The Importance of Seed Saving | HOW TO Save Seeds for New Gardeners

hey all I'm Jess welcome to my greenhouse here at roots and refuge farm the topic of today's discussion is one that I really really love to talk about and today I want to do kind of an overview though a comprehensive one because I really want you guys to be equipped to understand that importance of seed saving I've talked to a lot of people who start out in gardening and for whatever reason they decide that seed saving is too confusing or too hard and they just don't want to go through the trouble of learning about it and so they just plan on continuing to buy seeds and I actually did the exact same thing I misunderstood the requirements of seed saving and I didn't save a single seed out of my garden for the first couple years of gardening this video is actually part of a collaboration that I am taking part and hosted by homesteaders of America throughout the entirety this week they are going to be highlighting multiple different channels covering multiple different topics about growing your own food so I'll put a link down below so you can go check that out it's going to be an amazing resource for information and I was really excited that the topic that I was asked to teach about with seed saving now I have an old video from a couple years ago that shows kind of some of the hands-on of seed saving and I will link that down below as well if you want to check that out I really want you to feel equipped and when it comes to stuff like this when it's confusing and it's presented in a way that might be intimidating to the new gardener so many times people give up and I do not want you to give up I want you to feel encouraged and brave and know that you can grow food and that this is something that is totally totally doable it's not intimidating there's no secret I love to buy seeds I have a very large seed collection still just get lost in the seed catalogs every year I always want to know if there's something new but it is undeniable that seed saving is definitely the cheaper route it's easy to get carried away every year buying seeds but truly knowing that that you is optional when you get to the point that you can save your seeds and you're just buying seeds because you enjoy it it really does free up the budget and it it helps you understand that you can save a lot of money growing your own food if you do it this route potentially you could get seeds for a variety you could spend three dollars on that package or trade with another gardener and then you could potentially if you save the seeds grow that variety for the rest of your life year after year of gardening and that there's not much better financial deal than that and of course it is definitely the more sustainable route I know that as of the time of filming this video multiple of my favorite seed companies are temporarily closed down because of the corona virus outbreak and that so many people realized that they might need to grow a garden this year and they rushed the seed stores and I'm certain that they're probably many a seasoned gardener out there with a little shoebox full of ziplock baggies of seeds underneath their bed or in the back of their freezer whatever that is not at all concerned about where their garden seeds are gonna come from this year so it's definitely the sustainable route like any resources when we have an abundance of a resource it gives us the ability to share with other people the gardening community is really really cool and taking part in seed swaps and all of that is so much fun and it's just a lot cheaper if you don't have to buy the seeds to take part if you save the seeds from something that you grew not only can you give story that goes with it you can tell your part of the story that goes with it but you'll just have a lot more seeds to give away whereas you buy a package of seeds and you get you know between 25 and 100 seeds sometimes if you save them a lot of times you'll have thousands of them I'm gonna talk about some really basic stuff I feel sad sometimes when people come to me and they're like I think this is a stupid question but where do you get the seeds off of a carrot and it's not a stupid question if you've never been taught that you don't know and that's okay and you're never gonna know if you're too embarrassed to ask so I want to talk about some really basic things botanically speaking plants that we are on regarding they're all vegetation now we call them fruits and vegetables and a fruit is the structure of a plan that holds the seeds kind of like the ovary and so a cucumber and a tomato and a pepper and an eggplant these are all fruits and saving the seeds off of fruit bearing plants is a little more straightforward because you cut open the fruit which is part you grew the plant to get and there are seeds in there and so you kind of know where the seeds come from the plants that we call vegetables vegetable the term vegetable in botany doesn't mean anything it's all vegetation but what we call vegetables we're just eating part of the plant we're eating the leaves of kale and lettuce and the stalk of rhubarb and celery and the root of carrots and radishes and in order to eat the part that we want in many cases we actually have to end the life of that plant so if you pull up a carrot nice young carrot with a beautifully formed root you cut it up and put it in your soup you will not get seeds off that plant because you just killed it and ate it with some plants it's not necessarily the case you can harvest a handful of the leaves or whatever and you can still get some seeds but in many cases you forego your seeds the next generation of that plant for your dinner all of the varieties that we call vegetables what you have to do is you have to let those plants live out their life that same carrot whenever you allow that taproot to keep growing it's gonna get bigger it's gonna get woody it's gonna send off little offshoots and so the plant up above the ground is gonna get bigger