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How to Find Seeds Suitable for Seed Saving

Many gardeners, experienced or beginners, have in the back of their mind they would like to save their own seeds. Perhaps you have even tried it before, but were frustrated or lost interest. One of the most common reasons for failure is not starting with the right seeds. In this post, I’m going to explain how to get the right seeds. This post is mostly about vegetable seeds, but many of the basic principles can be applied to other plants as well.

Other Seed Saving Gardeners

One of the best sources for seeds suitable for seed saving is other gardeners who save their own seeds. I’m not talking about someone who buys a packet of seeds, plants half, then gives you the rest. I’m talking specifically about gardeners who are experienced in saving their own seeds.

You can sometimes find these gardeners in the context of seed exchanges, perhaps fellow community gardeners if you have a community (allotment) garden. There are of course other blogs like this one with people behind them that save their own seeds.

By it’s nature, saving seeds usually means having a lot of extras on hand. You shouldn’t be afraid to approach people who save their own seeds and ask for some, they will probably be happy to give them to you. Of course you should be prepared to pay shipping costs and/or a small handling fee, and offer something in trade if you have it. Most people who save seeds will have plenty of extras to spare, and may not even have space in their garden to accept any seeds from you in return.

Everyone understands that when you are new to seed saving, you need some seeds to get started, and won’t have anything to offer immediately in return.

If you know you are growing seeds that have been grown and saved by another gardener experienced in this, and you trust they have probably done it right, then you know you are growing seeds suitable for further saving.

The Difference Between Hybrid and Open Pollinated (OP) Seeds

If you aren’t lucky enough to know another seed saving gardener, then you will need to buy some, and this can be very tricky.

The bottom line is that in order to save seeds that can be grown into plants identical to the parent plants, you must have OP seeds. Most common vegetable seeds are F1 hybrids, and seeds saved from these plants may be sterile and in any case won’t produce plants the same as the parents. Commercial F1 hybrid seeds are not made in the same way as normal OP seeds, but rather are made in special laboratories or factories.

Seed companies depend on people buying their seeds every year. If everyone saved their own seeds and traded with each other, there wouldn’t be any profit in selling seeds. One of the most important reasons why commercial F1 hybrid seeds were developed was to make it impossible for people to save their own seeds.

Choosing the Right Seed Company

Many gardeners are very attached to their seed companies. Because they buy seeds every year, they want high quality seeds and good customer service. Many of these same gardeners when they starting thinking about buying seeds for the purpose of saving their own seeds, are very strongly inclined to look for OP seeds from their present favorite seed companies. This is almost never possible to do.

Since the entire business model of most seed companies depends on you returning every year in order to buy more seeds, they would go out of business if customers saved and traded their seeds, and one of their most important goals is to frustrate any attempt at seed saving. While most seed companies sell some OP seeds, anytime you try to buy seeds for seed saving from a standard seed company you will be faced with very aggressive marketing intended to convince you to buy F1 hybrid seeds instead.

One of the first things you may notice when looking for OP seeds is they aren’t labeled as such. You may find occasional seeds labeled as an F1 hybrid, but none clearly labeled as OP. There’s a very important reason for this. Most contracts between the seed manufacturers and seed retailers forbid the labeling of OP seeds. Instead the seed manufactures want you to have to guess which ones are OP based on the written descriptions or expect you to incorrectly assume all seeds not labeled as hybrid must be OP. Many of the written descriptions are very misleading in this way, and sometimes F1 hybrid seeds are given the same or a very similar name to an heirloom variety. In this way, many would be seed savers buy hybrid seeds by mistake and waste their time trying to save seeds from the plants.

Many smaller seed companies are run by very honest people with good intentions, but because they resell seeds from other less honest companies, they find themselves having to follow the rules laid out by their suppliers.

Of course if you don’t know if a particular variety of seed is suitable for seed saving, you can call or email the seed company and ask them. But give this some thought. Suppose the person answering the question doesn’t understand the difference between OP and hybrid, and assumes you can save seeds from any plant. How are you going to know this? How are you going to know the person telling you a seed is suitable for saving is really telling you the truth and knows what they are talking about? Maybe after you’ve wasted your time trying to save seeds from an F1 hybrid you can complain about it, but all you are going to get is your purchase price refunded or get a new packet of seeds. Do you care if you get your money back for a packet of seeds or a free packet of seeds?

There have been cases of seeds that were labeled as OP turning out to be hybrids. If this happens, again, all that you can hope to do is get your money back.

