Seed saving is the artwork of amassing the seed out of your crop and utilizing it in subsequent seasons to develop new crops. Even in case you save solely small portions of some crops, understanding extra in regards to the life cycle, breeding tendencies, and botany of your crops will enable you handle and look after them extra successfully.
Solely open-pollinated crops will produce seed that’s viable and that breeds true to itself. “Breeding true” implies that the crops grown out of your collected seed will produce a crop with comparable traits (development behavior, illness resistance, style, and many others.) to the father or mother plant. Even with open-pollinated crops, you’ll get the very best outcomes if slightly bit about their genetics and the right way to separate flowering crops by time and distance within the backyard.
Seed saving methods are particular to the species you’re working with, so in case you plan to delve deep into the world of seed saving and breeding, we extremely advocate selecting up a number of of the books on the topic.
If you wish to ease your method into seed saving, a few of the easiest crops to save lots of are annual flowers. For the informal flower farmer, amassing seed from annual backyard flowers may be very simple and satisfying: Calendula, marigolds, nigella, poppies, scabiosa, sunflower, strawflower, candy peas and zinnias all produce excessive yields of seeds with nearly no further effort besides to gather the seed pods once they’ve dried however earlier than they open and drop their bounty.
A word on saving sunflower seeds
Most types of sunflowers are hybrids, versus open-pollinated. The saved seeds from a hybrid plant will probably be viable, however the offspring will exhibit completely different qualities than its father or mother plant. For instance, in case you grew a hybrid sunflower selection that was compact with pale yellow petals, a few of the offspring could also be comparable, but it surely’s extra doubtless that its offspring will develop into all sizes and colours. Saving seed from a hybrid could be a enjoyable experiment…however you possibly can’t predict what you’ll get!
Storing your saved seeds
We wish to retailer our saved seed in paper envelopes- nothing fancy! Simply make sure you retailer your saved seeds in a cool, dry place. Label your seed envelopes with the plant identify, selection, and the yr it was collected.
Photographs clockwise from prime left:
Scabiosa seed heads, prepared to reap; Calendula seeds harvested off of the dried seed head; Strawflower seed head with seeds loosened; Zinnia seeds may be harvested earlier than the heads have dried out utterly.