and bigger and then eventually it's gonna send off a center stalk and at the top of that is gonna be a cluster of flowers and those flowers be really pretty and the bees will come and visit them and they're so nice looking and then they dry up and behind those flowers are the seeds of the carrot and it's that way with pretty much all the plants that we call vegetables the broccoli you know the head of broccoli it has all those little bitty pieces get stuck in your teeth those all open up into flowers the broccoli is just like the open bud head of a plant kale lettuce all of these cabbage actually will like come up into like a big cone and shoot up flowers although they go to seed it's also called bolting in a lot of cases that plant will put off a chemical that kind of makes the leaves taste bad it was like basil they really really change flavor once they start putting off flowers in a lot of cases it's not always so with radishes you can actually eat the seed pods and they're really spicy and they taste like radishes as a general rule a lot of times you're giving up your harvest to harvest some seeds and that's not always so bad I mean you don't need that many seeds so if you plant a hundred beets you harvest 97 beets to eat and you leave three in the garden to go to seed if you're looking to sustainably save those seeds and the same thing with lettuces I usually you know I'll plant a whole lot of lettuce and then I'll let maybe one or two heads go to seed and there's enough seeds in that it's all I really need for the next year and a lot of times for a few more years now with fruit it's just a little bit different when it comes to saving the seeds of fruit you again you want to make sure that that fruit is completely mature now with melons for instance when the melon is ripe and it disconnects off the vine it's just so smelling good and you're ready to eat it you cut it open all those seeds are in there you scoop them out you can save those and replant them and eat your melon same thing with peppers and tomatoes those typically come to ripeness and the seeds in them are ready with some things however you're harvesting those young like cucumbers a lot of times we'll get a lot larger squash we'll get a lot larger than we necessarily harvest them to eat with any fruit you need that to let them become fully ripe if you want to harvest seeds out of them and in some cases that may mean allowing them to go beyond the point that they're ideal for eating you just let them become fully ripe on the vine and then when you pick the fruit and you cut it open you take the seeds out if they're dry like peppers and eggplants those seeds just come out dry some melons there's just no casing around and they're dry a lot of times I'll just go ahead and lay them on a paper towel and make sure that they're fully dry before I put them in any sort of bag or or try to put them up you don't want to put any moisture in the bag with your seeds or else they'll don't mold if they are the kind of seeds that have any sort of gel casing around them and you're going to see this on Tomatoes specifically some melons you're gonna see that kind of gelatin stuff around it some people I've talked to just like rub that off the way I do it is I actually just soak those in a jar for a couple of days and allow it to ferment off and then put them on a paper towel to dry that casing is there to protect that seed so that it can pass through the digestive tract of an animal like a bird or a goat or a person and end up planted somewhere in the waist of that animal and all we have to do is get that off and fermenting it is probably like the least labor-intensive you can wash it until it comes off or scrubbing until it comes off I just like to ferment them and that is really how easy seed saving is that's just the bottom line of how easy it is wait till the plants fully mature get the seeds out get them dry and save them like seriously it's that easy however there are some other factors to take into consideration and this is what actually freaks people out about saving seeds and that's pollination and cross pollination so I want to talk to you about a few different terms that you really need to understand when it comes to planning your garden with the hopes of saving seeds and these are really important for any gardener to understand because there's a lot of misconception that kind of circulates around these things first is the term heirloom which an heirloom is a cultivar of a plant that has been handed down that it has been saved so it hasn't with anything else and that has stayed true year after year generation after generation can be anything you can have heirloom squash early melons heirloom tomatoes it's just so cold server that's been kept stewarded and handed down now the other term is hybrid and hybrid gets a little bit of a bad rap and people make some pretty blanket statements about hybrids and one of the statements that gets often circulated is well don't grow hybrids because they're not sustainable and that is not entirely true now hybrid is a cross basically meaning you have two parent plants the pollen from one came in contact with the pollen from another and you end up with the seeds which produce a new plant which is the little baby plant that looks a little bit like mama plant and a little bit like daddy plant that little baby plant is called an f1 hybrid which is the first generation of that cross and where the idea that these are not sustainable comes from is that if you save the seeds off that f1 plant even if you isolate it and make sure that it doesn't cross pollinate with any other plant those seeds are going to be a mixed bag it's gonna look a little bit like the parent plant a little bit like grandma plant and a little bit like grandpa plant you probably have ten different variations of the mixes of those genetics coming out in that that second generation and what happens is people who take an interest in plant breeding and people who want to save seeds out of their garden