The Complete Idiot's Guide to Aquaponic Gardening by Meg Stout

Author:Meg Stout [Stout, Meg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781615643332
Publisher: DK Publishing
Published: 2013-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Saving Seeds

Before the days when you could buy pretty packets of seeds, most farmers and gardeners used seeds they saved from their own plants the year before. Those seeds were necessary to ensure next year’s success. It was considered very unwise to consume or discard these seeds. The phrase “eating your seed corn” refers to the practice of consuming everything you grew without saving seeds for the next year.

The founding U.S. president, George Washington, was first and foremost a careful farmer. He took great pride in the farm surrounding his Mount Vernon estate, including the fields where he grew seeds for the next year’s crops.

There are two ways to save seed for next year’s garden. First, you can simply save the seeds that you didn’t use. You will likely have a smaller percentage of viable plants after storage, but you can still have viable seeds for years after initial purchase. Second, you can save seed from your own garden. Seeds aren’t terribly expensive so this won’t save much money, but saving your own seed gives you an opportunity to maintain strains of prized plants.

If you are going to save seeds, there are a few rules of thumb to determine seeds are worth saving in the first place:

• Don’t bother saving seeds from hybrid varieties. The hybrid you grew was optimized in the lab. The next generation of this hybrid will not be the same as the parent hybrid and will almost always be inferior.

• Don’t save seed from patented varieties. The seeds of patented plants belong to the companies holding those patents, not to you. It is unlikely that such a company would come after a home gardener, but they have come after farmers for saving seed.

• Self-pollinated plants such as lettuce, beans, peas, and tomatoes will produce true to form as long as you didn’t start with a hybrid.

• Don’t bother saving seed from cross-pollinated plants like squash, pumpkins, and cucumbers unless you can keep them separated from other varieties by at least 200 yards. In the case of wind-pollinated plants like corn, you’d need to separate them by a full mile from other varieties to avoid mixed cross-breeds in the next generation. The cross-bred seeds could be okay, or they might have all the worst characteristics of each parent plant.

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