Autumn In the Garden - Saving Seeds

Walled Garden

Autumn In the Garden - Saving Seeds

With the shortening of the days comes a slowing down of the productivity of your garden. There is lots to do, but the vibrancy of spring and summer is becoming a memory. You may have had a bountiful harvest, and your store cupboards may be bursting at the seams, but the garden is preparing to take a nap. If you have selected plants and seeds that are not hybrids, you can save the seeds for the following year.

Once they have been gently dried, seeds can be stored in airtight containers for several years. We have been saving seeds and growing plants from our own seeds for five or six years now, and it’s very satisfying to have established our own lines.

This extract is taken from A Taste of the Chateau.

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Hybrid plants have been produced by crossing two varieties of the same plant species to get the best qualities from each variety. The seeds saved from these plants can be less vigorous and the resultant plants can be more variable in quality, so are not a good option to save from year to year.

Seeds should be stored in a cool, dark and dry place – and it is really important to label your treasure properly with the crop type, variety, date and any other notes you wish to make. It’s also worth remembering to collect your seeds from the best plants you have grown. Unsurprisingly, some seeds store and live longer than others.

For example, onion and carrot seeds are known to be very short lived, but scientists in Israel have confirmed that an ancient date palm seed retrieved from the rubble of Masada and about 2,000 years old was successfully germinated. That makes it the oldest seed ever to sprout. As a rule of thumb, most vegetable and flower seeds may be kept for one year without appreciable decrease in germination.

Lots of fruits and vegetables are mature enough to sell or are ready for eating long before the seed is mature. Examples of these include: carrots, parsnips, cucumbers, peas, green beans, summer squashes and cabbage. It is obvious really, as we want to eat tender young veggies but the plant has to mature and keep putting energy into the seeds to make them viable. So, for seed savers, you will need to leave a few plants to fully mature.

The easiest seeds to save (and germinate) are lettuce, beans or peas. One of the first crops we started growing at the Chateau was salad bowl lettuce. You simply harvest the leaves as they grow. At some stage, the plant will go to seed, and we found that it self-seeded with spectacular success. So much so that we had a second crop with no work at all, and now we only collect the seeds to allow us to plant it where we want!
If you harvest your own seeds, you can easily end up with many more than you will ever need for your own garden, especially broccoli, radish or kale, all of which make excellent sprouted seeds.