Seed Saving Projects

Knowing that I wouldn't have much time to garden when I have a newborn baby, I've been trying to reduce how much stuff I had going on in the garden this past year. I decided to focus more on a few seed saving projects rather than trying to grow lots different varieties of vegetables for food. In a way growing seeds is easier than growing food because you just plant the plants and then mostly leave them alone. Instead of trying to prevent the lettuce or other greens from bolting, you just let them bolt. Instead of picking pea pods, cucumbers, or okra everyday to make sure you get them while they're still tender enough to eat, just let them all turn brown and then harvest them all at once. Instead of growing several different varieties of a species, just concentrate on growing one favorite variety so it won't cross with anything else. And if the plants get neglected a bit, tell yourself you're selecting them for harsh conditions.

So once I found out I was pregnant, I went through my seed collection and picked out varieties that were getting a bit old or that I was getting low on, which meant it's time to save a new batch of seeds from them.

I also went ahead and started listing varieties on Seed Savers Exchange. For a while I thought you had to be an actual member of SSE to list seeds, but it turns out you don't. (Or maybe that's how it used to be, but they changed their policy.) I have seeds listed on there now. I've only gotten one request so far, which is disappointing, but maybe I'll get more once the print yearbook comes out.


Here's are some varieties I've saved this year and listed on Seed Savers Exchange:

Cougar Lettuce - I got this lettuce from Bountiful Gardens. When they were going out of business I bought a packet of every lettuce they carried that said it was heat tolerant. Cougar is one that's done well for me, so I saved seeds from it this year. Lettuce seeds are easy to save. You just plant a bunch of lettuce and leave it alone and let it bolt. I've read that lettuce doesn't cross, so you can save seeds from multiple varieties, but I just saved this one variety this time around. The hardest part might be cleaning the seeds since they have this white fluffy stuff on them like dandelions. Last Christmas I requested these seed cleaning frames and screens from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, so that makes it much easier.

Tall Telephone Peas - I originally got this variety from Baker Creek in 2009, and this is the third generation I've saved. I like the big long vines this variety produces. That means I get lots of peas for the same amount of space. I grow them on a tall trellis made of cattle panels turned sideways. I didn't harvest any peas to eat this year and just let all the pods turn brown and papery, and then harvested the mature seeds all at once. Easy.

Texsel Greens - I didn't plan on saving seeds from this, since this was the first year for me to grow them, and I still have plenty of seeds left in the packet, but they did so well that when they finally bolted I let the seeds mature. They are Brassica carinata, which is a tetraploid hybrid between Brassica oleracea (which is the species that collards, kale, and broccoli are in) and Brassica nigra (black mustard), so they won't cross with any other plants I grow. And they are just like a cross between collards and mustard! The leaves are like collard greens, but thinner and a little more spicy. I got a good harvest of them and cooked them the same way I cooked collard greens, and they grew faster than my collard greens (hybrid vigor maybe?).

I also listed some seeds that I harvested in 2018 and 2017 that have been kept in airtight containers in the freezer. I mentioned that in the description just in case anyone cares about that, but they should still be good. I've got several varieties of tomatoes, Tatume squash, Seminole pumpkins, Sugar Snap peas, and Texas Hill Country Red okra. All of them are varieties that have proven their worth in my garden, so I saved seeds from them.

I tried to save seeds from Tuscan Kale, but they didn't make it. It's definitely my favorite kale to eat. It's so much better than the curly kale my grocery store carries. But it doesn't seem to like this hot climate. I think I planted my kale too late this time. It wasn't able to mature before it got hot, and I waited and waited for it to bolt, but instead it just got totally eaten up caterpillars. I have more seeds, so I'll try again some day.


Genetically Diverse Carrot Mix

Speaking of plants that have trouble making it in my climate, I've also decided to try my hand at so-called "Landrace Gardening." I found out about it from this article in Mother Earth News. I'm not sure if "landrace" is really the correct term for something like this, but that's what this Lofthouse fellow is calling it.

It takes almost an opposite approach from what people usually do with seed saving. Instead of going to all the trouble to keep separate varieties pure and free of crossing, you plant a bunch of different varieties together and let them cross. Then you save seeds from them and plant them and repeat the process until you have a population of plants that are well adapted to your climate.

This past winter I decided to try this out with carrots. I picked carrots for my first experiment with this technique for the following reasons:

• Carrots are hard for me to grow but not impossible. Joseph Lofthouse lives in a climate that is too cold for most melons to do well, so decided to try a landrace of them that do. My problem is I live in a climate where it's too hot for cool weather plants like carrots. The seeds have to be planted while it's still pretty hot outside in late summer/early fall in order to harvest them before it gets hot again in spring. I also have dense, rocky clay soil. So when I plant carrots, a lot of them don't make it, but usually at least a few of them do. That means I can plant seeds from the few survivors and maybe eventually get carrots that are better adapted to my garden.
• Carrots are strong outbreeders. Unlike tomatoes, which don't tend to cross pollinate much, carrots have to cross pollinate with each other, and they are very prone to inbreeding depression. Lack of genetic diversity doesn't really hurt tomatoes, but it does hurt carrots. So mixing a bunch of varieties of carrots together and letting them cross makes a very diverse carrot population, and I won't have to worry about inbreeding for several generations at least.
• I don't mind having a mixture of different looking carrots to eat. "Rainbow carrots" are trendy right now, and that's just a mixture of different varieties of carrots with different colors besides all orange. And then people sell them at the store and farmer's markets for twice as much money as orange carrots! So my carrots are going to be selected for surviving in my conditions (probably they'll end up having short, stubby roots, better heat and drought tolerance, and maybe faster maturity), but I'm going to try to save seed from different colors of carrots so I'll always have a fun mixture.

