There is no greater satisfaction for gardeners than when the main part of the season is coming to an end, and it was full of healthy and quality fruits. However, to that satisfaction can be added the possibility of saving vegetable SEEDS, which will provide a beautiful garden full of tasty fruits in the coming years. Find out below how to properly store vegetable seeds.
Why save seeds?
Saving seeds has many advantages. Not only does the process encourage us to pay more attention to the life cycle of our plants, helping us become better gardeners, but it also gives us the opportunity to grow stronger plants that adapt over time to our garden’s individual microclimate.
On the practical side, having your own seeds also means you don’t have to rely solely on stores, which may have limited availability or may not have the varieties you’re looking for.
When the seed is stored
The optimal time for storing seeds will depend on the plant and its life cycle. Vegetables can generally be divided into two categories: cool season crops and warm season crops.
Cool-season crops such as lettuce and radishes can be sown in early spring and also in fall, so they can be among the first and last plants in your garden to fully mature.
Meanwhile, warm-season crops like tomatoes and cucumbers, which we usually don’t plant until the frost is over, will peak in late summer.
This means, depending on what vegetables you choose to grow, you could be leaving seeds from late spring to late fall.
6 tips on how to save seeds for next year
How to store seeds – TIPS
Like any other process when it comes to gardening, leaving seeds depends on the species. One key element is learning the life cycle of a plant and what it looks like when its seeds mature.
Here are some tips for separating seeds from several common vegetable crops.
Luk
Leave the onion in the ground and wait for the plant to bloom. When it begins to release its seeds, you will notice neat, small, black seeds that have edges. Gently shake it into a paper bag to collect them.
Kale
Similar to broccoli and cauliflower, which are the same species, kale must flower and age past its prime picking time for its seeds to be ready for harvest. Kale produces long, skinny seed pods, and when they are dry, you can either collect the entire pod or cut off the individual seeds and place them in a paper bag.
Peppers
Almost all types of peppers will turn red when fully ripe or overripe. We want to let them overripe and almost start to decompose on the plant. Then you can open that fruit and basically scrape or peel off the seed that’s attached inside and lay it on a paper towel for a night or two.
Carrots
When the carrot is fully ripe, it creates a veritable umbrella of flowers. When the flowers are pollinated, the seeds are formed and become visible. You can leave them to dry on the plant and then shake them out in a paper bag. Another technique? Murphy says some people like to put a paper bag over the plant itself to avoid losing seeds.
Beans and peas
Before saving the seeds, wait for the leaves of the plant to “die” (the stage when the leaves are dead, but the root remains alive). The pod will turn brown and the dried seeds will even start to rattle a little inside. Save the seeds just before the pods somehow open and release the seeds naturally.
Zucchini
Leave the zucchini on the vine until they turn yellow and leave them there to ripen as long as possible before harvesting. You can then remove the seeds from the zucchini and leave them to dry.
It is recommended that one plant per vegetable crop be left to seed. This will still give you plenty of seeds to store, share or trade. One squash plant, for example, can produce as many as 50 seeds. And if you save just one plant for seed, you’ll open up more space in your garden to start planting next season’s crops.
Seed drying
Before drying the seeds, it is important to make sure they are clean. Some seeds, like those from pepper plants, will be quite dry and clean when you collect them. But others, squash seeds will have a pulpy substance around the seed that needs to be washed off to prevent mold and rot.
Be sure to wash those seeds, then dry them and let them sit on a paper towel for a day or two out of direct sunlight—ideally, in a place with less moisture. The more moisture there is in the air, the longer it can take certain types of seeds to dry completely, increasing the chances of mold.
How to store your seeds (and create a seed library)
Once the seeds are clean and dry, it is important to keep them in a cool, dark place. It is best to keep them in an environment that is completely opposite to the one in which you grow them — that is, in a place where there is no moisture, hermetically sealed. This will help keep the seed dormant for longer.
However, if you plan to use the seeds within a few months, an airtight container is not as important. It is enough to store the seeds in brown bags in cool, dark places.
If properly dried and stored, short-duration seeds (that is, seeds with a shorter shelf life), such as corn, onions, parsnips, and spinach, can usually last one to two years.
Mid-life seeds, such as carrots, beans, celery, Swiss chard, eggplant, peas, pumpkins and squash, can last up to five years, while long-life seeds, which include broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, cucumber, kale, lettuce, melons, peppers and radishes, can last for many years.
Ultimately, like most aspects of gardening, seed saving is based on trial and error. But that’s what makes the process exciting.
Source: CBC
Source: www.agromedia.rs