Remember too that if you incorrectly try to save seeds from an F1 hybrid plant, you may not know this for two or more years after you buy the seeds. This amount of time makes it all that much harder for you to go back to where you bought them and expect good customer service.

If you try to buy OP seeds from a normal seed company, you might succeed in the end, but you are really going to punish yourself in the process.

The only way to make sure you are getting OP seeds is to buy them from a company that has a clear public policy of only selling OP or non-hybrid seeds! You will see this policy stated in the seed catalog or website. These companies are proud of the fact they sell these seeds, and will not try to hide it from you. Many state it clearly on their front page.

For example, look at the policy and front pages of the following seed companies:

Baker Creek (bottom of page)

The Real Seed Catalogue

Bountiful Gardens

Another Resource for Finding OP seeds

The Seed Savers Exchange in the US tracks OP seeds sold by commercial seed companies in North America, and publishes some statistics and variety names in a book called the Garden Seed Inventory. This book is a very useful aid in determining what seeds sold by standard seed companies are OP.

Obtaining OP Seeds Internationally

One of the problems many seed savers have is OP seeds are all but unavailable locally. Many countries have laws that forbid the sale of many or all OP seeds, for example the European Seed Laws. North America is one of the last places in the world where the free sale of OP seeds is allowed. There is an added benefit to getting seeds from North America in that, because of the history of the area with all of it’s migrants coming from all over the world and bringing many seeds with them, the choice of heirloom seeds there is very large. The favorable exchange rate with the US dollar and many other currencies makes it also an inexpensive place to buy seeds at the moment.

Many people incorrectly assume buying or sending vegetable seeds internationally is not allowed. In fact, in spite of it’s reputation as being something difficult to do, most countries allow it. In fact few diseases are carried by vegetable seeds that are not already present worldwide, so there is not really a reason for most countries not to allow their import.

I have not personally tried but my understanding is even countries like Australia and New Zealand, that have reputations as being very difficult places to even transport plants internally, don’t have a problem with vegetable seeds. These countries forbid the import of invasive species, and require all seeds be labeled with their Latin name, so they can be compared with their invasive species list.

Until this past year the US formally did not allow the import of vegetable seeds, but in reality they were almost always cleared by customs. Many other countries continue to have policies like this. This last year the rules for the US changed and now the import of most vegetable seeds is formally allowed by individuals, but a permit must be obtained in advance by someone who is a US resident. As far as I’m aware, sending vegetable seeds to Canada is not a problem.

Most countries forbid the import of seeds associated with major commercial domestic crops. For example you cannot import corn into the US, potatoes into Europe and so on. Also many countries forbid the import of live plant material, scions, bulbs and tubers.

Your chance of getting seeds through customs in any country will increase if you put the seeds in a clear plastic zip lock bag, limit the number of seeds to about 50 per bag and label it with the Latin as well as the common name.

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The White Lions of Timbavati

White Lion

Mike on Planb recently posted about this magnificent lion, who’s home is Timbavati, a region near Kruger National Park in South Africa. On a visit to that area 10 or so years ago I remember the story of these lions being told to me then. They are very important spiritually to the people of the area, and for more than 12 years have been extinct in their natural habitat.

Prized by trophy hunters, circuses and animal collectors they have all been killed or used in captive breeding programs.

One of the most controversial aspects of these breeding programs is their use in canned-hunting programs, where rich tourists are given a gun and a lion in specially prepared setting, then offered the chance to shoot their own trophy to take home. Some tourists are reported to pay up to US$70,000 for this privilege, and it’s a multi-million dollar a year industry.

The color of this lion is owed to one recessive gene, and otherwise they are a common species. This means as a species they have no special domestic or international legal protections.

In March of this year a small colony of these lions were reintroduced into their natural habitat, and are slowly becoming re-established. Full establishment of this lion in it’s natural habitat looks set to be a hard battle in the long run, and your financial support would be much appreciated.

For the full story see Mike’s detailed post (link above) or the Global White Lion Protection Trust website.

I also join Mike in encouraging other bloggers to help spread the word by writing about this and/or linking to this post, Mike’s post and the Global White Lion Protection Trust website.

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Biodiversity Begins at Home

No sooner did it arrive did it seem to have been forgotten. On Thursday the UN report, Geo-4, was released. This is the most comprehensive report to date about the state of the world’s global environment. Its 572 pages were written by 390 specialists and reviewed by more than 1000 others. The news was not good.

Decline of fish stocks, degradation of farm land, unsustainable pressure on resources, dwindling supplies of fresh water for people and ecosystems were among the points made in the report.

