How to Save Seeds of All Sorts | A Complete Guide to Garden Seed Saving | Frugal Gardening

hello friends and welcome back to roots and refuge farm this is Jess and today we are going to be hanging out here in my kitchen and I am going to talk to you about saving seeds so this is kind of the story of my kitchen table this time of year especially on a day like today where I am saving a lot of seeds I'm going to be processing some of these tomatoes and these peppers before we get into the how of saving seeds let's talk about why I save seeds in order to save money essentially if I buy a packet of a certain kind of seed one-time and then grow it I can save seeds from that fruit from then on out and I don't have to buy that type of seed again the other thing is is I really enjoy the community of seed sharing and just you know talking with other gardeners and I take part in a couple of different seed swaps every year on Instagram I will link my Instagram account below if you'd like to follow that I generally post about those and they are hosted by other people I'm toying with the idea of hosting a swap myself if I do that it won't be until this fall after you know all the harvest is done and there are lots of seeds to be shared I do guy a lot of seeds even though I save a lot and some of my favorite places are Baker Creek seeds now tradewinds fruit there are a couple others that kind of specialize in more rare stuff which I will also link to those websites down below if you are looking in to getting into like rare varieties and less heard of heirlooms one thing to understand before you get into seed savings is cross pollination essentially all that means is that the pollen from one tie and pollinate the flower of a different variety of the same time for instance if you've got a Cherokee purple tomato as well as a sweetie cherry tomato and they're growing next to each other either by the wind blowing that pollen or an insect carrying that pollen what you could end up with is a fruit that seeds in it which carry the genetics of both of those plants essentially if one of those plants pollinates the other one your seeds are not going to be pure seeds you could have a cherry tomato that has seeds inside of it that when you plant them grow a larger tomato if it has crossed with something that is a larger variety however the pollen from a tomato plant it can't pollinate a cucumber it has to be within the same strain even though it could be different variety which means if you're growing an heirloom and you want to have seeds that will grow that same heirloom you're gonna have to take some sort of measures against cross-pollination no the simplest way to do that is only grow one of each type of plant in your garden one squash when watermelon one tomato however that's not very fun and my guess is if you are watching this video you want to have more than one type of variety in your garden another suggestion to avoid cross-pollination is to grow plants far enough away the cross-pollination isn't a concern however the agreed upon space is generally like a hundred yards apart that's a big space and that might work if you were planting multiple gardens across your large property however for me I only have four and a half acres and I could maybe set up three or four growing spaces like that therefore grow three or four types of plants without worrying about cross-pollination but that's just not going to happen basically what I've got is a really big garden where everything is going to be planted close together so in order to avoid cross-pollination what I use is called blossom bags you can buy blossom bags that are marketed specifically for the purpose of seed saving or you can just use little mesh party favor bags that will allow the wind to blow through but not allow pollen or specifically insects to get through these are just like a double layer of mesh and they have a drawstring so what you do is when plant sets its flowers before the flowers are open like a tomato or a pepper that's typically what I use these on is it tomato pepper they set little bunches of flowers and you slip this down over that branch that has the flowers and you tighten it over there so that all of the flowers when they open they'll be contained inside this bag and what I do is whenever I go past it you notice I'm just walking throughout my garden during the mornings I'll just shake that branch and that means that those flowers that are inside this bag they will pollinate one another because a plant essentially pollinates itself unless there's another plant nearby and they either touch or you know an insect carries pollen and then after those fruits set on that particular stem that's covered then you take the bag off and what I'll typically do is tie like a little ribbon or a string around that branch so I know those are the fruits that I'm going to harvest to save the seeds because those particular fruits I can be sure have the genetics of that plant only the thing is with tomatoes and peppers peppers are a little more likely to cross pollinate Tomatoes actually a lot of times don't I do have mine planted really closely together and a lot of times what I'll do is if I want to save the seed for one variety I will make sure I plant at least three of those plants and then I save the seeds off the middle one or typically if it's something that I really want to keep the seeds for if it's something rare or if it was something that I really love and I know I definitely want to have seeds when I use the blossom bags but as far as saving seeds for myself I don't mind the risk that they might be mixed so I'll just save the seeds off the middle plant so the next family of plants we've got tomatoes that we've talked about peppers and there's cucurbits which this is the gourd family which includes watermelons pumpkin squashes both winter and summer cucumbers all of these things fall into the same family and therefore they can cross pollinate one another typically the standard for cucurbits is to hand pollinate which means that as soon as that flower opens it takes a lot of attention what you're gonna do is you're going to take a clean paintbrush and you are going to take the pollen from one flower from that particular plant and you are