Never Buy Garden Seed Again Seed Saving Secrets with 100 Year Old Bean Seed

learning how to seed save means that you never have to buy garden seed from the store again but there are some definite things you must know about seed saving to make sure it actually turns out right and what you have growing is something that is edible so my family has been seed saving this strain of heirloom tar heel green pole beans for over five generations going back to the 1800s and really even further back so i grew up learning how to seed save all of our beans from the time i was a little girl however the only thing that i knew had a seed save was beans and so once i got married and we started growing more and more of our own food i realized that i wanted to be able to have control of my garden seed and make sure that the plants that we were growing were heirlooms and to be able to seed save all of them there was a lot that i didn't know so the first time that we attempted technically seed saving zucchini did not turn out so well the zucchini actually was a volunteer so i had had some zucchini that we had planted and it just got caught in the frost and it wasn't any good and it was over ripe and we just left it in the garden so the next year those seeds actually sprouted and then began growing very early in the springtime which was great i didn't have to plant that zucchini and it was beautiful it was really great dark zucchini picked it super excited but it was so bitter that you couldn't put it in a cake there was it was completely inedible we had cattle at the time the cows wouldn't even eat it the livestock wouldn't eat it it was gross and the problem was is that it was hybrid seed from the store and i didn't understand at that time the significance of trying to seed save from something that's a hybrid versus an heirloom seed so i'm about to give you a quick history lesson all of our seeds and everything that we have have been heirloom until about the 1940s now when i'm saying hybrid when you take an heirloom seed that has been standardized so it's been seed saved for multiple you know generations and years and provided that you don't have cross pollination going on every time you plant that seed it grows true to form so it comes back and tastes and looks and behaves the exact same way that's what we're talking about with heirloom now i can take an heirloom and decide i want to create a new species and do pollination and that would be a hybrid f1 the first time i cross them but when i'm talking about hybrid in the scope of this is when you're going to the store and you're buying hybrid seed packets so in about the 1940s you had a lot of seed companies started creating hybrid seeds where they would take some heirlooms and they would cross them to make a very specific type of tomato or zucchini or whatever the plant was and then they would ship them out now these are not the same as genetically modified seeds please don't there's a lot of confusion around those they're not the same thing but the problem is if you try to seed save from those hybrid seeds that come from the store then you get what happened with me with these zucchini they don't come back true to the parent meaning what you planted and you're harvesting that urine you see this see save the seeds from what grows the following year is not the exact same they can look different and oftentimes they taste really bad often especially with your zucchini and the reason in the 1940s they did this is we had the boom of big agriculture and it was really the first time in much of history and human our life span not my lifespan but all of human history i should say where you had big huge supermarkets and food was being growing and shipped you know hundreds and if not thousands of miles from where it was actually harvested and so they needed food that and varieties that would have a long shelf life that would ship well and also looked good because they discovered we're kind of fickle when we're shopping we want the tomato that's the most round and it's the most perfect looking we don't want the lumpy bumpy and kind of misshapen tomatoes and so they would pick um different strains of tomatoes that had those characteristics and that's how we got a lot of our hybrid beet breeds or and they would also pick ones that were perhaps disease resistant so that they could get a higher yield when we're doing this big type of agriculture so that's really why we have hybrid seeds the ones that we have today but many of you probably went through this spring during the coven pandemic and garden seed was something that was hard to come by so if you begin seed saving then you don't have to worry about that and you always have a supply of seeds to be able to grow your own food but you really need to start with heirloom or open pollinated sometimes they'll say heritage seeds to begin with so now that we've got that covered now we'll dive into a little bit more of the interchrist intricacies that was a hard word to say so that you have success with your seed saving so we need to understand one we're starting with the heirloom seeds we've definitely covered that but second is it a self-pollinating or a cross-pollinating plant in order to set fruit we're going to start with the self-pollinating because these are by far the easiest for you to successfully seed save at home so your beans and your pea family are what we call self-pollinating so what that means is you have your little bean blossom here your