The robins have arrived. The soil is warming. Green is bursting from shrubs and trees. Flowers are popping up everywhere. The exuberance and joy of another cycle of growth and life is spreading wildly.
And you’ve caught the excitement. It’s planting time!
One of the satisfactions of gardening and farming is saving your own seeds. You can keep treasured heirloom varieties, hardworking performers and your favorite colors and tastes to use year after year. You can experiment with breeding and crossing difference varieties to create something entirely new. The possibilities are endless.
Most of the seeds you will be interested in saving are self-pollinated or pollinated by bees or other insects. Corn is a major exception, as it is pollinated by wind. Most plants can be hand pollinated if you want to control the breeding for specific seeds.
As you design your garden layout you need to plan carefully to avoid unwanted cross-pollination. Peppers won’t pollinate tomatoes, for example, but squash and pumpkin or certain melons and cucumbers will all interbreed and wreak havoc on your seed saving plans. Unless, of course, you’re trying to breed the ultimate all-in-one veggie/fruit combination (what would a cukemelon taste like??).
Generally you will want to use open-pollinated or non-hybrid seeds for saving as they most often breed true in succeeding generations. Some people have reported successes with saving seeds even from hybrid fruits and vegetables purchased at the grocery store, but seeds will not reproduce exactly like the parent. If you enjoy surprises and experimenting, this might be fun to try.
The International Seed Saving Institute (ISSI) has a great website for saving vegetable seeds. Click on each vegetable you are planning to plant and it gives a detailed explanation of spacing (if necessary), the method of pollination, how to select “keeper” characters and harvesting instructions. Jot down the instructions for your vegetables and use them to formulate your garden layouts.
Everyone has a different method for designing garden space. My favorite is to use graph paper with one page per garden (I have several planting areas). I use colored pencils or markers to label and color in the spaces I’m using for various plants. It helps me to visualize how the area will look when the plants are mature. The colors help me to easily spot planting errors (“Whoops, I had tomatoes there last year,” or “The squash and pumpkins are too close together”).
Ed Hume Seeds has a handy chart for how many seeds or rows you need to feed four people. It’s a handy calculation if you want to have an idea of how much extra you need to plant or how many seeds you’ll need to save.
Corn is both a joy and a challenge if you want several varieties. I plant 8-10 varieties of corn each year. I don’t know why exactly, except that I love colorful ears, tasty sweet corn, colored corn flours and lots of popcorn. I haven’t found one variety yet that does all that by itself!
You need to study your corn varieties and make careful note of their maturity date. This will give you an idea of which varieties you can plant close by and still avoid cross pollination, as they will tassel at different times. You also need to pay attention to the stalk height. Dwarf varieties should not be interplanted with taller varieties unless the dwarfs are clustered on the outside of the planting area. The height of the regular corn will interfere with the pollination of the dwarf varieties by blocking the necessary wind. Ten to 14 days difference is usually a safe margin if you are going to plant the corn in the same area. Otherwise, you need to use distance as your protection from cross-pollination.
There are several schools of thought on how much distance is enough for corn. Articles will cite anywhere from 50 feet to 1/4 mile. I think it really has to do most with how absolutely positive you need to be that your corn seed is absolutely pure. This mostly applies to those who are selling seed.
The seed I protect the most each year is some very old rainbow flint corn that I am gradually bringing back to life. It has a higher protein content (14+%) and colorful ears. My first year, only two plants germinated from a very old ear. I hand pollinated them. They were planted right next to a tree row to help prevent pollination and chemical contamination from neighbors’ cornfields (the closest was about 50 yards). I bagged the plants (using feed sacks) for several days after they were pollinated to be positive there would be no cross-pollination. I got four perfect ears. The following year, I planted two ears and saved two (as a hedge against disaster). I’m glad I did, as a tornado destroyed our gardens. The following year, all the corn was lost to hail. I still have one ear left, of which I will plant half this year and follow the basic procedure again of hand pollinating if only a few plants germinate.
My other corn varieties are separated by maturity date or distance. I enjoy Hopi Blue Jade, which is a dwarf variety that matures blue and turns jade green upon cooking. I can generally plant this with one of the varieties of popcorn, as the plants are similar heights with different maturity dates.
We plant rows of sweet corn in with our field corn, again with differing maturity dates. Our cornfields are a good 300 yards from the house gardens and separated by dense tree rows. We generally plant 1/2 acre of sweet corn in 10 acres of field corn. I’ve learned to plant the sweet corn in the middle of the field, as the deer prefer it to field corn (smart deer).
Flowers and melons are a bit different. Some have male and female flowers on the same plants. You’ll need to separate them using space, but bees and insects can easily be confused just by barriers. For example, you can have rows of corn, bean towers or even tall tomatoes between your melons and cucumbers, and that will generally prevent any cross pollination.
The Pollination Home Page is an excellent website dedicated to many forms of pollination, from “natural” to hand methods. It also has fascinating ideas for cross-pollinating.
Basically, what you want to keep in mind is that you are actually raising two crops: your consumable crops (human or livestock) and your seeds for next year’s plantings. Your seeds are a crop and producing them is now part of your overall garden management. Your layout, planting and harvesting ideas will need to include not only peak food production but also cleanly pollinated seed stock.
Have fun with it, especially if you decide to wander into the realms of breeding your own crosses. Some of the most enjoyable times I’ve had are watching my own crosses of hollyhock flowers mature and reproduce. It is great fun and can be full of wonderful surprises.
Resources
Here is a list of resources you might find both helpful and entertaining.
From Colorado State University: A website with a great chart of vegetable pollination types
Seed Saving and Seed Savers’ Resources: This large website has hundreds of international links to informational pages, seed buying resources, seed savers’ groups and much more. It is a huge site, but relatively easy to navigate.
Saving Seeds by Marc Rogers and Polly Alexander is a fantastic book with phenomenal detail geared toward the home gardener. You may learn more than you wanted to know about plant characteristics, but it is all useful and informative.
Backyard Garden Seed Saving by Sue Stickland was recommended to me as an excellent resource.