going to hand pollinate the just open flower of the same plant you might put a blossom bag over it beforehand just so that if you miss the opening you can take the bag off pollinate it put the bag back on close it a lot of times first squash blossom is what people will do is they will hand pollinate and then they will tie that blossom closed with like a string to make sure that no bee comes along behind you and pollinate that flower in case you didn't get the job done that is a lot of work to be honest I have not done that I have not a hand pollinated for the sake of saving seeds I've hand pollinated for the sake of getting fruit it for instance if your blossoms just keep falling off of your cucumber plant or your squash plant but no fruit begins to form it might be from a lack of pollinators at which point you can take the paintbrush do the hand pollination and therefore the fruit will set and you get to harvest it however I've never done the like tying things off and trying to protect it from other pollinators coming I've only ever done it to aid in pollination so that I can get my fruit this year not for the sake of saving seeds so today I'm actually going to be saving the seeds from a couple of squashes and cucumbers and I don't know if they are going to provide a pure seed so what I'll do is for instance I've got this Armenian white cucumber that I'm going to save the seeds for now this is one fruit so this came from one flower that flower was either cross pollinated or it wasn't what determines the genetics of this fruit is the pollen that touch this flower if I became and pollinated every other flower on this plant with pollen from another plant but this one was pollinated with the Armenian white cucumber pollen this will be the seeds for a pure Armenian white cucumber what I'll do is I'll save the seeds and I'll put it in a bag all right Armenian white cucumber on the back and I'll write maybe cross pollinated then I will test it I'll probably actually test this again this year cuz I have enough time and the growing season to grow it again and if the fruit that it grows is Armenian white if it is got the characteristics of this particular variety of fruit I'll know that I have pure seed so I'll go back to my back and I will mark out across the maybe cross pollinated because I know that whole bag is full of all these seeds therefore they're all pure they all came from the same fruit for me when it comes to like super rigorously making sure that I do everything right and avoid cross pollination I don't mind the risk I think it's kind of fun it's a little bit of a gamble I might end up with something new and cool so I go ahead and just take the risk sometimes I save seeds from stuff that could have possibly been open that I didn't use a blossom bag on that I didn't hand pollinate and then I grow it and just see I have ended up with a really cool variety of okra that was from across pollination I really like it I've ended up with a couple of tomatoes that are kind of neat and it's just a new variety it's essentially an f1 hybrid that's created by crossing a couple of plants beans you don't really have to worry too much about cross pollination they don't readily cross pollinate when I plant my beans I try to give them just a little bit of space in between each variety and sometimes I'll plant the beans and then on the next trellis I'll plant a cucumber plant or something that really attracts the pollinators some flowers in ears or something like that so that I don't have to bean plants right next to each other where the bees are going interspersing ly between the two bean plants I don't know that that even really matters because everybody's always told me that they don't really cross pollinate readily same thing with flowers they don't typically cross pollinate so I've never gone through any extra measures to keep those seeds isolated or the flowers isolated so can you save the seeds of a hybrid well yes you can and most modern hybrids they're just f1 varieties which basically means they are the offspring of two parent plants that may haven't been stabilized yet in order to stabilize a hybrid it has to be bred for men generations and the fruits that present the desired traits have to be saved anyway essentially yes you can save hybrid seeds they just probably won't produce the same exact tomato they pulled them out of like you know an f1 hybrid that you get at the store you buy a plant you can save the seeds but it you might might have bought a cherry tomato plant and the seeds might grow a larger tomato you might end up with a tomato with just very different characteristics if you want to be able to save the seeds and have consistent tomatoes or plants from whatever you save seeds up you're gonna have to get open pollinated varieties that just means that it's a hybrid that's been stabilized and hybrids you've probably heard me talk about this before if you've been around here very long hybrids and in themselves are not bad things hybridization only gets weird whenever you get into the world of GMOs and all of that stuff but as far as just modern open pollinated hybrids that just means that someone made a new variety and that's completely okay so all of that laid to the side I know that's a lot of information and so I really just want to get on to how to save the seeds I've got a few things here that I'm going to save the seeds for today just to show you how you handle different types of fruits and vegetables in seed saving with in the world of botany a fruit is just a structure that carries seeds typically they are armed with all kinds of flavors and aromas that would appeal and attract to something to come and eat it that that thing that's something or someone would carry those seeds through their digestive tract and leave them in their waste and therefore the seed would be spread which explains why so many different foods whenever you cut them open the seeds are surrounded by sort of like a gel or a slime just some sort of protective coating the purpose of that coating is to help that seed survive your digestive tract so what is classified as a fruit well a lot of the things that grow in your garden that you might not realize our fruits are fruits things like green beans and