flower which is going your is where your fruit what we're calling our bean is going to come from and inside this blossom on self-pollinating plants you have both the male and the female part of the flower so they actually pollinate one another inside this blossom before it even opens so this is great because you don't have to have multiple varieties in order to actually get fruit but it's really great when it comes to a seed saving standpoint because you don't really have to worry about these crossing when it comes to seed saving we don't want them to cross and create a new variety unless we're after that so that every year i can continue to grow this exact same type of bean which i really do this specific variety that my family's been seed saving i can't buy in the stores i've never seen it for sale in the stores seed catalogs don't carry it and so it's something that i can't replace or just easily go and get if something happens and i don't save it correctly so and i always get asked in order to get some of this i have a large demand and people really want to try it so if you are a member of the pioneering today academy which is my membership every spring as a bonus i send out until i run out i can only save so much to current members of the academy so if you're a member that's in february and if you're not a member you can definitely check out a link about becoming a member and we have an entire seed saving course just one of the many courses inside the membership but that's how you can actually get some of this seed so self-pollinating everything happens within this blossom and then our beans form which is great i don't have to worry about keeping it away from any other type of thing or using bags or hand pollinating and it will come back every year true to form now i will have to say we do also seed save a shelled bean which is our october bean and if i've had bean plants really close together sometimes you will get a little bit of a drift and they will start to pollinate a small amount and to cross-pollinate and to cross so even when something does say self-pollinating and that they're easy to seed save they won't cross that's true for the majority but if you're trying to seed save multiple types of beans separate them out in the garden if at all possible so i've actually got these tar heel beans here in the garden and then oh gosh it's probably about 30 feet away is where i have the other shell being just to keep a little bit of a buffer distance so that they don't have any of that genetic drift so here we have some of my sugar snap peas and again peas are also self-pollinating so they're a great one to start with seed saving because we don't have those worries one of the things when you're seed saving though is you want to make sure that you let the plant or the pea that you're going to be seed saving from fully develop so that's why you actually see out here i have got some pods that are well beyond the point of eating that are beginning to actually die back so it's really important when you're seed saving that you let those seeds fully mature and go past the point of actually being ripe into overripe so that they're fully developed inside so then they have everything that they need to grow the next year if you were to try to seed save save for example from this one well one inside the peas just not developed enough as you can see this isn't bloated at all and it's still pretty green and supple which is perfect for eating i'm probably going to pick this in a little bit but here you can see this one has went from green it's all getting dried out and i'm actually letting this go even further it's got a little bit of mold on the outside and sometimes it can be really hard if you have a high humidity or in an area with a lot of rain to let these get to the point where they're fully developed ideally we want them to be really dry and crinkly a little bit more like over here where i've got this one but most the time when you're on the outside of the pod like this even though you can see a little bit of mold here when i open this up you can see that the peas are shriveled and they're harder but they don't have any mold on them so if they were to have any mold on them inside here then i would not seed save them they wouldn't be a candidate but most the time you'll have just a little bit on the outside and you won't see it on the inside of your peas and your beans and as we move further into this month i'll have even less moisture for august so one of the things is so we've got these they're fully developed you can see here they're they're white they've already started to dry so you can see where they're a little bit wrinkled and i'm going to test this by pushing my fingernail into it and i don't want to be able to it should not be soft i don't want any type of indent from my fingernail this needs to be really hard and fully dried so if there is an indent at all for my fingernail and there's just a little bit of one right there then i'm just going to shell these out and i'm going to let them continue to dry and harden even more so i'll just put these on a tray out of direct sunlight you don't want your seeds ever stored in direct sunlight you don't want them to exceed temperatures of 95 degrees here fahrenheit lower is better if they get too hot then it actually can begin to damage them and they won't be viable so this right here is all i'm going to be doing to seed safe i've already got my peas right here my pea