Seed-Saving for Dummies

In the backyard, tall tufted wands of lettuce seed stalks are waving in the August breezes. The Bronze Arrow plants, a highly touted American heirloom oak leaf variety, were grown from seeds saved in the autumn of 2010. Out of several varieties, these are the most prolific: luxuriant with seeds ready to take off on their little white parachutes. I have been cutting off the puffy tops and dropping them into a brown paper shopping bag labeled with as much information as possible: collection date, variety, source (i.e. grown from saved seed, purchased seed, or nursery starts).

I used to happily collect seeds from whatever plants in the garden made it through their full life cycle. Then, as I learned more, it became clear that not all seeds are created equal.

The biggest factor for a backyard gardener to be aware of is that some plants are inbreeding and self-pollinating. They don't rely on bees or insects and don't need pollen from other plants. Everything happens right at home in self-contained flowers on a single plant. These are the garden introverts: lettuce, peas, beans, and tomatoes are examples. They have "perfect" flowers, meaning they possess both male and female structures in the same blossoms on the same plant. The blossoms of peas and beans are often pollinated from within before they even open because the stigma (pollen receiving structure) and anthers (pollen producing) are very close together and mature at the same time. Inbreeding plants evidently have the remarkable ability to produce vigorous offspring generation after generation without outside infusions of genetic material.

The garden extroverts -- such as chard, broccoli, and zucchini -- are outbreeding and cross-pollinating. They like to attract insects to carry their pollen around and fertilize the nearby blossoms of plants in the same species. Beet pollen will fertilize chard blossoms and vice versus. Different varieties of broccoli will gleefully co-mingle, as will zucchini. (Now I understand why my carefully gathered Romanesco broccoli seeds gave rise to plants which sported odd, purplish, lumpy heads instead of the gorgeous lime-green, laser-sharp, Fibonacci-spiraled heads I was expecting. Purple sprouting broccoli, I'm looking at you! These cross-bred plants had the less desirable features of both parents -- very few side shoots and small shapeless heads).

Inbreeding seeds, on the other hand, left to themselves (as they prefer) are likely to produce a plant that resembles its parent -- because it usually has only one parent. They breed true.

I have now realized that I am a complete neophyte at understanding the mysteries of plant genetics and will simplify my seed-saving habits, sticking with the easiest, most predictable types, such as lettuce.








Still, there are complications, even at the beginner level of seed-saving. It's important to make sure that the seeds you are gathering come from non-hybrid plants. Hybrids are new varieties created by combining two plant lines with distinct features into one line that joins the best of both. Hybrid plants grow well, but, even if self-pollinating, they produce seeds that revert to the separate, less desirable features of the parents. If you grow hybrids, there's no point in saving the seeds; you have to keep buying the seeds or seedlings to keep the defining characteristics. (Often, it's well worth it: the fabulous Sungold tomato, for instance.)

Fortunately, it seems like most of the lettuce seedlings I pick up at the local nurseries happen to be non-hybrid heirlooms.

Australian Yellow is a tasty heirloom with crinkled, chartreuse leaves. The seedlings were part of an All-Star mix from Cottage Garden nursery. These seed stalks, despite being chomped by deer, have grown back and are almost ready to be harvested.







The Garrison lettuce -- a dark-red oak leaf variety grown for its attractive baby leaves which are a popular addition to mesclun mixes -- also came from Cottage Gardens. These seed stalks, too, were chewed down by deer. They are still in the blooming stage.

There's plenty of material here for further adventures in seed-saving, even for beginners.

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Sources of information used in this post:

Daughter of the Soil
http://daughterofthesoil.blogspot.com/2006/07/f1-hybrids-what-every-gardener-should.html

Seed Savers Exchange
http://www.seedsavers.org/Content.aspx?src=helpfullinks.htm

International Seed Saving Institute
http://www.seedsave.org/issi/issi.html

Give Peas a Chance

Here's the harvest from the experimental patch of Caseload Shelling Peas planted way back in mid-September, last fall. They have soldiered through wintry winds, pounding rains, and freezing nights, made the most of some unseasonable warmth lately, and bravely put forth these plump, albeit bedraggled pods.






According to The Natural Gardening Company, source of the seeds, these peas grow to two and a half feet in height and don't need staking. That has not been my experience! These babies are pushing five feet and the stakes are getting higher, so to speak.

The experiment last fall was to see whether my gathered seeds, more adapted to this yard, would perform better than the leftover seeds in the original packet from Natural Gardening. At first it looked like the gathered seeds were doing better; but now it's hard to see much difference between the two rows, and the small differences could be accounted for by more sunlight falling on the row in front. Nonetheless, I count the experiment a great success because it has resulted in a harvest.

My previous efforts to grow many different varieties of peas have been routinely unsuccessful. Mostly, they never came up at all or got chomped as soon as the first tender shoots appeared. I kept planting them anyway because it's so easy and fun to poke the pretty little green baubles into the ground and because they are a marvelous plant at all stages.

The small harvest of Caseload Shelling Peas last August was a breakthrough. And here we have a second one! So now I'm really hooked.






This January harvest yielded a scant half cup and some of the peas were scarred with traces of frost burn. But who's complaining? It was enough to build a dinner on.






Admittedly, the peas are mere tokens in this serving of Peas Alfredo, kind of like the stone in stone soup. But the meal was delicious. Maybe it's not the peas I'm so fond of but the noodles in cream sauce that the peas are an excuse for making! Anyway, it's time to start thinking about the next crop. Should it be this tried and true, field-tested variety or something new and different?