cucumbers and peppers all of these things are considered fruits in the world of botany because all of them are essentially structures that hold seeds they all start within the reproductive tract of a plant and the fruit is actually developed in the ovary to hold the seat so essentially we're going to eat a fruit lowered eating is the ovary of a plant and in the world of botany which is the study of plants the word vegetable it really doesn't mean anything other plants are classified by what part of the plant they are when we eat a carrot we're actually eating a root rhubarb is a stem lettuce a leaf we're just eating parts of a plant whereas with fruit we're actually eating the the part that is designed to carry the seeds with a vegetable we're actually eating part of the plant now what that means is essentially for vegetable seeds for instance carrots and lettuces beets radishes all of these things what you have to do is you have to allow them to grow the plant to actually grow so you do not harvest it and eat the root or else that ends that life of that plant and it can't go to seed or bolt what you have to do if you want to save the seeds of something like a lettuce you have to let it run its life course you have to let it grow far past the point of being edible so that it can then grow flowers and in those flowers produce seeds this is actually a bunch of the flowers that were produced on a particular type of lettuce that I've been growing in my garden [Music] thank so here I have a stem of this Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce now you can see here that many of these have already flowered this looks very similar to a dandelion because they're meant to be caught on the wind they have a really light seeds these these pods are not fully developed yet but in a lot of cases by the time these are open these have already blown away so you just have to pick it at some point when there is some seeds harvest so what I do is I just pluck this top off pull the flowers off and shake this now lettuce seeds are very small and I've got kind of some of this flower junk in here but these are already very dry and by the time they reach this point the plant is very dry and it still has leaves that look a lot like lettuce but at this point they're so tough you wouldn't want to eat them and saving the seed of anything that goes to flower is very similar to this carrots radishes beets any sort of root vegetable any sort of greenery broccoli all of these things essentially develop flowers and within the flowers after they dry after they dry up you have these little dry seeds now each one of these teeny tiny little seeds produces another plant which will produce another butter head of lettuce which we will pick leaves off of for weeks before it gets to the point of trying to grow up and develop flowers it's incredible the multiplication that happens in saving seeds I mean you can just see after breaking off just a few of those little heads of flowers we have that many seeds which is that many more heads of lettuce and that was just a tiny little bit here's more of those and this is not even this is not even 1/10 of what's on that plant right now there's a ton of flowers there's a ton of seeds to save now beans are somewhat similar and though they are considered fruits essentially you are saving the part that you eat you can actually buy I bagged dry beans at the store and plant them like pinto beans or navy beans you can grow the beans from those back dry bags because they're essentially just seed [Music] okay so with a beam you're gonna leave it on the plant until it is completely dry most of the time we harvest beans young to eat because when they get big their pods get really tough and the beans inside them tend to get a little bit bigger and and harder but this is very similar to saving dry beans for eating you would leave them at that point you would leave them on the plant to dry as well and you would show them just like this but then cook them and eat them we're gonna save these to replant so here I've got another bean that I've saved called I of the goat and they were dried up on the plant so I just opened up that pod and save the bean paint here I have some dried up calendula flowers and as you can see most of these seeds just kind of fell off pretty willingly they look just like this and basically these flowered and as is the case with all flowers you have to wait until they they completely flower and then they die back and then in off the dead flower that is dried up is how you save the seeds and that's that's pretty much the case with flowers but the seeds are all different some of them are incredibly small but in this case with the calendula flower their seeds are quite large and they literally just they're very obvious peppers are also quite easy to save and I don't really have any that are quite to the point of being able to save the seeds you just want to leave the fruit on the plant until it is full size you know that point where the skin kind of starts to just wrinkle up a little bit it's completely changed to whatever color that it's supposed to be at full ripeness and they they just begin to shrink them on itself you don't want to wait till it's rotting or anything but you want to make sure it's completely ripe there for the seeds are completely developed you just take it off very simply you pop off the top this one's really this one was a little bit young so I'm not going to do that you pop off the top take all of those pepper seeds I like to put them on like a paper plate or like a paper towel and just leave them sitting out on the counter for a day or so until they're completely dried up and you can put them away label them and they're good to go things get a little bit more difficult when you get into the fruits that have that gel or slick slimy coating on them things like tomatoes cucumber all of these need to have their seats fermented before you save them and that's what's going to dissolve that coating and put your seat into a place where you can keep it dry so the way I do this is this is a Parisian pickling cucumber this is actually a gherkin cucumber variety so when we pick these to eat them they're about this big they're so green and have bumps hello