by Mike Walters

Created on: March 25, 2010

It seems a shame to me that many gardeners, year after year, trek to the closest Big Box garden store in order to buy packets of vegetable seeds. There is no need to spend money on this annually! All you need to do is save some seeds from the harvest of your garden this year in order to have seeds to plant next year. This is the beauty of a garden; it is cyclical and self-renewing. With just a little bit of planning and work, you will never have to spend money on seeds again, and each year you will have a fresh supply of seeds to plant.

Before you harvest seeds:
Before you plan to harvest seeds for future use from the vegetables you grow, you must make sure that the vegetables from which you are harvesting seeds are heirloom vegetables. If you harvest seeds from hybrid vegetables and plant them the following year, you have no idea what you are actually going to get. In other words, it is really just not a good idea to save seeds from hybrid vegetables.

In order to find heirloom seeds to start with, you must look specifically for seeds that are labeled “heirloom”. The vast majority of seeds that are sold in gardening stores are hybrid seeds, even if they don’t say the word “hybrid” on them. A good, trusted source of heirloom, open pollinated seeds is the Survival Seed Bank. Since all of these are hybrid seeds, you only ever have to buy one Survival Seed Bank. Once you plant the seeds from your seed bank, you can then harvest the seeds from your heirloom vegetables. Heirloom seeds are reliable- you know what you’ll get each year. They also receive their name because they are treasured, and can be passed down through the generations, always producing the same trusted results.

Now as your vegetable garden flourishes, get ready to harvest, dry, and then save seeds for the following year. This process is not difficult, but it should be done carefully and thoroughly in order to insure that your seeds are properly harvested.

Removing the Seeds:
The first step is to wait for the vegetable to mature, and perhaps even become a little overripe, on the plant. (This means that you can’t really harvest seeds from any of the veggies you consume.) For example, a tomato should be left on the vine until it is very soft and overripe. A pepper should be left on the plant until it changes color and begins to shrivel. An eggplant is ready when it has completely matured and fallen to the ground. A zucchini squash should be allowed to grow large

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