though they'll save the one they like the best and then the next generation they'll save the one that looks the most like that one and again and again and again and after seven or eight generations of saving selectively from that variety it gets it becomes stable and at that point you can save the seeds off of your plant and they look just like the parent and at that point is called an open pollinated hybrid and that makes all the difference in the world now if what you mean by sustainable is you want to be able to grow the exact same variety year after year yes your f1 hybrids are not sustainable but your open pollinated hybrids are if by sustainable you mean that you want to be able to grow food in the time of crisis you could save the seeds of an f1 hybrid in for instance if it's a tomato and you you plant it you're still going to get Tomatoes it's still going to be food and it's still going to feed you however it's not going to be the exact variety that you save the seeds from and in the case of like let's say you have a paste tomato that you absolutely love makes the best sauce and it's an f1 hybrid and you love it so much you save the seeds for it and then you get all of these you know different sizes and different shapes and maybe not don't have the great paste qualities to them obviously that would not be desirable if you have a variety that you really love you want to be able to duplicate that year after year the thing is though is that whenever we write off all hybrids I don't know that that's really the best way to do things because many of those open pollinated varieties are amazing and your heirlooms that you loved were at some point in the past new variety they were a hybrid and open pollinated hybrid and I actually end up with hybrids in my garden often because sometimes I don't take the measures to keep cross-pollination from happening and it's okay because it's still food and I think it's kind of fun I end up with kind of different looking stuff or stuff that you know doesn't exist anywhere else because it just happened by a happy accident that brings me to cross pollination and pollination I think is the thing that freaks new gardeners out the most that's what causes people to kind of like back up and be like I'll just keep my my see it's this is confusing first thing that you should really just decide is whether this is going to matter to you or not now I'll be completely honest I really don't worry a whole lot about cross pollination like I said I end up with happy little hybrid accidents if you save see there's a chance that you're gonna get the exact same plant even if you took no precautions to keep any cross-pollination from happening because a lot of times plants will self pollinate it's not a big deal the times that you should really consider taking the extra measures to keep your seeds true to the parent type and make sure that they are pure is if you are going to be selling any seeds obviously you need to make sure that what you are providing is what you're advertising if you're going to be selling any plants from those seeds same story if you're Trading the seeds and therefore you're labeling it this is this type of tomato when you give that to a person you know they're going to make space in their garden for it they're going to anticipate it and that would be really disappointing to grow something and it not be what you were told that it is so if you're going to do any of those things definitely make sure that you're taking the extra measures to keep the cross-pollination from happening if you're just a hobby gardener trying to grow your own food you like growing cool stuff I think it's kind of fun to see what happens and just see if any cool crosses happen so sometimes I'll do that and I always just label when I save seeds that could potentially be crossed because they weren't protected in any way I just put on the label maybe cross pollinated that way I know for myself if I plant an okra seed that wasn't protected I'm gonna get okra but it just might not be the exact variety that I'm expecting and I'm okay with that I just wouldn't give those seeds to somebody else and you know that might potentially be disappointed whenever I first started gardening and wanting to save seeds I wanted to do it on a budget and sustainably just and you know like many people do I started reading about preventing cross pollination and I read something that said that you needed to put your garden at least 500 yards you know varieties of a plant 500 yards away from each other and I was just thinking what this is mean I only get to grow one kind of tomato and one kind of eggplant one kind of paper that is so lame like I don't want to do that I was actually very very discouraged and I actually did not save seeds for probably two years of gardening because in my mind I couldn't spread my stuff out and I thought I was choosing a wide variety over the ability to save seeds and that's so not true if you can't space your garden out the recommended space which is typically people will list between 500 and feet and half a mile so if you can't space your varieties out that much which I mean who can and you're not willing to just grow one variety for each type of plant and I mean most people aren't willing to limit themselves that much then you kind of just have to go into using barrier methods of keeping those flowers from being exposed to pollens so in the case of any variety that you're going to save the seeds for you just want to cover those flowers up you can use little bags like little party favor mesh bags as long as they're a really fine mesh and that's gonna keep pollen from blowing through on the win or keep insects from visiting those blossoms and you just cover the blossoms up before they open now you will have to take care to make sure that they do get pollinated a lot of times by if you've got multiple blossoms in a bag just shaking the plant will do that or maybe blowing on it through the bag will do that if you're dealing with something like