Graham so what I've done is I've left this on the plant until it got as big as it was going to get this is fully right now I bring it in the house just cut it in half of course it has all of those beautiful seeds inside I get a spoon and I just scoop these out into a mason jar you can use any sort of cup I like to use a mason jar because I have five billion of them and because it's clear so I can see through it so I've got the seeds and all of that pulp so as you can see each of these seeds has this little bubble of gel around it and that's what we're trying to remove by fermenting these and this is going to work the same for any sort of cucumber typically any sort of melon we're getting them out putting in this jar all the pulp so all the gels down in there and all the seeds so I have these glass markers that I got on Amazon that I used to label our kombucha and I will mark on the side of this glass what that is ratio pickling cukes and I'm just gonna take a little jet of water fill this jar about halfway up and as you can see we've got all of our shell all of our seeds and what I'm going to do is just set this on the counter and let it ferment for a couple of days generally to does the trick this is the one I just sat down let's label Parisian pickling cucumber this is the seeds from a melon from the other day and here are some seeds from a cucumber that I saved just a couple days ago so let's go ahead and strain these so that's gonna sit on your counter for a couple of days twice a day take it and you just pick up the jar and and just give it a little swirl so it's mixing around in there if you have an issue with regular flies or fruit flies and it's causing a problem for you to have like an open container of something fermenting on your counter they make these fermenting lids I know a few brands some one these are just the cheap ones from Amazon and that kind of comes and goes for us just depending on different stages and summer we actually don't have fruit flies real bad right now but occasionally we get them and I'll use these fermenting lids on top of the jar right now I have no need for them they're doing okay without it I will put that link down below though in case that something you think you might need so this this is the jar of cucumber seeds from a couple days ago and I'm about to strain them and give you a look alright notice there are some seeds floating at the top those are do not viable see even when it push down they float back up so what I'm gonna do first is I'm going to scoop everything off the top that's floating in this jar then I'm going to just pour these into early fine strainer and I'm going to rinse them off really well next I need to make a place for these to dry wait and a couple of paper towels which you can use if you don't do paper towels you can use like a flower sack towel I've used those before if I don't have paper towels so don't always keep them the benefit of using paper towels is that you can write on here what your variety is okay shake these off down here and I'm just going to put them on this paper towel throw some label and spread them out in a nice thin layer now a lot of times I'll just set these right here on top of my dehydrator which is kind of my catch all place for letting seeds dry out you see I've got some beans up here that we're still just a little bit moist when you are laying seeds out to dry or putting them in a jar to firm it you do want to put that out of direct sunlight you don't want to put it in as like super sunny windowsill or right inside of window just let them dry naturally so that they dry evenly now here is a set of collective farm woman melon seeds that I saved a few days ago and they've been sitting on this paper towel in my pantry for a few days so now they're completely dry you'll be able to feel them until you want them to be completely dried out you do not want to put it aids that have any sort of moisture up because they will mold I saved my seeds in plastic bags the reason I do that is because it keeps moisture out you just have to make completely sure that you're not walking any moisture in I've done it like this for a long time I prefer it whenever seed companies send seeds in plastic bags because if a little paper envelope gets wet all of those seeds can get ruined I'm putting all of these in here these are the seeds of one small melon that is a couple hundred seeds at least and I like to write the variety on the side of the bag with like a sharpie marker those have a tendency of growing legs and running away in my house and I can never find one so I'm just going to use this pen one of the biggest things to remember whenever you are saving seeds for a variety is making sure that you allow the fruit that you're going to save the seeds from to get to its full size I don't know if you guys remember several weeks ago when I was first doing the garden tours I was growing a particular kind of squash called Ron Denise and it was this cute little softball sized green round squashed it was delicious however I missed one on the plant and it started to get really large and so I just left it I thought well I'd like to save the seeds for that this is it definitely not the same thing that it was before so I left it until it stopped growing it changed colors now this is a completely different thing I mean it's got a super tough skin I'm having a hard time even cutting into it but this is what you need in order to save the seeds goodness that was no small task this right is hard so these actually aren't going to need to be fermented because you see how dry they are and these are just kind of like pumpkin seeds they're just big and they're already pretty dry so they don't have any sort of like gel coating so for these I'll just lay these out on a single layer on like a paper towel label it and lay them out until they're completely dry and then we will I'll put them up all right let's talk Tomatoes this is very much the same process as you would save any other wet seed there's a couple of tips that I like to do of course I do use the blossom bags for the variety where I want to make sure I don't have any cross-pollination I am willing to take the risk on some other ones some that I might have liked okay but you know I