Seed saving made simple | the abundance of saving GARDEN SEEDS

Hey there darlings. Welcome to Roots and Refuge Farm. If you're new here, my name is Jess. I'm really glad you're here and if you're not here, welcome back. I'm glad you're here too. In my messy, wild, overgrown August garden. This is the time of year where we are transitioning out of the summer garden. Pretty much things are done. They've died from disease or they're done being harvested and I'm doing the early parts of moving into the fall and winter gardening beginning to replant, start seeds, amend, tear things out. So I actually wrote a poem about the August garden years ago and one of the lines in the poem says, she contains enough seeds to feed my children's children. So today I want to talk to you about saving seeds. We're going to talk a little bit about the nitty gritty stuff and I want to take you around and just show you exactly how many seeds there are to be had in a garden like mine during this time of year. It's really bright out here so we're going to hang out over here in this little shady spot that I found. Today I've brought out to the garden some of the things that I like for saving seeds. A lot of times I'll just harvest stuff, take it back into the house, but for the sake of this video we're going to do it out here. I do have one jar, we'll get to this, that's for fermenting seeds that are covered in gel. I've got several little Ziploc bags. I have paper plates. I really like to use just like a plain paper plate that I can write on. You don't have to do that. You can use paper towels. You can also just put these on a towel and make sure you label them. And I have a Sharpie marker so I am not tempted to save seeds without putting on the seeds at that moment exactly what they are. My house is full of mystery seeds that I thought I'll remember. I won't. So definitely bring a marker. There's a really unfortunate air of mystery around saving seeds. So in the very beginning of this video, I know this will get kind of long and have a lot of information on it, I would like to tell you it's not that hard. It's relatively common sense. And in your garden, if you garden for very long at all, you will find that if, you know, a fruit falls to the ground and any seeds get left in your garden, whether on purpose, like you don't care, you drop something and hope it grows again, or unintentionally, like a bird grabs some fruit, eats it, and then poops the seeds out somewhere in your garden or in your yard. Seeds want to grow and volunteer plants are excellent proof of that. So I have things that grow in my garden that grow in my walkways and my compost pile, because where seeds are, plants are going to grow. And obviously no intention whatsoever went into saving those seeds rightly. A lot of times they end up spending the winter in the ground and they grow again the next year. So let's remove the mystery. Let's remove the pressure. There are obviously best practices when it comes to this, but you don't have to worry that you're going to do it wrong and get nothing. In the garden, we have obviously lots of different types of plants and they're going to present their seeds in lots of different types of ways. You'll hear people call their garden a vegetable garden because in culinary terms, we refer to fruits and vegetables as two different classifications of things. But in the garden, it's all vegetation. There are no vegetables. And what fruits are in the garden are the seed bearing structure of the plant. So for example, take a tomato. This is a fruit. This plant set a flower first. It was fertilized, pollinated, and that made it begin growing its seeds. And the whole point of this fruit is to spread seeds. All plants are just trying to spread their seeds. They are just trying to continue the next generation of that plant. With fruit, the whole purpose of it being to spread the seeds, it's going to have color. It's going to be tasty. It's going to be fragrant. And that is simply to try to entice something to come and eat it and then take the seeds by eating it and spread the seeds elsewhere. So interestingly, that's why seeds inside a tomato are encased in the gel that they're encased in, which this is a cherry tomato. It's not a great example. But that gel is there for the purpose of holding those seeds through a digestive tract. What about the things that we call vegetables? Now, this is the thing that actually mixes people up a lot when it comes to saving seeds. And I get messages all the time of people being like, Jess, I really wanted to save cabbage seeds, but where are they? I can't find them. You know, you're growing roots, you're growing radishes or carrots for the first time, and you're wanting to save seeds. And you're like, where does it keep its seeds? If you can't find the seeds on a plant, in most cases, they haven't formed yet. It's not time yet. So in the case of the things that we call vegetables in the garden, plants that are not fruit bearing, we are usually harvesting those to eat them when they are immature. So they have different life cycles. So essentially like with a cabbage, they're going to grow a head first, a carrot is going to develop that root or a rutabaga is going to develop that root. And at that point, when we want to pick that and eat that fruit, we're foregoing getting seeds. In order to get seeds, you have to leave those plants in long enough that they go to seed. Again, I'll take you down and show you an example of that. So the thing to remember, no matter what plant you are trying to get seeds out of, is that you need to allow the seeds to mature. That means you need to allow the fruit to fully ripen and fully mature. And