seed for next year i just need to make sure that they're a little bit drier before storing them in the house and this is the exact same principle you use for the peas as you will for the beans now there's a few one other thing that we need to talk about when it comes to seed saving on our beans and our peas it actually applies to a lot of them but specifically the beans now one of the fabulous things about seed saving is the plants will become acclimated to your area and your growing climate over time and will actually produce better for you so prime example these are a cherokee black bean that we have never grown before so i got the seed shipped in and i planted these beans the same time that i did our october shelled beans which my family has also been seed saving for multiple generations as well as our tar heel green pole beans now all beans have the same germinating and growing conditions we plant them at the same time well after a frost with soil temps ideally 65 degrees fahrenheit or warmer the interesting thing was so i planted the seeds we've been seed saving and growing here for since the 1940s these seeds planted them all at the same day same soil conditions everything they rotted in the ground and did not sprout so i actually had to do a second planting and even that second planting seemed to struggle with our cooler wet spring so one you want to look through the plants and this is for any time that you're seed saving but especially true for me this year there were two plants and i had them marked so it was this one right here at the base and then i had one on the other end coming in these ones grew the quickest so not only did they sprout and germinate the fastest of the ones that did but they were actually about two feet taller than all the rest of the plants were when they first began climbing up this trellis so you want to mark the plants that sprout the fastest that begin to produce the fastest because you're going to get more of a harvest off of them right the ones that are disease free the ones that you like the flavors the best of basically the best of the best is what we're after when we're seed saving so it's something that's important that you want to take note of as things are growing and that you want to seed save off of those plants now as far as genetic diversity you definitely want a seed safe than more than just one or two plants you know you really want a seed safe from quite a few plants even though it's within you know they're all the same these are all a black cherokee bean but i want a seed save from several different plants you don't want to ever pick just one but you do want to pick the best of the best to seed save from and this is true really for anything that you're seed saving not just beans self-pollinating versus cross-pollinating any of your seed saving plants it's always the ones that are absolute best and disease-free now here i have some of my radishes now usually when a lot of our cooler weather plants this is a daikon radish broccoli anything in our brass family like that begins to bolt we're really disappointed because when it starts to bolt it means it's really no longer edible for the most part it gets bitter it goes to seed and it stops growing however this is a really good thing when you're after doing seed saving so these are my daikon radish and they bolt which means they throw up this flower head and this flower head becomes these little pods so again we need these to fully develop because inside these pods this is going to be our radish seed so we're going to leave these in the ground and let these fully develop and begin to dry out and this is what is going to become our radish seed so all is not lost if you have things that begin to bolt you do need to leave them in the ground so that they fully develop but you do need to know if it's a root crop or any crop if it's cross-pollinator or self-pollinator so for your radishes your radishes will not cross-pollinate with other species but they will cross-pollinate within the radish species so if i have other types of radish that were growing and bolting right now they would cross i don't actually have any other types of radish and i'm further far enough away from my neighbor's gardens that i don't really need to worry about that so that's just something to keep in mind if you're growing multiple types of radish and they're in blossom or bolting at the same time they will cross pollinate so you can either do where you're just growing one kind at a time which is what i'm doing this year right now for the purposes of seed saving or you could put some type of netting over them there's different bags and things that you can put over to stop crust pollination but really the easiest and the simplest in what i do is just grow one at a time so here i've got my daikon radish which will then be my seed for next year so with your tomatoes tomatoes are self-pollinating so we've got these awesome little blossoms and inside there's that female and male part and sometimes you'll have tomatoes especially when you're in a high tunnel situation like this and people will be like oh my blossoms aren't turning into tomatoes sometimes they just need a little bit of shaking if you don't have a wind and that will allow the female and male parts and the pollen inside there to meet and actually pollinate one another and then that blossom will open and form into all of your lovely tomatoes so we can easily seed save our tomatoes because they are