won't be heartbroken if it doesn't grow in my garden the next year this is a pink Berkeley tie-dye this was not gonna blossom bag however this fruit got pretty damaged by insects and it split really bad on the bottom so if I were to try to eat this I would have to cut a lot of it away and so for me this is a great opportunity to save these seeds a lot of times I will pick the fruits that look really good but they somehow got messed up if one got really bad Sun scald or if it did get a lot of insect damage you know if you come out one day and you've got a tomato that got half-eaten by squirrel or something like that a lot of times you can save the seeds and then you salvage something from that fruit and it's not a total loss what I do is I just cut into it and I've got my jar right here and I'm just going to scoop all of that gel and those seeds out into my jar if you get some like chunks of the fruit in there it's not that big of a deal they will float to the top during the fermentation process and separate themselves from the seeds all your good viable seeds are going to sink to the bottom and all of the junk is going to float to the top okay so I got all of those little gel pockets that were in here cleared out and I've got all of this pulp with the seeds in the jar so I'm gonna go put water in this and I'm gonna set it down to began de fermenting this is also the same it's just going to be a few days of fermenting you can kind of tell by looking at it when all of your pulp and seeds have really separated and you can tell the seeds no longer have that kind of jelly bubble around them you don't want to leave them fermenting too long because essentially what happens after that two or three day mark that seed no longer has its protective coating and so it will begin to break down in the water if you leave it in there for several days with a lot of things you can actually still eat the fruit after you scoop the seeds out no a lot of the flavor of tomatoes is in that gel around the seeds so your tomato not might not taste as good but a lot of times what I'll do with these is if I've scooped the seeds out to save them I'll go ahead and process that meat along with other Tomatoes to make sauce so that I'm not wasting the whole thing if it is a tomato that wasn't damaged to begin with and of course the things like watermelon and winter squashes pumpkins the things that you're going to be eating fully ripe whenever you cut into them you just scoop the seeds out and continue to eat eat the flesh of that fruit like watermelons whatever you're eating it you can save those seeds when you spit them out however a lot of things like cucumbers you have to let the fruit get way past the point that it's even edible in order to save the seeds out of it so what I do whenever I have you know a really bitter hard large cucumber that I've taken the seeds out of that just goes like the chickens or the pigs so that it's not wasted a couple of things that I didn't have to show you today um okra okra is really easy to save especially since it just like grow super fast sometimes you'll miss them and you really have to harvest the pods young in order for them to be edible they get really hard really fast so in order to save okra you just let it completely grow up and dry on the plant and you pull it off and you can literally shake it when is that dry and because the seeds dry up and you just open I open the pot up and save the seeds out of when you get into herbs and flowers and I cannot exactly tell you that the right thing to do because I don't I haven't saved a lot of those seeds they just so many of those seeds typically come in a pack and I've never even used an entire pack in planning before so I just have a lot of them say them however with something like basil what I've done is when those herbs go to flowers I just break off once it's completely flowered and it's starting to the the stem the stalk with all the flowers is drying up what I've done is just broke in that pod off laid it out on a towel to completely dry and then once it was completely dry I just stripped the flowers off the pot into a bag and then whenever I go to plant it the next year I have not extracted all the tiny little seeds but I've got these flowers that have the seeds in them and I just sprinkle those in my soil to plant them the last part about storing your seeds is that you want to put them in a cool dry place because seeds essentially need moisture and heat in order to germinate therefore keeping them cool and dry will allow them to last a lot longer now their germination rate is going to go down year after year off of storing them however they can be viable for several years I recently watched a thing on in my gardener where he had ended up receiving some seed packets there were like eighty-seven years old and he successfully germinated and grew some of those seeds which is pretty cool so that's obviously not the norm but I have grown seeds that I've had for seven or eight years at this point successfully that's about the extent of my knowledge when it comes to seed saving which I'm happy to share with you guys I hope that it helps you and I hope that you feel empowered to save your seeds you absolutely can if nothing else it is so exciting it's a great experience it can save you some money and it's fun don't stress about it I stopped worrying about cross pollination or any of that stuff a while ago and now I just totally enjoy saving seeds for everything just because I want to grow come and see what happens so I bless you guys I thank you so much for watching until next time [Music]

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 567,631

Keywords: homesteading, gardening, how to, gardening how to, gardening tips, gardeners, growing food, how to grow food, saving seeds, seed saving, how to save seeds, how to save heirloom seeds, preserving seeds, gardening cheaply, saving money gardening, cheap seeds, free seeds, saving garden seeds, heirloom seeds, jessica sowards, roots and refuge, sustainability, homesteading vlog, sustainable, how to garden, fermenting seeds, tomato seeds, heirloom gardening, frugal gardening

Id: 2Ipi14eLVfc

Length: 33min 23sec (2003 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 16 2018