Project Update 2.2 - Seed Saving!

Saving seeds is one of my favourite parts about gardening. So much possibility and so much room to fuck it all up. High stakes gardening and what not, since your seed saving skills may determine what you have to plant next season. Some seeds are super easy to save, and others have all kinds of stratification and pre-treatment requirements. It's a good idea to familiarize yourself with common seed saving terms before getting started.

The first thing to do is establish from which fruit or plant you would like to save seeds. You should choose based on desired traits and characteristics, such as flavor, colour, size, disease resisitance and time to maturity. Usually, you will have to grow your produce for more time and to a larger size than normal. Culinary ripeness (good for eating) is usually not considered physiologically ripe (viable seeds produced). For example, I harvest my french round squash at 3"-4" for eating, but leave the seed saving squash on the plant for an extra couple of months, until it reaches 6"-8", forms a hard outer shell and turns a yellow-ish colour.

French round squash at edible size/maturity.

6 lb. squash for seed saving.

Squash guts and seeds.

Fun with squash!

Sometimes you'll get a seed surprise, and a couple of them will have started to germinate before you even open the squash.

Seed surprise! These three started germinating inside the squash.

To save squash seeds (or any cucurbit), you first need to gut your squash, and separate all the flesh and pulp from the seeds. If any seeds are small, thin, or flimsy discard them right away, as they probably won't be viable anyway. Rinse your seeds in cold water to get all the slime and gunk off, pat them dry and then place them on paper towel in a single layer to dry out completely for a week or so. I usually flip mine after a couple of days do encourage even drying. Once your babies are thoroughly dried, store them in a small ziploc or glass jar and be sure to label them with the variety and seed saving date. Bam. It's that easy.

When saving tomato seeds, I prefer to undertake the process when I am already canning or making tomato sauce, since those processes already require separating the seeds (and skins) from the flesh, and I don't like to waste anything.

Tomatoes prepped for sauce: blanched, peeled,

seeds removed and set aside.

Tomato seeds need to ferment a bit, so I put the pulpy seeds into shot glasses with a few drops of water and loosely cover them with paper towel to keep fruit flies out.

Flamme and Mystery Yellow tomato seeds.

After a few days some of the water will have evaporated and the pulpy casing around the seeds should be fermented and more thick. Dump the mess in a sieve (make sure the holes are more fine than your seeds!) and run cool water over it and give the goo a little rub. The mess should wash away easily, and you will be left with just the seeds. Spread these out on a paper towel, and once they are completely dry, bag 'em and tag 'em.

*Note about saving tomato seeds: The tomatoes I grow are all open pollinated (OP) heirlooms, so there is a high likelihood of cross-pollination. This means that plants I grow from my saved seeds, with likely not be true to type, and instead create some new kind of heirloom hybrid tomato. I don't mind, because this is all one big experiment for me and I like the idea of making brand new cultivars, but if you want to keep your seeds true to type, tie paper bags over the flowers you want to isolate. Tomatoes are largely self fertile, so the fruits should still develop, but the flowers won't have an opportunity to be cross polinated by insects and the next generation of plants should be true to type.