on something like a tomato, that's really easy to do because whenever that tomato gets red and delicious and juicy and fully ripe, you want to take that inside, you want to make a sandwich, you can get a sandwich and save some seeds out of the very same tomato. But there are other things that you are actually going to be forfeiting your harvest in order to get those seeds. And thankfully, one plant can have a whole lot of seeds on it. So you can plant a whole row of carrots and let a few of them go to seed, harvest the rest, and you can have both your food from your garden and seeds for next year's garden. Now, since all plants are just trying to make seed, we actually will get more harvest from our plants if they're producing fruits and we are picking them off. And we're not allowing that plant to mature any seeds. It's going to keep setting blossoms because it's just trying to do its one job of make seeds for the next generation to grow. Right here, I have a summer squash. This is actually a zucchini. This was, in the beginning, a nice little green striped, I think the variety here is called cocazelle. And of course, when I want to eat these, I don't wait until they are the size of an infant. I've harvested them when they're about this big and I slice them up and grill them and they're a delight. With zucchini, they do get really big really fast. But in order to most ideally save seeds from something like a squash, you need to let the fruit get fully mature for your cucumbers. You need to let the fruit get fully mature. We typically are going to harvest our cucumbers when they're a little on the smaller side because we don't want big hard seeds in our cucumbers. So we are eating those immature. But if we want to save seeds, we've got to leave a couple on the plant until they get big enough that the seeds are actually fully formed. So when we were tearing out the garden, this squash had been left on. It had gotten really big and I decided to save it for the sake of showing you guys what to do. And also, I wanted some seeds from this. I'm just going to cut this open. I didn't bring a really great knife. I brought a little pocket knife. The sign of your squash being very mature is the skin gets really hard. You could maybe get some mature seeds out of smaller squash than this, but this is definitely ideal. And this is any summer squash, pumpkins, anything like that. You want to wait until the fruit is as large as it's going to get and then give it more time to actually harden because that is showing us that it is mature. Alright, yeah, this is great. Okay, so here is what was a lovely little green zucchini and is now this big monster. And in here, I have nice hard squash seeds. They're going to obviously look like pumpkin seeds because a pumpkin is a squash. Now, no matter what we are saving, we want to make sure that these seeds are dry before we put them in anything sealed because obviously moisture in a sealed situation is going to mildew and mold. And once seeds have mildewed, they'll start rotting and they're not going to grow. So this is where I use the paper plate. For something like squash seeds that are moist, they don't have any sort of like gel on them. I don't really need to soak them to get anything off, but I do want to allow them to dry out. So I usually put them on a paper plate or paper towel. I write the variety on there and I let it sit on the counter for a day or two until they're nice and dry and that's when I seal them. Now, I very rarely cut these open. I'm going to do what I actually normally do. There we go. That's better. So here I've got what, you know, looks like pumpkin guts and I'm just going to go through here and get these seeds out. Alright, look at that. So I wrote the name of the zucchini right here on the plate so that I don't mix it up. Right here on this plate, I would I would estimate this is about three seed packages worth of seeds if I were to purchase these. And keeping in mind that a seed package is what, $3.50 ish? Probably more than that depending on where you're buying it. This is roughly $10 worth of squash seeds that I just got out of half of one zucchini that came off of a plant that I mean we ate pounds and pounds of food off of before I let this one go to seed. How crazy is that? There's so much abundance in the garden especially when you start saving seeds. So now this is going to go in the house, sit dry, and after it is fully dry where I don't feel any moisture on these seeds, I will put them in a sealed bag. I like to use plastic bags just because it keeps any moisture out and I will save those for next year. But it's the fall garden time. It's August. I actually have, I just looked it up, I have 77 days until my estimated first frost date. So I am actually going to take some of the seeds out of the squash and go ahead and put them directly in the soil in my garden. You do not have to cure seeds for them to grow. When people say, oh I must have saved my seeds wrong, they didn't grow. More likely you saved them to immature if you had no germination from saved seeds. But the curing process and drying or fermenting is not what makes saved seeds grow. That's just making it where you can stably put them in a drawer and they'll be fine for a year and not mold or whatever. It's the maturity of the seeds that's really the most important thing and where most people mess up. So I've got this empty space here in the garden and I'm going to go ahead and just stick these seeds in the soil so I can have some squash this fall. So these seeds should be nice and plump. You know, you may come across one that's like super flat and empty feeling. Like that can happen, I mean even in a really