Anyone here save seeds? Just finished reading a book on seed saving and cannot believe how complicated it sounds!
I’m starting to learn about saving seeds and having some luck. Hopefully seed saving will be covered on one of the weekly gardening threads.
I saved seeds from my green beans last year. It didn’t seem too complicated, not like carrots or beets. When the plants were reaching their peak production, I chose a few to stop picking from, letting the pods ripen until they turned tan. We had such a wet fall that they weren’t going to dry on the vine, so I picked the tan ones as they changed color and spread them out on newspaper to finish drying. When they were dry and brittle, I cracked the pods open and spread the seeds out for another week to make sure they were very dry, then packed in an old pill bottle with a dessicant pack.
(Actually, several pill bottles. After the plants died down there were a ton more that had ripened under the leaves out of sight, so I dried those for seed as well. I ended up with a nice pile of them!)
If you end up with too many green bean seeds, you can use them as dry shelling beans.
Beans are pretty easy and will stay true to their genetics without much bother, Other stuff, like corn, runs out pretty quickly and needs special precautions. Some books are pretty simple (and sometimes inaccurate) but others do a good job of guiding people through difficult methods to preserve genetic purity of the seed. The best treatment of seed saving I know of is this book:
Seed To Seed - Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners
Susanne Ashworth
Seed Savers Exchange, 2002
Most good OP seed catalogs now carry this title. If not, I’m sure Amazon does.
Tomatoes are slightly more complicated. I save the seed, juice, and some pulp in a plastic cup, add some water, cover with plastic with some air holes, let ferment for a few days (outside, out of direct sun), stirring daily, until the seeds separate from the pulp. Rinse, dry on a coffee filter or paper towel. Save in a pill bottle, test tube, or similar container. Label!
Only use “heirloom”, or other “open pollinated” varieties.