How to Save the Most Common Garden Seeds

Saving seeds of most garden vegetables and fruit is pretty easy. It just requires a little patience and a sacrifice of one or two of your best tomatoes, peppers, melons, squash, or other crops for the seed harvest.

One of the most joyous feelings for a gardener is to see that first ripe cucumber, pepper or tomato on the plant you grew from a seedling (your baby’s all grown up!). Excitement boils over, as you can’t wait to taste the fruits of your labor.

But if you’re a seed saver, you may have to let that first fruit or vegetable ripen to the point of near bursting and being inedible. That’s because the first-to-ripen fruit or vegetable is the earliest product of the hardiest plant and that’s exactly the best seed to save for next year’s garden. That first-to-ripen seed will be most likely to produce the most robust plants, and be able to survive pest attacks and weather extremes better than its brothers and sisters.

But that’s not to say that the seeds from later-ripening fruits and vegetables will produce inferior seeds. If they’re from that same, first-to-bear plant, any disease-free, pest-free produce will be fine. But only harvest seeds from the highest quality fruits, vegetables or flowers in your garden.

Why save garden seeds when buying them is so easy?

Garden seeds are plentiful most years. But some years, for various reasons, some varieties can be in short supply. You can generally find what you want online or at your local garden center: heirloom or hybrid seeds, non-GMO, organic, take your pick. Seeds are also only a few dollars – for the price of buying 1 plant at your local garden center, you can get a handful of seeds, and many kinds of rare varieties not sold at garden centers, much less big box stores. So there are advantages to saving seeds, depending on what’s important to you.

Reasons for saving garden seeds

1. Fruits, vegetables, and flowers that have acclimated to your local weather, soil conditions, and pests are less likely to be stressed by them. This will help to encourage a successful crop every year.
2. Heirloom crops may have been passed down in a family for many generations and you want to preserve that plant’s gene pool.
3. You know the source of the seed and how it was grown, which is especially important to organic gardeners.
4. Unique plants you won’t find at most garden centers.
5. It’s fun and a cool science experiment. Especially for kids.

How to save flower seeds

Saving flower seeds is a type of selective breeding. Save seeds from the flower that looks best so that you’ll have just as beautiful a flower next year. Look for the plant with the best growth, best foliage, best flower, and/or best color, and harvest the seeds only from that specimen.

Sunflowers are an easy flower to start with, as the time to harvest the seeds is very obvious (when the flower head points towards the ground and starts to brown), the seeds are easy to see and remove, and their germination rate is high. But be warned that your local wildlife knows when the seeds are ready, too. Place a paper bag over the sunflower’s head as it gets close to maturity to protect it from hungry birds and squirrels.

How to save vegetable seeds and fruit seeds

The seed saving methods for each vegetable and fruit can be considerably different. If you’re saving seeds from a plant more complex than beans, tomatoes, or peppers, it’s worth your while to spend a little time researching the techniques specific to the seeds you want to save. The book that introduced me to seed saving and one I highly recommend is Saving Seeds: The Gardener’s Guide to Growing and Saving Vegetable and Flower Seeds.

Preparing vegetable and flower seeds for storage

Once you’ve harvested the seeds, allow them to dry for 5-7 days at room temperature on a ceramic plate, paper towel, or coffee filter. Do not store seeds damp, as they’ll rot. You can tell they’re dry when they easily snap in half. When dry, put the seeds in a standard white paper envelope or glassine envelope and mark it with the following information:

• The plant the seed came from, including the specific cultivar.
• The date the plant bloomed or fruited.
• The company that originally produced the seed.
• The month, day, and year you harvested the seed.

Tips on storing garden seeds

Store your saved seeds in their envelopes, inside mason jars, the same kind used for canning. Mason jars are airtight, with metal tops that lock. Humidity is a saved seed’s enemy, so to ensure dryness in the jar, add a small packet of silica gel – the kind that’s frequently in bottles of vitamins. This is not a critical step, but it might allow your seeds to last an additional season or two.

Most seeds can be stored from 1-5 years if you keep them in a mason jar in a refrigerator – how long your saved seeds remain viable depends on the species and the quality of the seeds at harvest. Be sure to keep them away from the freezer side of the fridge, as you don’t want the seeds to come anywhere near freezing. For more info, see our post on how long you can store saved seeds.

Do not save hybrid seeds (F1)

If your seed packet indicates that the seed is an F1, don’t save the seeds from the plant, because the offspring will not look like the parent plant you grew. F1 seed is the first generation of a hybrid, the cross of two distinctly different parent plants, selected for quality or disease resistance. The seed from an F1 hybrid may produce a plant that looks like one of the parent plants, but the fruit may appear very different in shape, texture, or taste. I’ve experienced this many times with “volunteer” tomatoes that pop up in my garden.