Saving Seed

You can save seed from almost any herbaceous perennial, annual, herb or vegetable that grows in your garden. You'll be saving money, participating in a thousands-of-years-old agricultural practice, and learning, learning, learning.

• Take a look around your garden at the flowers you liked most. While you can harvest seed from almost any plant, it's often quite difficult to grow woody plants from seed.
• Take seed on a dry day. Wet plants and seeds invite mold.
• Take one or more entire flowers or seed pods, put them in a brown paper bag and write the name of the plant and the date on the bag .
• Allow the flowers or pods to dry for several weeks. Since we're heading into the holidays, you might forget the bags until after the New Year, and that's ok. The drying process can go on without anything being hurt.
• When you're ready to harvest the seed, prepare by lining a big table with newspaper.
• Collect a few brownie-size baking tins, shoe box lids or similar size vessels.
• Collect small coin envelopes or use empty, cleaned, dry pill bottles.
• Get one or more sieves or strainers with varying hole sizes.
• Open one bag at time and empty the contents into a strainer. Shake to loosen the seeds and allow them to fall through onto the baking tins or show box lids.
• Using a spatula or piece of cardstock, scrape up the seeds and pour them into one of the coin envelopes or pill bottles.
• Write the name of the plant on the envelope or bottle.

When you're ready to start your seedlings, consult a good seed catalog (for example, http://www.johnnyseeds.com/) for sowing depth and germination times for your plants. You can check planting manuals or the Cornell vegetable gardening website http://www.hort.cornell.edu/gardening/homegardening/sceneb771.html for details on sowing times of vegetables.