mature fruit. So I'm not going to plant that or save that one. It's this one. It's like super flat. It just didn't develop. You'll be able to tell the difference between the seeds which actually developed versus the ones that didn't. All right, the rest of this I'm going to check it out to my animals and I probably will end up with some zucchinis growing on the pasture too. All right, here's another great example of something that we need to let get very mature probably past the point that we'd want to eat it in order to get mature seeds out of it. There's a cucumber. So I had a plant actually volunteer here. It's mostly died back at this point. I have this really large silver slicer cucumber. You can see it's kind of got some scabbing on it. These are white so they don't change color. If you were growing a green cucumber they would turn yellow but you know they're going to get really big. They pretty much stop growing in size and then they start to harden and that's when we know that those seeds are getting mature. Cucumbers don't get as hard as squash do but they definitely are like tough. The skin is not something that you would want to eat at this point. Now I mentioned earlier with tomatoes and it's the case with a lot of cucumbers too. Anything that the seeds are encased in a gel, again that exists to protect the seeds through digestive tracts, but you just got to get that gel off. You can take gel covered seeds and like rub them between a paper towel and get the gel off. You can just lay them out on a paper plate and they will take a little bit longer to dry and then once they're dry just kind of like rub them and let the gel flake off. My favorite way to do it is to actually ferment. All right so good learning opportunity. This plant died back while this fruit was still developing and a lot of these seeds are not mature. So I mentioned with the squash like sometimes the seeds are going to be nice and plump and sometimes they're going to feel like really flat and empty. They just aren't fully developed at that point. There are some developed seeds in this cucumber. These little nice plump hard seeds, but there are quite a lot of them that are nowhere even close to that. Like there are quite a few seeds in here that are super flat. They're super small and those are not going to grow. They don't have the genetic material. They're not mature enough inside to have everything that they need. So I'm just going to go around the edges, try to get some of the bigger seeds out, put it in this jar. These do have like kind of a jelly texture around them. Not as much as a tomato, but it would take a while for these to dry. So I'm just going to soak them in some water for about 24 to 48 hours is about all it takes. So I went through and I got the seeds that looked more mature. It's not a lot. There's probably like 20 seeds in here. Normally in a cucumber when you save it you get like at least a couple hundred. I actually already saved seeds from a silver slicer cucumber earlier in the season. That one just ended up volunteering and I'm really only grabbing it to show you guys. But with that gel on a cucumber, tomatoes are another example, putting them on a paper plate, it would just take a while for those to dry. You could, but it's not ideal to set them out like that. So what I like to do is ferment that gel off and all you have to do is put them in a jar, fill the jar halfway up with water, and let those seeds sit on your windowsill for a day or two, 24-48 hours. Don't exceed three days. You could go up to three days. Eventually those seeds will start bloating. Once that gel's gone and they're just sitting in water, eventually that will damage them. So you typically one to two days will do it, three is okay. And after they've sat for that long, that essentially allows that gel casing to break down and then whenever you're done you can take those seeds, you can rinse them off, and then at that point you're going to lay them out on the paper plate, on the paper towel, label them, allow them to dry, and then put them in a sealed container. Now earlier I mentioned about all plants in the garden are called vegetation and though we may call it our vegetable garden because we're thinking in culinary terms of, oh we're growing our vegetables here. If you think along the lines of botany and you think along the lines of plants, it really helps clarify where the seeds are going to be and what we should expect from a plant. So for instance with kale, what part of the plant are you eating when you eat kale? You're eating the leaves. Whenever you grow celery, what part of the plant are you eating with the celery? The stem. Whenever you eat corn, okay, we actually harvest our corn young in a lot of cases and we eat corn on the cob. Those are the immature seeds that we're eating on the corn. Or we can allow that corn to fully mature, develop mature seeds, in which case we have hard kernels of corn. Those kernels of corn are the seeds of the corn plant. Now we can grind those down and make flour or we can pop them and have popcorn or we can take those kernels put them back in the soil and grow more corn. If you are thinking along the lines of, well what part of the plant am I growing this plant for and where can I expect the seeds to come from? It kind of just brings it all into a part of clarity where it does become very common sense. Again, we're talking about common sense seed saving here. So for a lot of things, especially things that, you know, produce flowers, let's say like zinnias, we're obviously not growing zinnias to eat them, but they produce these flower heads and we have to allow those flower heads to fully dry in order to get the