Saving seeds the Mighty Bean

Saving seeds is much more important than most people currently understand. It is very simple to save most seeds. It can be very hard to save other seeds. If you save your seeds from year to year you can save a good amount of money. Seeds are increasingly expensive. Seeds are also increasingly rare. Over the last 20 years more than half of the seed varieties for home use have become extinct. Because only a few seed companies control all most all the commercial production, what they have not propagated has often been lost from the gene pool. So the seed you save from your garden may be the only place on earth that seed is grown. So as you go about your life keep an eye out for people who are still growing food from seeds they have kept. Make them your friend and see if they will share some seeds with you.

To save seeds you need to know if the seeds are heirloom or hybrid. Only heirloom seeds will bread true. If on the seeds you buy it says heirloom or open pollinated you have seeds that you can save. The seeds from the fruit of the plant can be planted and you can get the same kind of fruit next season. The secret is to be sure no stray pollen from some other similar plant pollinates your blossoms.

To start saving seeds start with something easy. I think the easiest seed to save is beans. Beans are self pollinated, That means the bean flower pollinates its self before it opens. The chance of cross pollination is very low. Different beans can be grown just a few feet from each other and not cross pollinate. You can have several beans in your collection. There are hundreds of different kinds of beans.  Some are best eaten green, some as snap beans, some as dry beans. Beans generally fall into two groups by how they grow. There are the bush beans that are short, most often vines are less than 24 inches tall. There are poll beans that may have vines several yards long. You may want to choose your beans by how they grow.  I have some bush and some poll beans. If you have less space for beans try poll beans. they will grow straight up a 10 foot poll. From just 24 poll bean plants I have been able to harvest 1 gallon of dry beans. My poll bean is Cherokee trail of tears. It is a black bean that is good as a green bean when it is young and also a good black bean for baking.

To save bean seeds, let some of the bean pods hang on the vine till they are dry. Then just break the hard dry beans out of the pods. Put them in an air tight  container. I use zip lock bags and plastic jars. Then close them up tight and put them in the freezer or a cool dark place. I have been able to germinate seeds from my freezer 8 years after they were frozen. I always save the largest pods for next years seeds.

So as you sit home this winter and read the seed catalogs think of picking up a few heirloom seeds. If you want a very good source of heirloom seeds go to seedsavers.com. This group is dedicated to saving from extinction as many heirloom seeds as possible. You may even consider joining them. I have.