Two recurring points made in the report were loss of biodiversity and unsustainable agriculture. Thirty crops dominate agriculture and provide about 90% of the world’s calorie intake. Two thirds of the world’s population depend on the input of nitrogen based fertilizers for their food supply. You may wonder what this has to do with home gardening, and I’m going to tell you.

As most of my regular readers know already, many things changed after WWII in both gardening and agriculture. Before this time, there was not a lot of difference between home gardening and farming. Both farmers and gardeners generally saved and traded their own seeds, and while seed companies did exist then they only sold Open Pollinated (OP) seeds that were suitable for seed saving.

There was no need for nitrogen based fertilizers (which were originally created as a means for recycling the stockpiles of chemical weapons that existed after WWII), because people used their own compost and rotated crops that used nitrogen with ones like beans that fixed nitrogen into the ground. Pests and plant diseases that now require the application of pesticides weren’t usually a problem, because crop rotation meant the same plants didn’t play host to these problems from one year to the next, and a healthy garden usually meant beneficial insects would establish themselves to combat crop pests.

After WWII, all over the world, there were major changes in the way food was grown and we were all taught to believe these changes were beneficial. While there were some benefits, mostly these changes were all about creating new farming methods and plant varieties so that farmers could be made dependent on products like seeds and pesticides produced by corporations. Any objections to how everything worked fell mostly on deaf ears, because massive government subsidies meant everyone came out ahead financially anyway.

Initially, there was simply a divergence between gardening and farming, but soon gardeners were encouraged to take advantage of these supposed benefits too. Pesticides and fertilizers were made available to home gardeners, together with the seeds of the new varieties being developed. The seed and chemical companies quickly discovered they could very effectively promote their products with the ‘what if’ scenario. What if you need fertilizer and don’t use it? You better use fertilizer just in case! Most people after they use fertilizer don’t have the slightest idea if it was needed, or what the benefits were. The same logic applies to pesticides – what if you get a disease or insect pests and you haven’t used the right pesticides? Better use them all, just in case. In this way huge amounts of unnecessary products are used in home gardens every year!

In this way too, many gardeners find themselves under a lot of pressure from fellow gardeners who don’t know better, who encourage the use of these products to one another, or sometimes promote ‘organic’ alternatives to these unnecessary products. All this is just free advertising for the chemical companies!

Seed companies only make money if you buy seeds, they don’t make money if you save and trade seeds with other gardeners. Seed companies have the fundamental problem that they have seeds developed for farmers, and the systems of pesticides and fertilizers used, and they need to get home gardeners to grow them too. These are the seeds you find in most seed catalogs and garden centers.

The same ‘what if’ logic is also used for garden seeds. For example seeds with disease resistance for a disease that could only be an issue for farmers is promoted to home growers, in order to make home gardeners afraid to plant anything else. Quietly older varieties of plants are removed from seed catalogs and replaced with new ones, that are supposedly ‘better’ than the inferior old ones. In this way seed companies that offer more new varieties are supposed to make you feel better about buying seeds from them, because what if you accidentally bought an older variety that was inferior somehow. After all, gardeners are supposed to feel excited about getting seeds for the newest varieties of plants to try in their garden.

What’s astonishing is how successful this system of marketing has been over the years in selling seeds to home gardeners. If the seeds of a particular variety of plant aren’t saved and periodically replanted, the variety is just lost. This is because seeds only stay viable for a few years. This period of viability can be extended with techniques like freezing the seeds, but nothing lasts forever. It’s been estimated that in this way, about 70% of the food plant varieties have been lost since WWII, and many more are still lost every year. Even seed banks, tasked with preserving these varieties, have only managed to save a tiny fraction of what used to exist.

Together with this lost of biodiversity is the loss of gardeners who know how these old gardening systems worked, and who are experienced with traditional breeding and seed saving techniques. Even university agriculture programs don’t usually teach these techniques, because they aren’t considered important for modern agriculture.

In recent years reductions in government subsidies have put a much bigger squeeze on farmers financially, who because of local laws and international ‘free trade’ treaties are forced to first buy expensive seeds and chemicals, then sell them the resulting crops below their own costs. Loans are often used to cover the financial short falls, driving farmers into an ever growing cycle of poverty and debt. This has led very large numbers of farmers in India, Australia and many other places to kill themselves in order to escape their debt. Very agressive methods are being used to promote new hybrid rice varieties in Asia for the sole purpose of squeezing farmers financially and leaving them dependent on seed and chemical companies.