seeds out of the flower heads. And that's the case for many of the flowers that you grow in the garden. You just got to let them fully mature and as the seed head dries, the seeds mature. And it's long past the point that the flower is beautiful. And in the case of anything like that that produces a lot of blooms, the longer you cut them, the more you will have flowers for your table. But you have to allow some of those things to dry and get ugly looking and take space in your garden to develop their seeds. Now for a lot of things that we do actually eat in the garden, let's say things that we eat the pods of, we're eating the seed pods when they're like a sweet pea, like a snapping pea, sugar snap peas. Those are just immature seed pods. So we have to choose, do we want to harvest the immature seed pods and eat them or do we want to save seeds for next year? And typically what most people do is they harvest it to a certain point and as long as they know, okay, I've got enough time before the heat comes and kills these pea plants, I'm going to leave some of the pods on so that they can actually get mature enough and dry out so that I can take the seeds. So if you're saving seeds from anything that's growing in a pod, you want to let it fully dry out on the plant. So here I have some okra. Some of these actually volunteered and they are wild. But you can see up at the top, like far above my reach, I still actually have some young okra pods. But down here, these are nice and dry. Now we get a lot of rain. It's very humid here. So they're not quite as rattly as they might be if we lived in a climate. All right, so I've just written here Alabama red okra and we will get to this question mark. In a lot of cases when you're harvesting dried seed pods, your seeds would be dry enough at that point to go directly in a bag. It's a misty early morning right now. It just stormed here. I'm going to let them dry out on a plate just as best practice instead of directly putting them in a bag. So all of these seeds are hard. They're fully developed. They're nice and hard. They are pretty dry. That's just one pod. I would say when you buy a package of seeds, you are getting about a pod's worth of okra. So to keep in mind, if you have one plant that went to seed, you are literally looking at several hundred dollars worth of okra seeds. It's just incredible the amount of multiplication that happens in a garden. All right, so let's chat a little bit about cross-pollination. I'm just going to speak really frankly on this. These are my opinions and this is how I do things. I am admittedly a pretty laid-back gardener. You may be able to tell by the state of my garden right now. I'm really not stressing the small stuff. As a person who has been saving seeds now for over 10 years and growing my garden from a lot of safe seeds, letting volunteers grow in my garden, embracing new things that pop up in my garden, I spend incredibly little time thinking about cross-pollination. So here's what you need to know. When you go to a seed store, let's say an heirloom seed company, and you order their catalog and you're looking through their catalog and you're looking at all the different varieties, something like that okra that I just saved, Alabama red okra, I mean that okra has a story. That started with someone either intentionally crossing two plants or having something unusual pop up in their garden and deciding to save seeds and grow it and save it and grow it until it became stable. You will often hear people say, well you got to get heirloom seeds if you want to be able to save seeds, and that is not technically true. You do need open pollinated seeds. If you want to be able to isolate plant varieties, save seeds, and have plants that are exactly like the parent plant that you saved them from. All heirloom seeds are open pollinated. So heirloom seeds are just varieties that have been protected and handed down from generation to generation. It's not agreed upon exactly how much time makes an heirloom. Some people say 50 or some people say 75, some people say 100, you know a lot of people just kind of assume a couple of generations of gardeners. But a plant is open pollinated after you save a variety, isolate it, protect it from not cross pollinating with anything else, for about seven or eight generations of the plant. Mind you, you know you have a long season, you can grow two generations of a plant in one season. Like I just planted those squash seeds. That's going to be the second generation of those seeds in my garden. So if you start researching how do I plant my garden so I can save seeds, you're going to see stuff like make sure varieties are multiple football fields away from each other. Or you can have the option of only growing one type of something. Okay, you can grow one type of bean in your whole garden to guarantee that it doesn't cross pollinate. And that really only works as a guarantee if you don't have a neighbor that's right next door to you growing a garden with another type. I have a big garden. I have a big property. And when I first started reading about the distances required to absolutely guarantee no cross pollination, I was like there's no way I'd have to have four different gardens on my property growing one thing in each one all the way on opposite corners. It didn't make any sense. Now that mixed with the fact that I like growing lots of varieties. I like growing, you know, this year, I kept it small, and I only grew like 25 varieties of tomatoes, but they're obviously side by side, there is a chance that because I have multiple varieties in the same space, they could end up cross pollinating, and their fruit could be a mix