Saving Your Own Seeds

From centuries-old heirloom varieties to your own garden hybrids, pass down your favorites from year to year

Heirlooms come in as many shapes as clouds, as many colors as the rainbow, with mildly tangy flavors and sweet, earthy aromas. Letterberry/Shutterstock

My corn is a thousand years old.

So are the heirloom beans I use for red beans and rice, the Friday school lunch staple I grew up with.

I have garlic that’s 30 years old, winter squash that’s 20, a lima bean that produces perennial plants, and a lovely, ancient lavender purple bean from the mountains near Mexico City. All these vegetable varieties, though they have deep origin stories, are now unique to my garden here at Owl Feather Farm.

I’m a seed saver—a food guardian, practicing what may be the oldest human profession, an activity that dates back 10,000 years to the dawn of agriculture. Each year, just as people have done for 500 generations, I set aside seeds from my harvest so I can replant next spring. Thus, I am my own horticultural supply store, with an assist from nature herself. I’m also demonstrating a trendy new cultural idea: food sovereignty, or exercising control over my own food supply.

I grow exactly what works best here at my farm.

I nurture and improve the cultivars I grow—and ensure that I have them each year. Sometimes, I serendipitously wind up with splendid new varieties.

I set aside seeds each fall, drying and storing them, and plant them again next spring. The seasons are different for garlic (plant in fall, harvest early summer), but the technique is the same.

I carry the stories of these crops—and I write new chapters.

Beans are one of the most beginner-friendly seed saving crops, as they're self-pollinating and reliably true-breeding, and easy to harvest from their pods.Jennifer White Maxwell/Shutterstock

Gifting Seeds and Stories

Consider the red beans story. Years ago, I was visiting a famous native singer-flute player and farmer at Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico. This is one of North America’s oldest inhabited places, and Taoseño Robert Mirabal is a shepherd of both its artistic and agricultural traditions. After his performance, while exploring his garden room pantry, I discovered a bin full of potent-looking dried red beans. Mirabal noticed my admiration.

“Want some? These beans have been grown here for a thousand years, probably.” He gave me a dozen in response to my enthusiastic assent, and that’s how they made their way from the Sangre de Cristo foothills north of Santa Fe to the shores of the Salish Sea in the Pacific Northwest. They proved remarkably adaptable, and I’ve been growing them for 20 years. I believe they cook up into the very best red bean stew possible.

My yellow flour corn was given to me by a farmers market operator in Phoenix; its heritage goes back centuries in the Hopi Nation in northern Arizona.

The lavender beans were given to me by a famous chef in Mexico City.

The lima beans represent a commercially defunct seed bred by pioneers for the Northwest climate.

The squash volunteered in my corn bed 15 years ago and thrives where others struggle.

The garlic is my most popular Christmas gift and serves marvelously to curry favor with family and friends; I’ve been saving and adapting it for three decades.

Anyone can do this. There are a few tricks, but it’s really not complicated.

How to Get Started

Start the whole process by ordering older, heirloom varieties that are not hybrids (which will not grow true next year). Any reputable seed catalog focusing on organic varieties will be good, such as Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. These seeds are generally labeled OP (open pollinated). Usually, OP seeds grow true every year. If you want to be sure of what you’ll get, focus on beginner-friendly plants at first, such as beans, peas, garlic, potatoes, and annual flowers.

“Keep it simple when you start seed saving,” advised Ira Wallace, one of the movement’s visionaries—she manages Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and has been producing OP seeds since the 1960s, when growers of all kinds thought hybrid industrial seeds were horticulture’s entire future. “Choose easy plants like beans and garlic. Label your plants and seeds at all stages. Focus on the varieties most important to you that grow best in your garden.”

Self-pollinating crops such as beans are the most reliable year after year, according to Montana State University assistant professor Claire Luby, one of the founders of an organization known as the Open Source Seed Initiative. These are plants whose flowers can fertilize themselves and need no assistance from insects. More than 90 percent of the time, the seeds I save grow true—beans, especially.

Cross-pollinating crops require more consideration in planting. Corn should be separated if you are growing more than one kind, as it’s wind-pollinated and you may wind up with an exotic result. But then again, that could be excellent—you never know. Squash is notoriously fickle; I make sure my winter squash grows far from pumpkins, zucchini, and so on.

“Take time to learn the flower, seed, and pollination biology of your crops,” Luby advised. “Observe your plants—have fun!”

Tips for Harvest Time

The actual harvest is the core art of seed saving. It demands close attention to weather, so your crop is not ruined by fall rains. If you are saving seeds from a crop used in mature dry form, such as soup beans or garlic, this rule applies to the entire harvest. You must bring such crops indoors (or dry them in the sun) for culinary use anyhow.

If it’s something like green beans, leave unused seed pods on the plant to fully mature past the culinary stage. If the weather is threatening, bring them inside to finish maturing, and then dry. I stash corn, beans, squash, and such in my mud room to fully dry, if needed, or in the kitchen, where the squash are delightful decorations.

In all cases, set aside good-quality seeds while harvesting—about 10 percent of your crop when you start seed saving, less when you have achieved the mega-crops that you are imagining.

Now, should you choose the best seeds, or seeds from the best plants? I say both: It’s your project; do what you want. No fiscal analysts will interfere. As you do this, you are improving and adapting a particular variety to your particular garden. I call this layman’s selective breeding.

Make sure seeds are accurately labeled and properly stored. I use glass jars or old medication bottles. I have on occasion failed to label seed jars and, six months later, forgotten exactly what’s what. Oops. Then I have to grow a mystery crop to rediscover identities.

Always save more seeds than you need, just as a general principle. I mix unused seeds from prior years with new year seeds just to enhance the genetic diversity.

Finally, don’t plant all your seeds every year. What if a giant snail comes along and levels all your red bean seedlings? Or mildew takes out the entire crop in August? Use your reserve seeds to start over next year.

A Hands-off Approach

One can even be a seed saver without doing anything at all—let your garden do it for you. I have sunflowers, phacelia (bee’s friend), anise hyssop, gladiolus, lilies, columbines, asters, phlox, and cosmos that all seed themselves.

It’s not just flowers. My frost-hardy cilantro seeds itself each autumn, coming back in late March. And my favorite grows-like-mad tomato, Sungold, spreads itself around to reappear in mid-May. Has it mixed itself in with other tomatoes and become more orange than gold? Splendid. Will it keep crossing and changing? Possibly.

Such cross-pollinating is how I came up with the beautiful, flavorful winter squash I grow each year amid the Hopi corn. And a few years back, my yellow domestic garden columbines and wild red mountain columbines crossed to create an orange-red new flower that shines like a lantern in the June garden.

Nature is diverse, promiscuous, inventive, and robust, and our goal as gardeners is not to block it but to embrace it. As a long-ago business mentor of mine put it, trust and embrace the dance.