The Complete Guide to Preserving Your Own Seeds for Your Garden by Katie A. Murphy

Author:Katie A. Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: seeds, preserve, sowing, grow, garden, plants, pollinating, collecting, vegetables, fruits, biennel, perennial, flowers, germination
Publisher: Atlantic Publishing Group Inc.
Published: 2012-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

Strawberry pot being used to grow herbs. Photo courtesy of University of Illinois Extension

Once established, strawberries are an exceedingly hardy perennial and will reproduce rapidly. Once the berries start to ripen, you should continuously harvest them. As the plants begin to bear fruit, they slow their production if they carry the fruit. The faster you remove the ripened fruit, the faster the plants will produce more fruit. This principle is the same as deadheading your flowers.

Most strawberries reproduce or propagate by sending out runners, a form of vegetative reproduction. In large garden settings, because of their sprawling growth patterns, strawberries can take up as much room as many of the other crops. Two varieties, Sweetheart and Baron Solemacher, do not propagate by putting out runners, but rather rely on cross-pollination and seed. Because these varieties do not spread, more plants are needed to produce a good yield in the garden.

Strawberries are among the easiest of plants from which to extract seeds. Because they are on the outside of the berry and more accessible, you can either take the time to pick them away from the surface using a toothpick (which is very time-consuming), or you can push the berries through a sieve or pulverize the fruit in a food processor with a plastic blade on low. Once they are crushed, add extra water, and pour off the remaining pulp with the excess water. Retrieve the seeds from the stringy shreds that may still be attached, and put them on ceramic tiles or pizza stones to dry completely. These surfaces work best, as the seeds tend to stick to paper, which is usually used to dry other seeds. You can then store them in a sealed, labeled envelope along with a desiccant and place them in an airtight container in a cool, dark location, ideally the refrigerator.

Before attempting to grow new plants from the seed that you collect, place the seeds in the freezer for a month before sowing, or plant the seeds in the autumn so that they will have to go through the colder temperatures of winter before germinating and sprouting in the spring. This process — stratification — is covered in detail in Chapter 11.

Raspberries, thimbleberries, and blackberries

The fruits of raspberries, thimbleberries, and blackberries each contain one or two seeds. Flowers of these plants are perfect, self-fertile, and can be self-pollinating. Though deformed and underdeveloped (also called partial) fruit and fully fertile seeds develop if the flower self-pollinates, there must be a vector to pollinate the shorter stigma to produce a complete fruit. In order to guarantee a successful crop of berries, they need maximum exposure to pollinators. Again, bees are an essential part of a garden with raspberries or other berries in the rose family. Maintaining several plants of the variety you choose to grow also ensures genetic stability and reduces the likelihood of depression in successive generations.

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