of the two. And that's a bummer if like my favorite tomato Dr. Witches, this big yellow tomato, if I save the seeds from that, and I only grew my Dr. Witches from those safe seeds next year. And then they turned out to be like kind of medium size and kind of red streaked. It might be a great tomato, but I might be sad because I didn't have the one that I really wanted. So you can actually use bags, you can get into isolating blooms, you can tie off your squash blossoms and hand pollinate them and so that they never open and never have an opportunity to actually have a bee come by with some other pollen in them. You can become very meticulous in eliminating any chance of cross pollination happening in your garden, and you don't have to plant your garden football fields away from each other with varieties in order to do that. Now, what if you're laid back? What if you forget to put the bag on the blossoms or you don't hand pollinate or whatever? What are the odds of things going your way? The worst thing that is going to happen in a garden where cross pollination was not prevented against is you're going to end up with a new variety. So for instance, that okra, actually all that okra volunteered from last year. I didn't plant any of that. So that all came from seeds that lived over the winter. I like saving seeds from plants like that because they're kind of tough, you know, survival of the fittest. But I did notice this year as I was picking okra that there was one variety amongst all of those that looked kind of different. That means it ended up crossing. I had another variety of okra down on the other end of the garden. Probably a bee did it, I don't know, brought some pollen down. So I can't guarantee that those seeds I saved are 100% Alabama red okra. There is always a chance that next year I might end up with a little surprise. Now I've grown some really cool crossed okras that were delicious, delightful. I decided to save seeds from them and try to get them again. So I always just put a question mark on the bag if I don't know absolutely certain that I protected those. Now in the case of the squash, that was the only kind of squash I had growing down here during that time frame. So I feel very confident that the squash that are going to grow from those seeds are those cocozelle zucchinis. Same thing with the cucumber. I didn't have any other cucumbers down here. So there's nothing, there was nothing on the farm for them to have crossed with at that point, at least with any sort of likelihood. Yes, it could have by chance come from like a neighbor's garden far away, but it's very unlikely. So I'm just going to mark those as silver slicers and take it for what it is. Oh, one more thing, just for the sake of being thorough. There is this information that goes around about toxic squash, because apparently there is a thing that can happen when squash, certain squash cross pollinate with one another, that they will create a fruit that is toxic and will make you sick to eat. And when I talk about saving seeds and I talk about being lax and all that stuff, inevitably somebody will be like, well, what about the toxic squash? I've been for a long time. Obviously I'm in touch with a lot of gardeners, like more than the average person. Like I hear from gardeners all over the world. I have never personally talked to someone who ever got sick from a toxic squash. I have heard from maybe two people in all my years of being on a public platform and talking to thousands and thousands of gardeners a season. I've heard of maybe two instances where someone saved squash seeds and they ended up with a fruit that was really bad tasting. And I have heard that the toxic squash that will make people sick from eating tastes really, really, really bitter. So it's not something you would likely power through to eat. So that is not something that I've chosen to really concern myself with. If you are afraid of toxic squash, you can always isolate those blossoms, but it's not something that I'm that terribly concerned about. All right. So as I mentioned, my garden is wild, overgrown, lots of plants that are just like past their prime and dying back, ready to cut out. Here's some eggplants. So on any of these, like this eggplant looks kind of gross. I could cut this open and get seeds out of this. Anything that is fully mature, any of these that are past the point of eating, these are going to have really mature seeds. If you've ever let an eggplant go kind of long in your garden, you know that they get kind of seedy and it makes them not as great to eat, but you want to let it get, you know, it may change colors. Like this was a white eggplant and let those seeds get nice and hard. You can see they're very small, but those are mature seeds. I could save these. They're pretty dry. So I would just set them on a paper plate for a day and then put them in a bag. On the case of those eggplants, those are actually F1 hybrids. Let's and guarantee that what you grow is what you are expecting. You want your seeds to be open pollinated. That means they're just stabilized. In the case of F1 hybrids, I want you to consider like if you bred a Labrador to a poodle, you have F1 Labradoodles at that point. And that litter of F1 Labradoodles would all have very similar characteristics. They would a lot of times be about the same size. You may have some different colors come through, like some different traits like that, but more or less similar coat styles because an F1 hybrid, you more or less know what to expect from a 50-50 cross between one type of breed and another. It's the same thing with plants. Now, if you were to take an F1 Labradoodle and breed it to an F1 