Spreading the seeds

So it's finally beginning to look like winter here in this strange season....
   After dropping off the face of the planet to attend to the dreaded 2 months of Christmas consumerism.   Which I am forced to be a part of due to working retail and another 2/3rds of a month to decompress. I'm back to feeling like starting new projects and documenting what I've been up to again.

A week or so ago I began sorting all of the seeds that I had harvested last summer and over the season had thrown willy nilly onto random, unused, window screens in the basement near a fan to dry or stuffed, when dry, into ziplock bags.

Now they are all neatly sorted with descriptions of what where and when they were harvested.  

   Most seeds will keep for many years (5+) only slowly loosing their viability over time.  When you buy a package of seeds they may give you hundreds of seeds when you only really need a dozen or so. Yet with other varieties you may only get 6 seeds in a package, hrmph!

I kept the seeds and the packages from previous years crops and cut out the descriptions and put them all in plastic baggies that I can now quickly flip through.   This is only one years leftovers and harvesting.   Nearly everything I planted grew well enough to set seed for me to save.  A few like dill, I let self seed in place but most I harvested and dried so that I can share my bounty.  All in all, it was a good year's harvest.

Saving seeds is very easy and to my mind, essential to providing sustainability and diversity to my garden.   

So it all has to begin with seeds or plants from somewhere.  

So lets say you like sunflowers... they are pretty, tall, undemanding and I paid 10cents for a year old package at a surplus store last spring.  There were about 12 seed in the package, that's less than one cent per seed, a really nice price.  Usually they would be about $1.25 a package.

I planted them along the fence behind my new rhubarb and strawberry transplants and watered them as needed for the first month and then stood back to watch then grow.

so many wee plants!

and then, they grew...

and grew...

and were pollinated...

Then I cut their heads off to foil the tree rats... (some nibbling is already evident)

Then I dried them in the heads till the seeds were loose enough to fall/ be wiggled out onto a spare window screen like the rosehips above are on.

then after a month or so I poured them into large pickle jars

So now, I have far more than the first 12 or so I started with.  I did set aside a bag with thirty or so of the largest, best filled kernels for my next two years plantings, but the rest just went into the jars, I have a few leads on people to gift more to, but I will just raid the jars as I need more.  Down the road, whatever doesn't get planted can get eaten so long as I save 24 seeds or so, that gives me enough for two years worth of crops failing to give me more seeds (highly unlikely).

Many plants are just as easy as I showed above, most plants have seeds that are best dried on the plant unless you have competition for them in the way of wildlife or if you have a short growing season.   So all those types really need is to be collected, left in the open air until fully dry and hard and then jarred or bagged up somewhere cool and away from any light.  

 Tomatoes can and other fruits can be eaten and just set the seeds aside to dry on some parchment paper.  All of the squash family have many nice big seeds, but watch out if you are growing your own because they readily cross pollinate and you may get some interesting things that are not much like the parent plants.  However if you got your pumpkin out of the pumpkin patch where for many tens of meters around it are only other pumpkins, there are good odds that your seeds will grow a pumpkin. Apples and pears suffer the same problem, not to say it's not worth trying if you have a LOT of space and ten+ years of patience.

Now I know that finding plants or buying fruit, identifying them and harvesting their seeds is ideal, but lets face it, it takes a lot of time and planning and even then not everything goes reliably to seed or ever grows any where near your home to begin with.  Also, not all of us have friends who seed-save, but you might be surprised  how big a bag of seeds a few well placed questions and complements will get you later in the season if you start looking early. 

Outside of those options, there are many good and responsible seed suppliers.  There are also some that are only 'friendly' looking divisions of larger, often less responsible, agra-business.  The place I have used most often in the past for my starter seeds and plants is http://www.richters.com/  My first purchase being about 15 years ago and my last seeds (to fill in a few holes in my supply and new varieties to try for this year) just arrived last week.

 I still remember some of what was in my order 15 years ago, because most of it is still living and -hem- invading the lawn in my parents back yard to this day.  Herbs are just like that.  A friend of mine bitterly refers to all members of the mint family as "Land Carp"

  Even now I can hear my father teasing me when my order arrived "You spent how much for three blades of grass?"  Ok, so it's true, it worked out to a dollar a blade, which was paid out of my own pocket, but from tiny acorns, mighty oaks do grow.  I have given braids of sweet grass and passed on tiny plants to many of my friends over the years, so that they can enjoy as much as I and then pass it on to their friends and family.