cucumbers or squash you can tie the blossoms up or cover them in a bag if it's a large blossom you just tie it up and you cover it before it opens and then when it opens you can actually take a paintbrush from blossom to blossom and take the pollen and make sure that it makes it on to the parts of that plant obviously this is labor-intensive but don't worry because if you put bags over one little cluster of tomatoes once that fruit is set you take the bag off you tie a little ribbon on that branch and you know that you just need to save seed from those tomatoes if you do this with a cucumber you you know you cover up the blossom and you make sure you pollinate it from that same plant so you've got a pure cucumber and then once it sets its fruit you take the bag off you tie a little ribbon on it or some form a marker you know it's some sort of colorful tie and when that fruit gets big enough and ripe enough you know that's the one fruit on this plant that has the pure seeds in it so you don't have to worry about the whole plant you don't have to cover the whole plant you just cover one one little area one fruit one squash you tie up and then make sure that you get to it before any bees do and that one squash is the one that you save the seeds from and for the case of most home gardeners that's all you really need is to save the seeds from one fruit another thing that I see common misunderstood as people will say things like they'll have to melon plants in their garden let's say this one is a cantaloupe and this one is a honeydew melon and one of the plants ends up putting off fruits that don't look quite like they're supposed to and they'll think immediately that those two plants cross pollinated and that's why you have that different fruit and that's not the case what you're actually seeing with any plant that is growing from a seed in your garden you're seeing the genetics that happen in the last generation so cross pollination doesn't happen like right now like if you have a Labrador Retriever and a German Shepherd and the German Shepherd breeds - the Labrador Retriever the Labrador Retriever doesn't turn into a mutt it's still a Labrador Retriever but the babies that are inside of that dog are going to be half and half of those genetics and that's exactly how it is with these plants that is commonly misunderstood especially with peppers people will say just planting your hot peppers in the general vicinity of your sweet peppers will cause your sweet peppers to be hot and in the first year that you do that that is not the case however the genetics of heat always override the genetics of sweet so if you have hot and sweet peppers in the same garden and you don't do something to protect the blossoms of that sweet pepper from taking on the pollen of that hot pepper if you save seeds from the sweet pepper the next year you will have a hot pepper because if those cross pollinate the heat overrides the sweet but in the same year it doesn't matter if bees are going from plant to plant the fruit that is born in that year will be a result of the parent plant now some things you don't even have to worry about this legumes for instance any peas both English and southern so like you're shelling peas plot or your black-eyed peas any green beans any dried beans legumes are self pollinators and they don't cross pollinate just as a general rule usually just the anatomy of that plant is that the male and the female part of that plant kind of coexist and those blossoms are there already pollinated when they open and so you could grow a bunch of different kinds of beans all near each other save the seeds never think anything about it they're not going to cross pollinate it's not a problem and you save those bean seeds by just allowing them to again mature because any seeds that we save we want to let those seeds mature and you just leave some of the beans on the plant until they dry out dried beans that you purchase at the store like if you buy a bag of kidney beans or you buy a lot of times you can actually find sources that sell heirloom beans you can actually take some of those beans and plant them now if they're not organic you might run into the fact that they may be sprayed with something but if you buy like a bag of organic heirloom beans to eat you can take a handful of those and plant them in your garden those are seeds that have been saved you can also eat them now I know this was a lot of information but I do think it's really important to understand the stuff on the front end because of the fact that you might have misunderstood the way this works and you've just given up the idea of saving seeds and in a time like right now it just really does give you a peace of mind to know that you have the information in the and that you are equipped to have options later so I did want to encourage you this I wanted to give this to you like I said so that you could be brave and know that you can grow your food and that this is not over your head this is not something that's too hard for you to do and ultimately if you end up with a handful of hybrids in your garden and you save the seeds you're still gonna have for the food next year and you're still going to have a great garden and you might even really enjoy that process of having some little surprises make sure you go check out the other participants in this video collaboration and thank you so much for watching I'm so excited to share this gardening year with you guys it's gonna be an incredibly productive and joyful year in the garden thank you guys so much I bless you until next time

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 54,700

Keywords: roots and refuge, roots and refuge gardening, seed saving, backyard farm, small farm, how to save seeds, can you save seeds, heirloom seeds, growing food, how to grow food, homesteaders of america, gardening for beginners, gardening tips and advice, how to garden, how to start gardening

Id: OFvGC4dP17s

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020