Labradoodle, that next generation is going to have a lot more variation. So you may have like multiple different sizes of dogs, different types of coats. There's just going to be a lot more that comes out in that second generation of that cross. And it's the same thing with plants. So let's say I have this that F1 hybrid eggplant and I really like that and I want to have that exact eggplant again. Well, if I take the seeds out of that eggplant, let's say it was the only eggplant I grew. I know it's not cross-pollinated with anything else. And I take the seeds out and I grow it next year. Let's say I grow 20 plants of that, which would be an insane amount of eggplant. But this is what people do when they're trying to stabilize a hybrid. You have to grow a lot because out of those 20 plants, maybe five of them are going to have the exact same characteristics of the parent plant that I originally grew and saved seeds from. And I would save seeds from those five. And the next year I would grow 20 plants. And maybe that year I would have eight that were like my original plant. I would save seeds from those eight. And then the next year I would grow 20 plants. And you do that for seven generations of the plant or eight generations. Some people say 10. And at that point you have what's called an open pollinated plant. It may still actually be called a hybrid. It's not an heirloom until it's been passed down for generations. But once it's open pollinated, you can confidently plant it, grow it, save the seeds from it, and plant it again. As long as it didn't have some plant next to it that it could have crossed with. A lot of people will talk about survival situations. And this is just one of those things that once you're no longer ignorant to something, you notice ignorance. And ignorance is just not knowing better. I'm not like being rude and saying that. When people are like, oh if you're in a survival situation, you better have your heirloom seeds so you can grow a garden to survive. If you are in a survival situation, grow whatever seed you can get a hold of. If you have no seeds and you had like a tomato on your counter that you got from the store, yes. Obviously weird tomatoes that may not be the best tasting or your favorite size or uniform for canning or whatever feature you may choose your tomatoes off of, they're still food. And so in most cases, the worst thing that's going to happen if you save seeds is you're just going to end up with something that's maybe a little bit of a surprise. But it'll still be food. It would still be an eggplant. It just might not have the exact traits that I'm looking for. Now, when you have limited garden space, you're putting your effort into this, you want to be able to choose what you're growing. That's really why we do open pollinated seeds, is to have control over what's going to come up in our garden. All right, so here's another example of pods drying. These are some cow peas. And you can see here, these pods are nice and dry. Yes, they've got some marks on them from the humidity. The actual shells start getting a little bit mildewy. But you can see here that I've got these lovely cow peas inside. They're hard. These are mature seeds. If I were to pick like one of these green pods, I could shell this and eat it. It would be nice and tender and lovely. I wouldn't have to soak it. But if I put it back in the ground to grow, it wouldn't grow because those seeds are not mature yet. You want to let pods get dry so that the seeds are fully mature. Now, here are tomatoes. They're really no longer with us. I could save seeds off of some of these tomato plants. I've actually already saved my tomato seeds. In ideal seed saving, you want to save the seeds from the very best fruit, the fruit that you want to see again. So I'm gonna use the animal breeding analogy because I think people have an easier time wrapping their head around this. When we were breeding hogs, whenever I had a litter of hogs that was born and I wanted to reserve one hog for breeding the next year, obviously I'm not going to get the one that has undesirable traits. I'm looking and I'm trying to pick the very best looking hog in that litter to save to pass the genetics down. Same thing with my goats. This year, I have one doling that as soon as she was born, I could tell this is the best doling I've ever had. And I definitely want to keep her. She has conformed perfectly, her size, the shape of her ears, her nose, everything about this. I want these genetics in my herd. It's the same thing when you are saving seeds from fruit. Now, in some cases, it really doesn't matter that much. For instance, if you have a bunch of zinnias, they're all pink, they're all more or less the same size. It doesn't matter. Just whichever one dries, save the seeds from, you know, those cow peas. They're all pretty much the same. The plant's the same. I'm just going to grab some and save them. That's what I'm going to plant. Now, when it comes to things like tomatoes, where you may have some variation on a plant, I typically will, when I'm harvesting at the prime of the season, and I'm getting like the big, lovely fruits that are like blowing my mind, when I'm taking them inside to cook, I just scoop some of the seeds out, ferment them, and then put them away to save to grow the next year. I want to save seeds from the fruits that I want to see again. This year, I actually did not bag my blossoms, my tomato blossoms, and there were multiple varieties there. And I grow enough plants that I may end up with some that are crossed next year, but I'll save seeds from several different fruits and mix them together. And for the most part, I end up with what I'm