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Seed saving tips from local pros

Courtesy Josh Leveque

Back in 2001, Lauren Leveque and her husband Josh learned to seed save as professionals with High Mowing Seeds in Vermont.

"We got to do some evaluations of different seeds, and one of them was cantaloupes? Watermelons, it was watermelons, so we got to sit at a huge table with several other people who worked at High Mowing Seeds and cut up and taste different watermelons to decide which ones to carry in the catalog," Lauren explained.

This worked kind of like a wine tasting, Lauren said — like wine you can’t eat too much watermelon, or you just won’t make it. So they took big bites of melon and spat most of the fruit out into five gallon buckets, saving only the seeds from the best of the best. But since then their techniques have changed — because as Josh explained, seed saving commercially has different goals than seed saving at home.

"So when you’re growing crops for sale, you want to have as much uniformity as possible," Josh said. "You want to be able to say ok, all of these radishes are going to be ready in about 3 to 4 weeks tops."

You don’t want crops getting ripe over the course of six weeks on a commercial farm. But for home gardeners, things are different.

Josh Leveque at a seed saving workshop.
Courtesy Josh Leveque
Josh Leveque at a seed saving workshop.

"It actually might be beneficial for us if our bok chois are maturing over a period of 3-4 weeks and so we can plant 20 bok choy plants and not be swamped once day 33 happens and they’re all mature and getting ready to send up their flower stalks."

Seeds that are more diverse will automatically ripen over a longer period. But there are other reasons diversity is important too: keeping plants resilient in the face of diseases, pests, and unexpected weather events. And Josh and Lauren say this means you don’t want to save seed from just one or two individuals.

"We have these organic seed saving reference books that talk about how many individuals you need to save from each type of plant, but then we have Carol Deppe I think is her name, and she’s really talking to home gardeners and she says save from as many individuals as you can," Josh said.

We don’t all have fifty bean plants to save from, but we can save seed from all of the best tomatoes for instance that any given plant produces. And then, Josh and Lauren use an old trick from professional seed saving to get the best seeds from what they’ve collected.

"With seeds, often bigger is better. So we would put them through the screens to grade them."

When I asked why bigger seeds would be better, Josh said it’s usually just because they’re more mature. And once you’ve gotten the best of the best seeds, Lauren added, it’s time to figure out where to keep them, and for how long:

Lauren explained: "Ideally we store seeds in the freezer. They have to be properly dried, if you put them in a little bit damp, and then froze them, those cell walls might come apart, there might be some problems."

If you don’t have a freezer, she added, a cool dark dry place in the house will do just fine. But no matter how well you store your seeds, some will last longer than others.

"Anything in the onion family, not that great, like maybe 2-ish years before it really starts to decline, also things in the dill and carrot family, dill, carrot, parsnips, those seeds also don’t last very long," Josh pointed out. "But tomato seeds, pepper seeds, things in the cabbage family, you can get 3 or 4 years maybe more without losing too much viability."

It’s challenging but Lauren says worth it.

"It’s so satisfying to go from like a pile of dry dead looking stuff to some beautiful pile of seeds with a distinctive texture, color…"

Learn more about the book Josh mentions, HERE.

Elspeth Hay is a writer and the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on CAI since 2008. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food, the environment, and the people, places, and ideas that feed us.