Growing garden plants from seed is one of the great joys of having a garden. It doesn’t matter whether you measure your garden in acres or in pots on a balcony. The magic of taking your crop from seed to table provides satisfaction that’s hard to beat. When you’ve taken the time to collect your own seeds, clean them, store them for the winter (remember where you stored them!) and germinated them the following spring — it’s even better.
Of course, growing your own garden from your own seed requires you to actually collect the seed this year so you have it for next. And despite our best intentions, many of us think of it around January when the seed catalogs start to arrive in the mail. “Next year I’m going to remember to … ” Maybe now is a good time to start.
If you’ve never collected your own seed, it can seem a little intimidating. Of course you remember from high school biology class that plants produce seeds and those seeds have to mature on the plant before they are ready to make a new crop of baby plants. But there is something like 11 gazillion different plants on the planet so where do you start?
You could go the AI route. There is certainly plenty of information out there. But having a basic understanding of how the whole seed thing works can give you a pretty good blueprint to apply no matter what you’re collecting.
When Is the Best Time to Collect Seeds?
Plants give us clues, if we simply pay attention. Overall, plants are pretty logical organisms. Once they’ve produced a mature, viable seed, they’re likely to stop pumping resources into that seed or the flower/fruit in which the seed lives.
When your zinnia petals start to fade, when a tomato fruit ripens to a nice deep red, when your prized Golden Delicious apple turns that perfect shade of gold, that’s a pretty good sign that your seeds are either ready or getting close. Letting that zinnia turn good and brown, waiting until that tomato looks a little past prime and waiting for that apple to drop from the bough will give you a little more assurance that your seeds are ready for harvest.
In general, the best time to collect garden seeds is late summer to early autumn.
You can also take a cue from whatever eats them. I’m not talking about the neighborhood deer that mow down anything with a cell wall, about any time of year. I’m talking about watching your backyard finches. They’re pretty smart and are not going to waste valuable resources pecking out unripe seeds that aren’t at their peak of nutritional value.
They generally wait until they get the greatest nutritional bang for their pecking buck. You don’t see a whole lot of robins eating green blueberries or service berries. And the neighborhood squirrels don’t harvest many acorns until they are ready to offer the most beneficial meal. Once you see Mother Nature’s foragers foraging, it is a good clue that you might want to do the same.
What Is the Best Way to Store Seeds for Next Year?
Most seeds hate moisture. More precisely, most seeds store best when they are kept dry and cool. While water is essential for germination, if you want to keep your seeds happy and viable for as long as possible, dry is key (with a few notable exceptions. See below.) Whether you are saving seeds of marigolds, peppers or a favorite ornamental grass, air drying and then keeping them dry works best for storage til spring.
Drying fresh seed is a pretty simple process. If you have an air conditioned home and you keep your thermostat set to something most people consider reasonable, you already have about the perfect conditions. Clean your seeds (hanging on bits of fruit pulp is a great place for disease organisms to get a start) and spread them on a cookie sheet or plate and let them air dry, out of the sun, for a few days. Don’t use a paper towel (seeds have a tendency to cling to paper towels like Velcro as they dry) but rather spread them out on a firm surface to dry.
Once your seeds are dry, store them in paper envelopes (labeled!) in a cool, dry, dark space. I store my seed envelopes in an outside wall kitchen drawer that I don’t access that often.
What Seeds Do Not Like to Be Dried?
Of course for every rule there’s an exception. Fortunately, some of the oddballs are easy to spot.
High moisture content seeds don’t like to be dried down for storage. Magnolia seeds want their pulp removed (it contains a germination inhibitor) and then planted or stored moist in the refrigerator before sowing. Oaks (acorns), buckeyes, walnuts and the like tend to lose viability very quickly. Some, like white oaks, even send out a root in the fall. Most of these do best when they are sown as soon as they are ripe in the fall.
Maples, the trees that produce those delightful little helicopter seeds (schizocarps, to be botanically pedantic) if dried, enter a double dormancy that is a pain to overcome. They are best harvested long before they dry on the tree and immediately sown in a moist medium where they will (hopefully) germinate right away or the next spring.
Seed Storage Versus Pretreatment for Seeds
It’s important to understand the difference between these two situations. The conditions described above are important for allowing you to store your seeds in a viable condition for later germination. Germination pretreatment is a different thing entirely.
Fortunately, most of our annual flowers and veggies just need a little moisture and warmth to germinate if they’ve been stored correctly. But many perennial plants (most cold hardy trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials) need a cool/moist treatment for a few months (basically, a simulated winter) before they’ll germinate. But that’s a different story for a different column.
Either way, you can’t store them, or sow them, or germinate and grow them next year, if you don’t start collecting them now.
Paul Cappiello is the executive director at Yew Dell Botanical Gardens, 6220 Old Lagrange Road, yewdellgardens.org.
Reporting by Paul Cappiello, Yew Dell Botanical Gardens / Louisville Courier Journal. USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect.
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