and get them into this back so we just want to clip off the top of the umbrella here we're just gonna take that and then put that in our brown paper bag brown paper bag is great because it's still breathable but as this continues to dry then it's gonna catch any of the seeds if they start to fall off so these are great to you it's in your seed saving then this one as you can tell is really getting dry and there's even more Brown than the other one so as long as they're fairly dry this one's ideal but I really need to start to pull these plants out to make room for other crops so we're gonna begin to harvest these so I've already went through and pulled and harvested the seed heads from another row of our carrots but I wanted to save this last row so that I could film and share it with you guys so one of the great things about doing this is you can still actually go ahead and pull these up after you've harvested the amount that you want for the seed and these have been in the ground like I said since last the first part of September end of last August so almost a full year and so you can tell they put their energy instead of going to the root of the carrot they put all of their energy going to growing these than the blossoms and then the seed but you can still use these roots now of course these aren't really big carrots so it's not like you're having an ideal carrot harvest but these are still completely usable so you can use these they've got some pretty fine roots on there you can see they're not huge in size and they've got more roots than little roots coming off of there then your regular carrots that you just harvest within that first year of their growing period but these are great to still use in stock and soups and broths I end up feeding some of them to my chickens if I've got too many but you still can actually use the root so that's kind of a pretty cool thing they're just gonna be a lot smaller and kinda gnarly looking sir for our seed heads of course we want to continue to let these Drive we definitely need them to be fully dry before we put them into storage we want to keep an eye on on that we don't have any moisture that begins to develop so we're gonna put these you don't wanna put them in direct sunlight they don't need to get hot if your seeds get over 95 degrees Fahrenheit then it really starts to affect their viability and their ability to germinate so we want to make sure that we keep them in an area that is dry and has some good airflow but isn't too hot or in direct sunlight and if you were curious what variety of carrots it is that I'm seed saving from I first got this I tried a lot of different carrot varieties and had trouble getting them to be large and the flavor that I wanted that they didn't get to woody if I didn't get them pulled up and that type of thing and so the original ones that I got were the Danvers 126 half long heirloom carrots eat and I did get these from Baker Creek heirloom seed company if I don't have a certain variety that I'm already seed saving myself or a local source I found them to be a great online source and they have a lot of really fun and cool varieties so that is the variety that I am doing my seed saving from where I originally got my strain and I really like them they're a great Hardy and good prolific carrot that even when they get larger if you've left a few in the ground or kind of forgot about them they don't tend to have that woody or kind of like that bitter taste when sometimes carrots can develop that they get too big so this is after about a week in the bag and you can really see how much these dried and shrunk up and they'll really curl up on them so I've got them on a tray here because you can see once these carrot seeds fully dry they're going to just start falling off and of course we want to help that habit along once these are all the way dry so putting them on some type of rimmed cookie sheet is going to work really well just to make sure that you capture them all and they're kind of they're almost a little bit prickly they don't really hurt but they're raspy so you can see that these seeds have little hairs on them and when you purchase seeds in the store or order them online and they come in a seed packet they don't have these little hairs the machines that they use to process them remove them but when you see and save them at home they definitely have these little fuzzy let me see if I can get in closer with my zoom there they have some little fuzzy like I said they're kind of rough not quite as rough as sandpaper and they don't hurt but they do have a raspy type texture so that's totally normal and they're gonna be just fine so just know to expect that and so to get these to come off we're just gonna kind of move him between your fingers and you can see him like popping see how much those just pop off so you can see why I've got this on a sheet and so you're just gonna go through and you're gonna get this until you get them all removed and then you can let them dry a few more days if you're concerned about moisture content we really need our seeds to be totally dry before we put them into any type of sealed container to then save them until we have planting season again so I will oftentimes we'll let these just set out any type of seed that I'm saving a little bit longer it's harder to tell on little seeds like this but especially bean seeds it's easy you can tell when they're fully dry and ready to go into storage when you press them with like your thumbnail that's hard and you don't really see much and it's hard to tell on these they're not like a bean seed but that is how I test my bean seeds where you don't see an end nth so to be on the safe side I'm gonna let these sit out and probably dry just for one more week especially the ones here in the center just to be totally sure and then I'll put them in a bag or in a mason jar and seal that up store them out of any heat and in the dark until next planting time if you enjoyed this video make sure that you are on my email list because October 2nd the organic gardening workshop is coming up it's going to be a free viewing period of over a week with all the information that you need in order to grow organic vegetables where you live I've got a free seasonal monthly planting guide that's by gardening zone that's going to walk you through each month what you're going to be doing in the gardening and planting so you can get that link below at Melissa cane Orascom free seasonal planting guide and I can't wait to give you the information as soon as you can get registered for that organic gardening workshop just know that it's coming and have your calendars marked okay I look forward to seeing you next week in the next video

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 30,645

Rating: 4.961637 out of 5

Keywords: how to save carrot seed, heirloom carrot seed, how to save carrot seeds video, how to save carrot seeds, how to seed save carrot, how to save seeds, saving carrot seeds, how to harvest carrot seeds, how to harvest carrots, heirloom seeds, harvesting carrot seeds, how to seed save carrots, how to save seeds from vegetables, seed saving tips, seed saving for beginners, seed saving techniques, how to collect carrot seeds video

Id: RC2lQzeFgOk

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 14 2019