self-pollinating but just like the beans tomatoes can have a little bit of drift meaning that they will cross pollinate if you have other varieties super close now for the home seed saver some people say they seed save just fine even if they have plants that are growing right next to each other and they don't have an issue of them crossing other people say they'll have a little bit of crossing so to be on the safe side i will seed save from the tomatoes plants that are the most robust that are disease-free they're giving me the best tomatoes but are also the furthest away from any other variety just to be on the safe side but tomatoes are another easy one to seed save because they are those self-pollinating ones just taking a little bit of extra precaution again you could also choose to only grow one type of tomato or grow them in other spots oftentimes people will do that and for a couple of years i only grew san marzano lungo number two which is my favorite paste tomato for making all of our sauces and salsas so you kind of have a few different options sometimes people will even you can get like these little bags and put them on the end of the blossom again you'll need to make sure though that there's movement and then you would mark and seed safe from the tomato once the tomatoes begun to form the pollination has already happened so then you would remove the bag but you need to mark it and be like this is the one that i know did not have any crossing with another type of tomato so you've got a couple of different options there now when we're seed saving onions and the garlic family garlic is really easy because you don't have to worry about a flower head we're just going to be planting the cloves but with our onions we definitely need a seed head and onions are technically usually a biennial meaning they won't throw up that flower until the second year but i've not always found that to be true i usually have at least a few onions that will throw up a flower head and try to go to seed to me even though they were just planted this year now if you're not into seed saving most people will tell you to pinch this off and to cut this off so that the energy goes to creating a really large onion bulb and not creating this flower head but onion seeds are interesting because they're really only viable for one year so a lot of our seeds you can seed save and plant that seed as long as it's in a cool dry environment and it'll be good and still germinate for you for at least a couple of years if not more onions are kind of an anomaly usually their viability they won't germinate they just won't grow from seed if you try to seed save them beyond one year so i definitely want to let some of these go to seed so that i have fresh seed for next year in case i can't get onion sets that's what a lot of people do is order onion sets and they don't grow them from seed just to be on the safe side in this lovely time of the pandemic however with our onions they will cross pollinate with other onions so right here i have got patterson onions which is a great yellow storage onion so these will store for me pretty much for an entire year and i've got a couple of seed heads at different stages and again i want to have more than one flower head so that i'm not saving from just one plant because i need some genetic diversity within the onions so these ones are opening they're getting ready to open they haven't quite blossomed yet this one is just forming so it's still got this little coating on the outside of it and this one is like in between it's just started to begin to burst open but the little flower heads have not opened but these are all the same species as i said these are all patterson which is great however right over here i have a blush onion which is also a storage onion but it's a you can see it's actually really pretty it's like this it's a purple and a little bit of a red onion but i don't want this to cross with my pattersons i want to keep these true so because this blossom head has not opened yet you can see it's still really small it still has that coating on it then there's no chance that this is actually opened and is cross-pollinated with them yet so i'm just going to come in here and remove that this is actually a great to use in cooking so you can go ahead and use this green stock it tastes wonderful so i'm going to use this in tonight's dinner and i don't have to worry about it cross-pollinating with those so if you're growing multiple varieties of onions you want to make sure if you're seed saving that you're only letting one type blossom at the same time unless you don't care if they cross if you don't care if they cross then go ahead and let them but most people want to make sure that they're keeping the each type as its own specific type and not crossing so here we have lettuce this is my red merlot lettuce and you can see that it's bolted what we would call bolting again and it's formed flowers and then the flowers have bloomed and they're drying and this is what is actually going to be my lettuce seed here is so kind of reminds you of a dandelion a little bit so this is what's actually going to be my lettuce seed so it can kind of and i usually let those go a little bit longer and form in here and get a little bit drier so they're still just kind of developing into that they haven't reached all of that form yet lettuce is a great one to seed safe because again it is a self pollinator so you don't really have to