looking for. All right, let's come down here. So, this tunnel on the left is actually going to be the fall garden tunnel. Over here on the right, we're still harvesting a lot of stuff, so it's not cleaned out. Now, here are some artichokes that I allowed to flower. Remember, seeds are in the flower pods that are dry. An artichoke, when we're eating an artichoke, we are eating the immature flower head. And so, right here in the head of this flower, I have artichoke seeds. And so, I can pull these. Now, this is really cool, and when we look at plants with common sense, and we're just like, well, how does this work? You'll see these really flowy bits. Well, this has been recently very rained on, and it's been real humid, so this is damp right now. But let's say it gets really hot and dry, this completely dries out. What would eventually happen is this seed head would kind of open up more, and these really flowy bits would start blowing in the wind, and they would actually take these seeds with them and spread the seeds of this artichoke, because it didn't grow for me to steam the head and dip it in butter, though I did that with several of them. It grew to spread these seeds. So, as long as I know what a plant is trying to do, I can work with it and get what I need from it. Here's an example of zinnias. Some dry seed heads here. Just pull them apart, and you will find zinnia seeds. There they are right there. Again, at the bottom of these dried petals, which are meant to catch the wind and spread these seeds. These volunteered. These grew from last year, just from, you know, zinnias I had in here previously that dropped their seeds. Okay, so back here is an example that I wanted to show you guys regarding root vegetables. I don't have a lot of this stuff growing in my garden, because we don't really grow that in the summer, but here are some carrots that I have left in the ground for as long as I could. I need to just go ahead and pull them all up. Because, as you can see, a few of these carrot plants are starting to go to seed. So, let's pull this plant out. Now, we've got the flower head. We've got the carrot. You might could still eat this carrot. A lot of times, by the time they start producing flowers, the root has gotten huge. It's begun splitting. It's gotten really like hard and pithy, because it's no longer tender and young. I pulled this out for the sake of being able to share it with you guys. This actually is not ready. So, like all flower heads, we want them to be dried up before we try to get seeds out of them. This is still just developing. There are no mature seeds in this carrot, and that's probably also why this is still like looks pretty good. Once these are dry, usually this is pretty gnarly, and you do really have to choose which one you want. You want an edible carrot, or you want carrot seeds? I wanted you to be able to see this whole plant. You can see we've got the root, which is the part we eat, the stem, and up here we have the flowers. Pretty much everything that you grow in like a winter garden, a fall garden, all your root vegetables, all your brassicas, all the things we're calling vegetables, where we're eating roots, or leaves, or stems, you have to let these mature to the point that's past the place you want to eat it in order to get seeds. And in anything like that, if you're looking at the plant being like, I don't know where this thing keeps its seeds, it probably just isn't time yet. It hasn't formed them yet. Most plants, the seeds become fairly obvious. Not all, but most. So, I actually need to get the rest of these carrots out of the ground before they start going to seed. It is really interesting, and carrot flowers are really pretty. They're great for arrangements. Look at this pepper. Isn't that beautiful? This is called candy cane. So, this is a hybrid. This is one that I could save the seeds from and experiment with and figure out how it does. In the case of saving seeds from peppers, it's just like anything else. We want our peppers to be fully ripe whenever we go to save the seeds. Now, these jalapenos are not fully ripe. We typically pick jalapenos when they're young and green to eat them, but here's example of a fruit down towards the bottom that has turned red. It's kind of starting to get just a little bit soft. It's changed its color. This is a fully ripe jalapeno, so this is what I would choose to save seeds from. And with peppers, they're not coated with anything, but they might have a little bit of moisture. So, this is just one that I would open, put on a plate, let it dry for a day or so, and then put the seeds in a sealed bag with some sort of label on them. Now, with peppers, I will save the seeds without bagging the fruits, and I will let volunteers grow. However, you should know that the peppers will cross-pollinate. Not always. You can save seeds from them without protecting them, and a lot of times you'll get the same thing. If you're growing really hot peppers in the same general vicinity that you were growing not hot peppers and you were trying to save seeds for those not hot peppers, that is one trait that is dominant. The heat of a pepper is a very dominant trait, so if it does cross-pollinate, you are running the risk that next year you're going to have like really spicy bell peppers if you don't do something to protect those seeds. So, I save pepper seeds. I still also will buy some pepper seeds, but if it's something that's really important to me, especially my sweet peppers, I will go ahead and isolate those blooms with a little party bag. I put them over them right before they open when it's putting out a cluster of blooms. I'll put a little bag over it and