Plants for Beginning Seed Savers

Seed saving is a long, time-honored tradition that has allowed farmers and gardeners to save and pass down their favorite varieties of plants for generations. It also allows gardeners to become amateur scientists, experimenting with genetics and creating new varieties or perfecting their current ones.

While seed saving has a long history, it is becoming a lost art, and today gardeners who wish to start saving seeds will often have to learn without a teacher or mentor. This skill is relatively easy to learn but given the seasonal nature of the hobby, it can take a long time to master. If you make a big mistake, you may have to wait till next year to try again. However, seed saving is a rewarding and practical skill that is worth the effort. If you are a beginning seed-saver, here are some popular plants you can get started with:

Cannabis

In states where it is legal, many people enjoy growing cannabis in their backyards. This plant is easy to grow and saving seeds from it is relatively easy, as well. The plants are wind-pollinated and can easily cross-pollinate with other varieties, so if you are trying to keep pure strains you will need to isolate them somehow, such as by only growing one variety at a time. Once your buds have matured, you have to wait until they are completely dry before extracting the seeds and storing them. You can get started by purchasing exotic weed seeds online.

Lettuce

Lettuce can be a great plant for beginning seed savers to start with. It is easy to gather the seed and they don’t require any processing. The plants naturally go to seed when the weather turns warm. However, lettuce cross-pollinates with other varieties easily. If you want to keep your lettuce varieties pure, only let one variety go to flower at once or protect the plant with shade cloth or some other physical barrier. Once your lettuce has flowers, let the flowerheads dry and the seeds fully develop. You will have to harvest them before they begin to blow away, so check them each day or cover them with some kind of collecting bag to prevent this. If you allow your lettuce seeds to blow away, you will probably have a lot of volunteer lettuces in your garden next year!

Tomatoes and Peppers

Tomatoes and peppers can be easy to save seeds from. These plants usually pollinate themselves, often before the flowers open, so cross-pollination is rare. However, processing tomato and pepper seeds can be a bit more work than some of the other vegetables. Tomato seeds are covered with a thick membrane which has to be removed before the seeds can be dried. This requires a fermentation process that isn’t hard to learn but is a bit different from the way you process other seeds.

Flowers

Many flowers are very easy to save seeds from, as they naturally go to seed as soon as the blooms are spent. Annuals like marigolds, zinnias, hollyhocks, and cosmos readily produce seeds if you don’t deadhead the blooms. Remember that allowing these plants to set seed will often trigger them to stop the production of more flowers, so if you want continuing blooms, consider setting aside a few plants to use as seed plants and keep deadheading the rest to maintain their productiveness. Many of these plants will self-seed as well, given the right environment.

Melons and Watermelons

Melons can be relatively easy to collect seeds from, as you simply clean, dry, and save the seed as you eat the fruit. The difficulty with saving seeds from melons is their tendency to cross-pollinate with other melons and even other members of the cucurbit family like cucumbers. This can result in some very strange and distasteful fruit. Cucurbit flowers are pollinated by bees and flies, so they can also be cross-pollinated from other nearby gardens. To prevent this, you can simply create a barrier to the insect pollinators on certain female flowers that you want to keep the seeds from. Many people tape the flowers before they open, preventing them from opening. When they are ready to pollinate, simply untape the flower and rub the pollen from a male flower onto it. Then re-tape it to prevent contamination.

Peas and Beans

Peas and beans can be one of the easiest plants to save seeds from. Not only are most pea and bean flowers “perfect”, meaning they pollinate themselves, but they are also easy to collect and process the seed from. Simply let the pods develop until completely dry and then remove the seeds from the pods. The biggest disadvantage to saving seeds from these plants is that they stop producing new pods. If you are wanting to save bean or pea seeds, plant extra and designate a few to be seed producers so you can keep picking the others for a longer season.

Vegetative Propagation

Finally, consider plants that you can reproduce through vegetative propagation. These plants can be grown by cutting a part, usually a leaf, stem, or root, from a mother plant and then rooting that part to grow a new plant. This is technically cloning, and many houseplants reproduce this way. Some vegetable garden plants can also be propagated through this method, including tomatoes, potatoes, asparagus, garlic, and strawberries. Some, such as potatoes and asparagus are nearly always sold and planted in this way and seeds are rarely used. The exact method to follow for each plant varies, but once you learn how to do this it can be a fast and easy way to get new plants.