There is special satisfaction to nurturing and saving garden seeds for replanting and sharing. Because they are fresh, home saved seeds tend to have high germination rates, plus they are free. Yet several things can go wrong, so it pays to attend to small details. You don’t want to go to the trouble of harvesting and storing seeds that are second rate or are destined to fail. To ensure the quality of your seed stash, avoid these five common seed saving mistakes.
![Chillies]()
Only fully mature vegetables produce robust seeds
1. Harvesting before seeds are fully mature
Very few vegetables and herbs rush to make seeds. Instead they put time into the process of packing away specialised cells inside a custom coating, so you must often wait weeks or even months for the plants to go from blossom to mature seeds. Vegetables that are really fruits, including peppers and tomatoes, must be fully ripe to the point of softening before seeds are collected. You should not collect seeds from a green pepper, ever, because the seeds, like the fruit, are not yet mature.
![Delicata squash]()
When delicatas (above), yellow squash or other varieties of Cucurbita pepo squash cross, the next generation can be very different from the parent strains
2. Collecting seeds with unstable genes
Most of the melons, tomatoes, and peppers you buy at the store are hybrid varieties, which means they resulted from a cross of two carefully selected parents. Seeds produced by hybrid vegetables may give rise to plants that resemble their grandparents more than their parents and may be lacking in vigour and overall quality. This is why it’s wise to avoid saving seeds from hybrid varieties, regardless of how much you loved the crop.
Open pollinated varieties of many crops can cross with one another, too, so it’s important to isolate plants from which you plan to collect seeds. Squash family crops are notorious for crossing, and peppers are not far behind. If you grew only one variety of a certain species you have nothing to worry about; the seeds should breed true. But in a diversified garden, be aware that bees may have transferred pollen between varieties, leading to big changes in their genes.
![Saving rocket seeds]()
Rocket seeds fall from the husks when they are ready
3. Storing seeds that are not completely dry
Seeds that are enclosed in pods or husks do best when they are allowed to dry slowly indoors where they are protected from rain and heavy dew. My favourite way to dry peas, beans, rocket, and other enclosed seeds is to put seed-bearing stems and pods that are changing from green to tan into a large paper bag, left open in a warm room. After a week or two, when the stems and pods dry to crisp, you can crunch through them with your hands to release the seeds. Once collected from the bottom of the bag, let the seeds dry in an open bowl for another week before storing them in labelled containers.
![Saving cucumber seeds]()
With the rind cut away, cucumber seeds are ready to harvest
4. Handling soft seeds too roughly
Seeds that are coated with a gel such as cucumbers and tomatoes have yet to form a hard outer shell when they are ready to be harvested and dried. They are easily bruised or cut, so they must be handled with care. To access the seed cavities of cucumber, melons or squash, cut around the seed cavity, and gently remove the seeds with a spoon. Tear open a seed-bearing tomato with your fingers, and squeeze out the seeds from the middle.
At this point it pays to be selective by choosing the largest seeds from the centers of the fruits. Reject wimpy small ones or any that show strange discoloration.
Opinions vary on whether gel-coated seeds should be fermented to rid them of presumed pathogens in the gel. It’s certainly an option if you have a lot of seeds to share, but in my experience, the seeds know what to do. As cucumber and squash seeds dry, the gel dries and flakes off. Tomato seeds dried on coffee filters keep their natural coating, which they seem to like, judging from the number of volunteer plants in my compost. In ten years of drying tomato seeds on coffee filter paper, I’ve never had them fail to germinate in spring.
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Zinnia seed head are sorted by colour into labelled paper bags
5. Insufficient labelling
The human mind is such a fallible thing. You think you will remember which pepper seeds you left to dry on a plate, but a week later you are not so sure! To avoid confusion, label seeds at every stage of drying. Write the name of the plant on paper bags or paper towels used for drying seeds, and make sticky notes for open bowls or plates.
When seeds are completely dry and ready to store, place them in labelled envelopes or jars stored in a dark, dry place. A shoe box under your bed with a couple of anti-desiccant packets to control humidity is an easy way to keep your seeds safe until spring.
