Seed Saving: Start planning now - buy heirloom seeds

While you peruse seed catalogs and plan this spring’s garden, keep the end of the season in mind. Your garden’s plants offer more than beauty, medicine, and food, they also offer a promise for the future in their seeds. If you are a slightly more advanced gardener, or want to be, plan to save some of your seeds this summer by letting the plants go to seed.

You will need heirloom varieties — hybrid seeds do not reproduce true to type. Many seeds sold today are hybrids. Check to see that yours are heirloom or F2; F1 hybrids will not produce the same plant you gather them from.

Some seeds are more complicated to save than others. These need to be pollinated carefully (like corn) or are difficult to gather (like tomato). If you have never saved seeds from your garden’s plants, start with the easy ones like lettuces, orach, spinach, peas, beans, parsley and squash (that were planted far away from any other squash variety).

To learn more about seed saving, check out Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth and my own Sacred Land.