Fruits and Vegetables 2021 : The art and science of organic seed saving
Springtime is coming, and it’s time to buy your seeds from local producers.
Starting in February, we are featuring our vendors and members in a ten-part series for the International Year of Fruit and Vegetables.
In this first chapter, Shannon Jones from Broadfork Farm, a local grower that will soon start to sell seeds again for the season, explains to us the thorough process that goes behind seed saving every year, and how one can start to further that important knowledge.
For Shannon Jones, who started Broadfork Farm with her partner Bryan Dyck in 2011, saving seeds as an organic farm “just seemed natural”. Even though they don’t grow all their own seeds, they still offer a variety of bulbs and seeds that they sell to customers. Supporting your local seed producer is important, since 95 % of vegetables planted in Canada are grown from imported seeds (Source).
Several categorizations of seeds for different difficulty levels
The seeds can be divided into several categories, that make it either easier or harder to save and plant. Shannon named a few of them throughout our interview: pollination, annuality, hybridity and seed pod type. But what does all of that really mean?
First, the seeds are first either self-pollinated or cross pollinated. “Sometimes people call [the self pollinating varieties] ‘selfers’. These include fruits and vegetables, seeds such as peas, beans, tomatoes, peppers and lettuce [for example], which can be easier to plant since you don’t have to worry about it crossing with other [vegetables]. It’s really important to know”
On the other end, she mentions squash, zucchini, cucumber, corn, and broccoli as examples of cross-pollinating plants.
Biennial crops are harder to save seed from than annuals, she says, as in our climate we have to preserve them over the winter.
“Carrots often will rot in our climate if stored in the ground in the winter, but in some climates they can be stored in the winter in the ground, so people will often bring them into storage, like in coolers, or a root cellars, or a basement, and they plant them again.”
She takes the Rossa Di Milano onion as an example of a biennial crop they saved two years ago. “So in 2019 we saved this beautiful open pollinated variety of onion, so we harvested them all, we cured them, we brought them in, and then we sorted them, and the ones that we liked the best we kept over the winter somewhere cool, dry but not freezing”.
The next spring they planted them out. “At that point they grow a big tall stalk and they make a flowerhead. [...] The flowers then got pollinated and they became seeds. So we saved those seeds in 2020, and this year in 2021 will be the first year that we grow those seeds, so that takes two years, [...] much longer than an annual seed.”
They sold some to Annapolis Seeds, where you can buy them on their website.
And then, for beginners, hybrid seeds (often the ones bought in supermarkets) are a hit-or-miss when it comes to predictability. That is why when saving seed for predictable crops, it’s important to buy initial seeds from open-pollinated varieties, rather than hybrid. “Gardeners can save hybrid seeds if they want to, grow them up, but some stuff might end up tasting bad, and some things could taste amazing. So it’s kind of a gamble.”
When processing, there’s also the seed pod type : « Some types of plants have wet-seeds while others have dry seeds. So wet seed includes like tomatoes, or squash, or cucumbers, or zucchini, or tomatillo, seeds have that wet coating, inside the fruit. And then there’s dry seeds, where they make awesome little pods. They become really dry on the plant and they might scatter off the plant. These become dry on their own. So the ones that are dry, we harvest those usually into paper bags. And then that way we can dry them further, the paper bag can help them to bring out some moisture too. »
Tomatoes, generally a good self-pollinating beginner seed
“At the very beginning, we mostly just saved a few varieties of tomato seeds that weren’t commercially available”, says Shannon.
She actually recommends tomato seeds to beginners, as they’re annuals and they ripen at the same time as the fruit (the part that we eat). “Once the tomato is ripe, it also has seeds that are ripe. And that’s actually the whole strategy of the plant.”. In fact, the tomato fruit often ends up being eaten by animals, as it is a beautiful color when ripening. This allows the plant to spread itself, as “the seeds are quite small, so the seeds might pass intact through our digestive system”, she indicates.
Here’s a little walkthrough from Shannon to help you try tomatoes at home :
“So what most people do, they first ferment the tomato seeds before they dry it. You squish a tomato and get all the seeds out into a jar, you pour some water on top, and then you just leave it out for a few days. It’s possible it gets a little moldy. You have to cover it though, because then you also get fruit flies that are going to seem gross to you. You just leave it for a few days, sometimes it gets a little moldy and that's okay. What do you do, is after those few days, you start rinsing, so you pour more water in, and you pour out the water and the goo. Ideally at this point the seeds have separated from the gooeyness. So you just keep pouring water in, pouring water out. And the seeds that won’t be viable, that didn’t get pollinated within the tomato plant, those will be very light and they’ll just float and wash away too. So you clean them that way, and then you dry them, somewhere… An interesting thing to remember is that seeds are alive, they’re just dormant. You want to dry them, quite a bit, but you don’t want them to be like bone dry for example.”
If tomatoes seem intimidating to grow after the seed’s been saved, as they do better in greenhouses rather than inside, she mentions peas and cilantro are as good for beginner crops too.
Squash, a fun but unpredictable adventure
Vegetables from the squash family seem easy to save, but they’re unpredictable, as Shannon mentions. In fact, in addition to honey bees and bumblebees, squash can be pollinated by rarer insects called “squash bees”.
“Bees can fly quite far, so squash can be cross pollinated with something that might be growing a mile away. That’s why it’s harder to save seed from [vegetables] that cross-pollinate from a large distance. [...] As an example, we grow lots of different varieties of squash for our customers, so we don’t save any squash seed because we just have too many varieties on the farm.”
Now, not knowing what a plant from a cross-pollinated seed or hybrid seed is going to end up as might not be that big of a deal for a gardener, but as a farmer can’t taste the vegetable they’re selling, they tend to like predictability. “Let’s say a tasty variety of squash crossed with a non-tasty relative, next year's seed might have varying tastes and sizes”, Shannon says.
An important local knowledge
As seed sellers, Broadfork Farm has to have a lot more knowledge than a farmer or gardener who just saves seeds for their own use.
But Shannon says seed saving shouldn’t be scary to anyone.
« Humans evolved with plants, saving seeds and learning. So [seed saving] shouldn’t be inaccessible, it’s just the kind of thing you keep learning all the time. People should feel confident trying it out even knowing they might not succeed, [...] as people that have been seed-savers for 50 years are still always learning more about it. »
One thing that came out from this interview was that seeds take a lot of time to master, but one has to start somewhere. Be sure to check sources online for seed storage conditions and time, as it all depends on the kind of plant you’re saving from.
See you in March for the “seedling” chapter of our monthly series!