then shake it, allow the wind to blow it. That plant will pollinate itself, and then after the fruit is set, I remove that bag and mark that branch. So, I know save the seeds from these fruits because you've protected them. So, what I've told you applies across the garden. For instance, here's a basil plant. This is holy basil. It puts up its flower stalks. Flowers is what plants use to make seeds. I need to go to flower stalks that are completely dry, pull the flowers off, and within these are tiny, tiny little seeds. A lot of times when it comes to saving seeds for things like this that have like really little seeds, lettuce has really little seeds, I'll just grab a bunch of these flowers. I'll put them on my plate, let them dry out, and I'll save just a bunch of the flowers, and when it comes to planting these next year, I'll just over-sow them. Instead of trying to thresh this out and get all the tiny seeds out of each individual flower, planting these flowers with the seeds in them will also work. All right, okay, so there in the middle of my hand is one of the seeds. I just pulled one of the flowers apart so you can see how tiny they are. So, what some people do also as far as like saving teeny tiny seeds, carrots, lettuce, things like basil, where you have these flowers that may have three or four seeds in one tiny flower, a lot of times people will take a bunch of the flowers that are dried on the plant, they'll lay them out, let them dry further, and then you can at that point take them and put them in a bag and shake them a lot or roll the bag and essentially thresh those plants, and that's separating the seeds from the chaff of the dried flowers. But then you've got to go through and get the seeds out, so it's just, to me, it's just easier to save the flowers and plant them directly from that. So yeah, that's a little bit of the seeds that are in my garden right now. I could probably find more, and if you can imagine the garden this whole year, all the different things that have been grown, there are enough seeds in one year of a garden to grow that size garden again. I mean, for another 20 years, honestly. But that does lead me into my next thing, which is storage. Seeds don't expire. Whenever we buy seeds from the store, they will have a sell-by date on them, but that is really just a regulation that is meant to keep seed companies honest. Unfortunately, a lot of people think that it's a sell-by date and they throw their seeds away like they would spoiled yogurt. Don't do that. They grow for a long time. If you keep your seeds cool, dry, and preferably in a dark place. So I like to keep them in plastic bags in some sort of like plastic tote or Rubbermaid container. I slide it underneath my bed. So somewhere cool, dry, and dark. They'll last for years and years. I routinely grow seeds in my garden that are at least seven or eight years old. You know, people send me things. I've got things. You may lose some germination as time goes by, but I remember Luke from MIGardener. He did this whole experiment where he got these tomato seeds that he'd gotten in a shadow box and he estimated they were 80 something years old. And he ended up growing these seeds and getting plants from them. So I let that be my encouragement. They're not going to expire. And if you store them poorly, like I've had seeds that I left in my greenhouse entire season. Like I left them in the whole summer, the whole winter. Obviously the exact opposite conditions that they should have had. And I grew them the next year and they grew fine. Maybe not as high a germination as they would have if I had been more careful with them, but I still got food. Now I do have a video that I made several years ago. I think it was like my first year doing YouTube. So it's definitely young Jess that's not quite as comfortable talking to a to time this video right at the crossover of the spring to summer garden. And I was able to actually show a lot of examples of saving seeds from different things hands on. You know, I didn't have as many examples today. It's a lot of the same information that's in this video, but I'll put a link to it if you are the kind of person who likes to specifically see. But I hope that these common sense tips will help you feel encouraged. And then if you are stuck in analysis paralysis, and you are buying seeds every year needlessly, because you're afraid you're going to do it wrong, I hope you'll just throw caution to the wind and save seeds out of your garden. I always tell the story, my mom is like a compulsive seed saver. And so at any given point, she has like napkins or little baggies or something with seeds in her bag, because, you know, when we're out in public places, and there's landscaping, and they've got dried flower heads, my mom will often grab a few seeds off of it. It's a very common thing for gardeners to do when anybody visits my garden ever. I'm literally just like, if you see anything you want to grab seeds from, go for it. You know, if you want to grab a hunk of a plant, if you want to take a cutting, that is the joy of gardening is just how multipliable it is. We are never in lack. When we understand this about the garden, there is abundance to be had. And when it comes to seed saving, I don't think there's anything in my life that has convinced me that there is abundance to be had like seed saving in a fruitful garden in August. When you look at this and you go, man, it's a mess. It's overgrown. There's not much to offer here. No, no, no, there's a ton to offer. Next year's garden is to be had right there in that mess. Thank you guys for hanging out with me today and all the days you do. I bless you. Until next time.