worry about it crossing with your other types of lettuce and you don't have to do anything special other than let it develop this flower go into the seed and then make sure that you capture it now where it starts to get a little bit tricky with your seed saving is when we dive into the cross pollination plants so plants that will cross pollinate are your summer squash and your winter squash basically anything in the squash family technically they're cucurbita and you've got six species within that so you can see where it can get a little bit complicated and not all six species will cross-pollinate among those six classifications i should say in there but within each one there's a lot of cross-pollinating that happens so for example your zucchini which is a summer squash will cross-pollinate with your acorn and as you can imagine we don't want half acorn and half zucchini i love them both individually but i do not want them together and so that's where a lot of people have issue when they're trying to seed save or let a confusion with your summer squash um so a lot of times people will have squash plants that are growing and they'll grow like this weird plant they're like this is not what i planted this seed packet said or i saved this from etc and so sometimes people think that it pollinated that year so they're like oh i must have had my zucchini was planted too close to my acorn because i got this mix no it was actually the year before so if you bought the seed the company that you bought it from had some contamination and didn't know it within their pollination if you seed saved it yourself it's likely because you didn't know about doing making sure that they did not cross-pollinate when it comes to seed saving in order to keep it pure so oftentimes people will just be like oh i'm going to save seed from this zucchini and so they let it get really large which you need to do so you actually have a large developed seed inside and they'll save it and then they're highly disappointed the next year when it grows and they don't actually get a zucchini plant or they did it from a hybrid seed and it wasn't an heirloom to begin with so you really have to know what species you've got when it comes to the squash and which of those six categories they fall in to know if they're going to cross together or not so you can see where there's some great books i have a seed saving book that i use that i'll share with you and i also go over this in depth within the seed saving course inside the pioneering today academy so you definitely want to check that out we'll be opening for membership again this fall you can go to mostknowhorse.com to get more information about when we open but one of the important things is you can with your summer and winter squash because the blossoms are so large you can do hand pollinating and so that's where you will identify a male blossom and a female blossom and you're like a little garden fairy and you will pollinate those together but it does take definite care to make sure that you're doing it right and keeping really good track of what you have hand pollinated to ensure that there's no cross-contamination and that you have saved those ones specifically and nobody picks them because obviously you don't want to have to hand pollinate every single squash that you get from the garden for the entire year now then we also have our cucumbers so cucumbers are great because your cucumbers will not cross pollinate with your other summer squash so these cucumbers aren't going to cross pollinate with my zucchini or if i had crook neck or something like that so that's great however your cucumbers will cross pollinate with another cucumber i have two varieties of pickling cucumber that i'm growing this year so really i don't really wouldn't really care they're both pickling cucumbers if they were to cross pollinate but ideally i would keep some that were pure so that you are able to retain some of those strains because unfortunately with our heirloom seeds if we're not careful in keeping pure strains then that variety can be lost forever i mean it's probably very staggering to know how many varieties have been lost over the centuries especially now when people don't really seed save that much anymore as compared to you know what we did 100 and obviously further back now carrots are another thing that are actually really easy to seed save they're a biennial so that means same as our onions that the year that you plant them you're not going to get a flower so there's a few steps that you want to take in order to seed safe from them so if you want to learn more about how to seed save your carrots go and watch my seed saving carrot video and if you're interested in step by step how to seed save all of the things and getting your hands on my family's heirloom strain of the tar heel green pole beans make sure that you go and check out more info on the pioneering today academy

Channel: Melissa K. Norris - Modern Homesteading

Views: 90,066

Rating: 4.9470353 out of 5

Keywords: how to save seeds, seed saving, heirloom seeds, how to save seeds from vegetables, seed saving carrots, seed saving green beans, how to save seeds for next year, how to save seeds from green beans, how to save seeds of all sorts, how to save seeds from lettuce, saving seeds for next season, saving seeds from lettuce, saving seeds from green beans

Id: Njg9TSVeoDc

Length: 27min 37sec (1657 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020