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June 2008

First experiences with seed saving

The theory: we never saved seed before. It is just something we always wanted to do! There are many advantages in saving seed. First of all, it's cheap. Why spend money on seed packages, when it's all there in your garden, and all you have to do is harvest the seeds and save them for the next planting? The other great advantage is that you can pick the seeds selectively. The theory here is that -for example- seeds from individual plants which mature early, will grow into plants themselves which mature early.

Above: the over three hundred seeds we seed saved from the original planting of 45 seeds we bought by mail-order from Brisbane.

The test: Even though red kidney beans are a main food source for many people, their seeds are very difficult to buy in Tasmania. We had to mail order seeds from Brisbane! And these seeds may have been ideally suited to a warmer climate, but here in Tasmania they did poorly. A third of the seeds never germinated and many that did grew into small plants. Rather than buying red kidney bean seeds again, we decided to save all the good seeds from our crop. These 300 seeds are the "survivors" from the first crop and hopefully will grow into plants better suited to our climate than the initial 45 seeds we bought. If we seed save the best seeds year after, we should end up with a strain of red kidney beans ideally suited to our environment here.

A few problems
Top left: a few red kidney beans which were too wet at time of shelling. They will probably still germinate, but they don't look as good as the main batch.
Top right: seven year beans from the kitchen garden. A good example of how NOT to do it. We harvested the pods and shelled them without drying them in storage. They were way to wet and became mouldy. Seeds like these have to be thrown out!
Bottom: seven year bean seeds from the vegie garden. The pods were harvested and hung up for drying, but not long enough. They didn't become mouldy, but if they will germinate remains to be seen.

Conclusion: harvest the pods and hang them up for drying. But be more patient than we were. Good seeds seem to come from well dried pods (we will test this theory next planting season!).

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