Picking up a Six Pack . . . of Lettuce

All the lettuce is going to seed and we are in a lettuce emergency. No recourse but to run out for a six pack of seedlings. This is a "summer salad bowl mix." It looks promising but requires patience and deferred salad gratification.





Meanwhile, seedlings of seeds gathered from Bronze Arrowhead, Forellenschluss, and of course Black Seeded Simpson are developing. They were planted August 13, but not in time to bridge the gap. We have to (sob) buy lettuce at the store.

The Umbrella Family

All over the backyard tall swaying clumps of Queen Anne's Lace are going to seed, thickened blossoms drooping earthward with their load of raspy pips.

About three years ago, along a country lane near the coast, I gathered a lot of seeds from these ubiquitous wildflowers and flung them around in our yard. They are biennials, evidently, and take some time to get going, but once established have no trouble holding their own and might even take over if not restrained.

Despite invasive tendencies they are welcome here because of their delicate lacy beauty at all stages of development and their ability to attract beneficial insects like lady bugs and tiny wasps.

Legend has it that someone named Anne known for her lace-making skill -- perhaps Good Queen Anne of England or Saint Anne, the mother of Mary and patron saint of lace-makers -- pricked her finger while making her famous lace. A single drop of blood fell on her handiwork and is memorialized in the tiny purple floret found at the center of some of the doily-like blossoms of her namesake flower.

Whatever the story may be, our wildflower "meadow" is an important part of the garden.






A close cousin of Queen Anne's Lace is the fennel that has been growing wild in this yard since before we moved in almost twenty years ago. Several stands of eight foot tall hollow stalks are bending under the weight of their airy grey-green disks of seed.






In one corner of the yard a lone parsley plant stands tall, offering up small plates of tiny brown seeds not heavy enough to bend the thin stalks.

Parsley, fennel, and Queen Anne's Lace are the current local representatives of the huge family of umbelliferae, a term derived from the same root as "umbrella" -- perhaps, and this is just a guess, because of the shape of the flowers. The family includes carrots, celery, cilantro, and the dread poison hemlock. Don't ever mistake the hemlock plant for wild carrot, children.

I plan to gather some parsley seed for planting next year and let the other plants come up where they will, within reason of course.

In with the New

For the record, the Red Sails lettuce seedlings were planted Saturday, May 8. The wire frames are for draping shade cloth over on warm days.




Here is the installation with shade cloth (an old lace curtain) in place. In the foreground are the going-to-seed Black Seeded Simpson plants.

We are still harvesting lots of lettuce and have enough on hand in the fridge to provide salads through the week. But it's not at all certain the Red Sails will reach harbor in time to make a continuous supply. What I can find out about Days to Maturity is six to seven weeks -- but is that from germination or from planting out of seedlings? I hope the former because this is not just an intellectual question. Fresh garden salads are at stake!





This Bronze Arrow seed stalk has its own spiky beauty. I will let the various lettuces go to seed and see if it's possible to establish some lettuce generations. It's always a thrill when plants start coming up on their own and it's always interesting to see which plants are willing to do that. Black Seeded Simpson seems to like our yard, but that's the only variety so far that comes up on its own.

Stages of Seed Saving

Eventually, I wager, every gardener who keeps at it gets around to saving seeds from the garden. (From the start we all accumulate the unused parts of seed packets, but that's not real seed saving, that's just horticultural guilt.) We start saving the garden seeds because . . . well . . . there they are, by the hundreds and thousands. It all happens gradually. Once you have been working the same patch of ground for a while you can't help noticing that where last year's plants were left to go to seed, new seedlings are springing up. It's a thrill to get "free plants": kale you didn't expect, nasturtiums popping up all over the place, gratuitous parsley. We have a place by the fence where chard has been coming up on its own for more than ten years. Not remembering the precise variety, we call it "yard chard."

From merely noticing and marveling (and gathering the free goodies) it's a natural progression to start purposefully saving seeds to plant in a designated spot. That's as far as I have gotten. For example, this winter's Black Seeded Simpson lettuce comes from seeds I gathered last fall from a volunteer plant which grew from a previous season's nursery starts.

Over time, I've accumulated a couple of drawers full of seeds, including wildflowers collected from rural roadsides. It's been pretty haphazard until the past couple of years when I began to be more organized about it. Instead of dumping seeds in paper envelopes and scrawling a note or two, I made sure they were dried out thoroughly and stored in dark glass bottles (old vitamin bottles work well) with recorded sources, dates and varieties.

So it was with great interest that I read a fascinating article in Saturday's Press Democrat about the local movement to collect, save, and trade seeds among gardeners in this area. Trading seeds must be the next logical step in the process that begins with noticing volunteer seedlings. I wish there was a mail order component of these local seed exchanges, since I don't see the likelihood of attending the meetings where gardeners gather with their hoarded treasures. But is sure is nice to know that this is becoming more common. Sooner or later there will be one close by.

Seed Gathering

Yesterday, I pulled out the nasturtiums, two big trailing plants worth of slimy mess, and threw them on the compost pile. The bare spot where they used to be was littered with their seeds. I couldn't help marveling at the layered poetry of earthy debris, seemingly dead but really a petrie dish of teeming life, mixed with newly sprouting life of forget-me-nots and stored life of nasturtiums. There were lots of locust tree pods mixed in and a few bits of redwood and eucalyptus, not to mention a couple of gooey remnants of nasturtium leaves. What a montage! (Click on the photo above to enlarge it and see the details.)

Today I gathered up the nasturtium seeds and brought them inside.




It's a simple matter to strew them on a plate and let them sit on the dining room table to dry. The fat green newly gathered ones are mixed with some dried up specimens from an earlier seed gathering foray.