The Complete Guide to Seed Saving: An Article Containing Every Bit of Information That Could Possibly Be Useful

When I talk to people about saving seeds, they are often full of fear. What if they don't get isolation distances right? What if the variety gets polluted? How about inbreeding depression? What if their seed is a hybrid or gets crossed?  My response is invariably the same: None of those things matter. The only knowledge that is necessary regarding seed saving is that plants produce seeds, and those seeds can be harvested and replanted. I believe that anything else is fluffy-foo-foo.

As far as I can tell, the idea that seeds need to be pure has done more to impede seed saving than any other thought pattern. In my experience as a landrace plant breeder, plants grow better with mixed genes than they do with highly stable and inbred genes. When I plant heirlooms, I tend to get poor performance out of them. I figure that is due to inbreeding depression, because by the traditional definition, an heirloom is a cultivar that has been inbred for more than 50 generations. After being inbred for so many generations, there is not a lot of genetic flexibility left in an heirloom, so it can have a hard time adapting to changing conditions.

People often say that seeds should not be saved from hybrids. This is just a rewording of the purity argument: The offspring will not look and grow exactly like their parents. I find that to be a good thing. Because among the diversity of offspring, I may find plants that taste or grow better than their parents.

I apply the same thought prossess to isolation distances, and isolation cages, etc. If I am focused on keeping varieties pure, then I am preventing them from rearranging their genetics. If they can't rearrange their genetics, then they can't adapt to my garden. So I do not have a care in the world about isolation distances or keeping cultivars pure, because I think my plants are stronger when cultivars cross pollinate each other.  If a hubbard squash and a banana squash get cross pollinated, all of the offspring are still squash. They grow like squash, they look like squash, they eat like squash.

Likewise, inbreeding depression is only a problem if I am growing a cultivar in strict isolation. If I am constantly adding new genes to a population, then it doesn't much matter how many plants I save seeds from.

Seed companies test their seeds for average conditions in average gardens. I believe that means that their seeds may not do as well as seeds that were specifically tailored for specific conditions in specific gardens. I believe that if we want the best cultivars for our own gardens, we ought to be growing genetically diverse crops, and saving the seeds from them in our own garden. My farm has extreme growing conditions due to the high altitude and short season. It is at the ecological limits of many varieties. I could not reliably grow cantaloupe or watermelon until I started saving my own seeds.

I am able to grow almost all of the seed for my farm. Of those few varieties that I don't grow, I prefer to source my seed from local growers. That way I am taking advantage of adaptation the seed has done for their climate which is similar to mine. My neighbors often complain about their plants “burning up”. They have the same climate and the same irrigation as I do. The difference is often due to where they sourced their seeds from. The climate of Oregon is damp and cloudy. Plants that are grown there tend to produce offspring that are not well adapted to the brilliant sunlight, extreme low humidity, and radiant cooling that we get out here in the high mountain desert. My neighbors would get better results buying their seed from a local grower.

When I start saving seeds from a new species the initial results can be spectacular failures. The first year of my cantaloupe seed saving project, I got almost no harvest from 40 cultivars that were planted. The second year, 3 plants produced more fruit than the combined output of 150 plants. The third year was magical. I was treating the overabundant melons like they were zucchini.

First Year	Second Year	Third Year

All the common fears about seed saving disappear when using the type of landrace seed saving scenario that I practice on my farm. And I get the benefit of growing a genetically flexible population that can adapt to changing conditions. A landrace is a foodcrop with lots of genetic diversity which tends to produce stable yields under marginal growing conditions. Landrace crops are adaptively selected for reliability in tough conditions. The arrival of new pests, new diseases, or changes in cultural practices or in the environment may harm some individuals in a landrace population, but with so much diversity many plants are likely to do well under the changing conditions.

My vision for the future of seed saving for home gardens would be that most people would save most of the seeds they need from their own gardens, and that we would stop worrying about the thoughts that interfere with our ability to confidently save our own seeds. I would hope for us to be growing genetically diverse populations so that the plants have an opportunity to adapt to each garden. And when we can't grow our own seeds, it would please me if we grew the seeds produced by our neighbors.