So this past fall I planted three varieties of carrots: Chantenay, Atomic Red, and Purple Dragon. I planted more Chantenay than the other two. It's an orange carrot with short, stubby roots, so I expected that it would do the best, so I wanted more of its genetics in my population. Purple Dragon is also a shorter carrot, but the main cool thing about it is it's purple! Atomic Red is long and skinny, unfortunately, but it's red, so I put it in too so I'll have more colors.

Then when I harvested them, I separated out the biggest, prettiest carrots, and replanted them instead of eating them. I ended up with mostly Chantenays, a few Purple Dragons, and 2 or 3 Atomic Reds that could be replanted for seed.

I'm was surprised at how long it took to get mature seeds from them. It took until late summer for the seeds to mature. That's another thing to keep in mind about seed saving. It makes the crop take up space in your garden for a much longer period of time, preventing you from planting anything else in that spot. But maybe that's a good thing for me, since it prevented me from succumbing to the temptation to plant more things in that bed to take care of while I was in in my third trimester of pregnancy. Snipping off the brown carrot seedheads and throwing them in a bucket to finish drying wasn't that hard.

Bucket of drying carrot seeds

I discovered that carrot seeds are also hard to clean. Their seeds have these sticky hairs on them, similar to a very annoying weed I get in my yard called Beggar's Lice, which looks a lot like a carrot plant, so I think they are related. The carrot seeds are not as sticky as the Beggar's Lice, but when I cut off the umbels and pull the seeds out, they do stick to my gloves. At least they smell good while I'm working on them.

I ended up with a lot of seeds from this. I filled up a pint mason jar with seeds and put them in the fridge. I wasn't able to get them as clean as commercial seeds, so there is some chaff taking up that space, but that's still a lot of carrot seeds. That's another good thing about seed saving. I always end up with many more seeds than I'll ever need, so I have plenty to share and swap, but I can also plant lots of seeds and not worry as much about some of them not making it.

I haven't planted any yet, but I plan to soon. I think I'll just toss some of them in the garden somewhere and see how they do. Since I have a lot of seeds, I can plant a lot of them and don't have to worry if a lot of them don't make it. With the new baby taking up most of my time, they'll probably end up being pretty neglected. I might not have time to water, thin, weed, and otherwise pamper these carrots as much as I have with carrots in the past. But that might be a good thing, because if any of them do make it, I can save seeds from them to select them for surviving neglect. If none of them make it, I have plenty more to try again next year.

I also plan to add more varieties in the future. I've had luck before with Danvers carrots, another short orange variety, so I'd like to add that one. And maybe I should add some more colors. I don't really like the looks of white carrots, but maybe some yellow and some other varieties of red or purple. Baker Creek Heirloom seeds has some strange and unusual carrot varieties that might be good to add to the mix.

I can only list pure varieties on Seed Savers Exchange, so I can't list my carrot mix, but I'm still looking forward to seeing what I come up with.

And maybe I'll try this with some other species in the future. I don't really see the point of growing a landrace tomato, for instance, because tomatoes don't mind inbreeding and I already have some heirloom varieties of tomatoes that do well for me, so I'm just going to keep growing those. But there might be some other plants that I might want to try doing this with for similar reasons as the carrots. Maybe landrace beets next?

One more limitation I might have is space. Joseph Lofthouse is a farmer, so he grows entire fields of his landraces. I'm just a suburban home gardener. Carrots plants aren't that big. I planted my carrots for seed about six inches apart, and they ended up taking up about a 6x4 foot space, so that's room for... about 96 carrots? I probably ended up with less than that, but that's still a good population number for right now, giving me plenty to select from. Lofthouse grows a lot of melons and squash, which take up a lot of room. I probably don't have enough room to grow 50-100 melon vines. For those species it would probably also also be best to seek out existing varieties that do well for me and doing traditional seed saving where the varieties are kept pure.

Squash Vine Borer Resistant Summer Squash

I've written about this project before, and it's still not going well. To recap, I want to cross Tatume, a variety of Mexican summer squash with long vines that can outgrow squash vine borers, with bush varieties of summer squash like zucchini or yellow squash. I'm still having trouble getting the different varieties of squash to be timed just right so they have male and female flowers on them at the same time and can cross. Tatume takes longer to mature than bush varieties, so won't cross with bush varieties if I plant them at the same time. And since bush varieties grow so fast and then get killed by the SVB's so fast, there's a very short window where they can have a chance to cross with Tatume.

I've started focusing more on trying to get my bush squash varieties to survive longer. The latest trick I've been trying out is covering them with tulle fabric to keep the SVB's away until female flowers show up. Then I uncover them so the bees can get to the flowers. This gives them a head start to grow nice and big before the borers start getting them.

I could keep them covered up all the time and hand-pollinate them, but that seems like a lot of trouble. Squash flowers open at dawn and then wilt after only a couple of hours, so I'd have to be out there hand-pollinating during that short window of time. I'd rather just let the bees do it, but that does leave them exposed.

So last year I saved seeds from Tatume so I'll have an ample supply of pure Tatume seeds to experiment with, but all my other summer squash varieties didn't make it long enough to save seeds from or even to cross with Tatume. So still no summer squash crosses.