How to Save Heirloom Seeds

How to Save Heirloom Seeds.

All across America, American gardeners are growing heirloom plants and saving heirloom seeds. If you have grown heirloom produce this year, you too may want to consider how to save heirloom seeds from your plants and vegetables so that you can grow more next year. Even if you did not grow them yourself you may find heirloom vegetables on a farm market or even in your local supermarket, and you can save heirloom seeds from these too. Learning how to save heirloom seeds from your plants will allow you to grow and enjoy a much wider variety of vegetables than if you have to buy the seeds or plants each year and it will be a lot cheaper too!

The first step to saving heirloom seeds is to make sure that the seeds are ripe. This is likely to be when a tomato is perhaps past its best for eating and slightly mushy; or the zucchini is past the small tender stage. This is clearly much easier to do if you are growing and monitoring the produce in your garden, than it is when you are relying on the supermarket to sell over ripe vegetables. If you do buy the heirloom vegetables, particularly peppers and tomatoes, let them come to full ripeness on the counter rather than store in the refrigerator, where the maturing of the fruits is delayed by low temperatures.

The next step is to identify and extract the seed. For peas and beans this is obvious, and it is easy to take the seeds out of the shells. Dry these seeds and store them until next spring. For tomatoes and other messy seeds that are in a gelatinous coating, rinse the seeds thoroughly in a sieve and rub the seeds gently to remove the gel. Dry the seeds on a paper towel before storing. For very tiny seeds such as with lettuce, let the plant go to seed and pick the seed head. Cover the whole thing with a brown sandwich bag, or plastic bag, and shake the seeds out. Sort out any chaff or debris that is among the seeds before storing them.

These simple steps will ensure that the heirloom plants you grew this year can be grown again next year. By learning how to save heirloom seeds, you will also be able to share the seeds with neighbors and other vegetable lovers, so that more can be grown again in North American Gardens next year. Saving heirloom seeds also promotes the variety of vegetables that you eat and helps to preserve some of the strains of plants that were in danger of being lost forever.