Saving your own seed from this year’s crops to sow next season is the ultimate in vegetable garden self-sufficiency. Here’s how to do it:



What to Save and What Not to Save

Choose your best plants to collect seed from. Selecting in this way means that, over time, your plants will become more and more suited to your garden’s unique growing conditions.



Particularly suitable vegetables for seed saving include peas, beans, tomatoes, peppers and lettuce. Onions, leeks, carrots, beets and chard are also worth saving, but as they are all biennial crops you’ll need to overwinter some plants to gather their seeds after they flower next year.

Brassica family plants readily cross-pollinate with other members of the same family, so the seeds are unlikely to come true to type.

F1 hybrid seed should also be avoided because they are created from two separate parent varieties, and won’t come true. Only save the seeds of open-pollinated varieties.

-Advertisement-