So this is all pretty heavy news.  What can you as a home gardener do to help the situation?

For seed and chemical companies, the only solution to the world’s agriculture problems will be new varieties of seeds, pesticides and fertilizers. Going back to old varieties of plants will never be an option, and indeed since these older varieties compete with the newer varieties, seed and chemical companies want to see the older varieties disappear.

As a home gardener, you can play steward to some of these old varieties. You can learn some of these mostly forgotten techniques like crop rotations, seed saving and amateur plant breeding. These are the techniques that improve soil instead of degrade it, and increase biodiversity. Organic Guide recently posted on how some of these techniques are being proposed as a solution to the current Australian farming crisis.

Even if you don’t do anything besides learning to identify commercial varieties of plants and not buying these seeds, but rather using your seed buying money to buy OP varieties as well as support some of the few small seed companies that are still around working to preserve old varieties, you can make a big difference.

Growing heirloom and heritage varieties can be very rewarding, and once you get away from the 30 crops mentioned in the UN report as being responsible for 90% of our calorie intake, there’s a whole exciting world of new foods and plant varieties to be found! To see pictures of a few of them, click on the ‘Featured Plant’ link on the sidebar of this blog as well as having a look at these blogs:

Daughter of the Soil

In the Toads Garden

Of course with the excitement will come a few disappointments.

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New Garden, First Frost, Fires and New Blogs

No pictures yet, but our new garden is coming along nicely. Most of the weeds are out, and I hope the garlic and some other things will go in this weekend.

One of the difficult things in a new garden is amending the soil. I have lots of compost from the old garden to use for this, but it means lots of carrying back and forth.

We had our first frost on Monday night. It was light, but enough to kill most things. Fine with me, as I don’t have a lot of plants in the ground right now, but it means winter is coming! It’s not horribly early, but I think this frost was a little earlier than usual this year. It’s also hard to know what’s normal anymore.

Several others have said similar things, but I want to say that my thoughts go out to all the people in southern California affected by the fires. It’s not just all the people who have lost their lives or homes, or what the news here reports as the roughly 1,000,000 people who have been evacuated, but everyone who has to breath the dirty air and all the friends and relatives of all these people. Something like this impacts nearly the whole world. It’s probably too much to expect politicians will be able to make the association between this and global climate change, but we can always hope.

Is it just me, or does it seem like there have been a lot of changes in the garden blog world in the last few months? I think I blinked and missed it. Suddenly the number of people reading this blog has gone way up, and there are new blogs popping up all over the place. This is a little normal this time of year, because those of us the the northern hemisphere are just finishing their gardens, and those in the south are just beginning, so lots more people are paying attention to blogging, but it all seems a lot more intense this year.

First of all welcome to blogging all of you that have started in the last few months. I am way behind on researching new blogs to add to my news reader and blogroll, not to mention way behind on reading my usual blogs, so hopefully in the coming weeks I will spend some time and find some of you. I will also try to write some posts of an introductory nature, so some of you can get to know me better. In the meantime, I hope some of you will make some comments here or send me an email. Please let me know you exist!

Here are a few new blogs I’ve been in touch with recently:

A Thinking Stomach: Making wise choices for eating and gardening. Pasadena California.

A Spot with Pots: Learning to be more self sufficient. Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.

Organic Guide: Living organically. Online magazine, including a blog, with a worldwide focus. Printed magazine began in 1987, but is now being moved online. Based in Sydney, Australia.

If I’ve missed anyone on this very short list, it’s not on purpose. Please let me know, and I’ll update this post or mention you in a future one.

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Bare Bones Gardening

There is a new very interesting looking Australian blog called Bare Bones Gardening.

It’s all about gardening without spending money, something along the lines of what I posted about a few days ago and have advocated many times in past posts. Also included in the scope of this blog is gardening with disabilities.

Recent posts on Bare Bones Gardening have included things like recycled paper jiffy pots, repairing garden hose, free mulch and compost and compostable garden planters.

He also recently posted about Ruth Stout and Esther Deans no-till garden methods. I’m more familiar with Ruth Stout who in the 60s and 70s, in the US, championed what we might now call organic gardening. The idea of organic gardening didn’t exist then because the widespread use of chemicals in agriculture was still too new. She was one of the first people to advocate natural gardening methods, and still has a large following of people who believe in these today. Me included!

Bare Bones Gardening has been around for about 2 months now, and has 48 posts. That’s almost one post a day! All of these posts are well thought out and full of interesting material. This is definitely a blog to add to your bookmarks or RSS feeds.