Save Your Own Seed

EVER SINCE the Cistercian monks of Coggeshall Abbey domesticated the carrot in the 12th Century, we have grown the seeds that our Nation of gardeners need.

Our seedsmen spend their lives trying to stop our vegetables returning to the weeds from which they grew. They keep our beet from becoming Beta vulgaris maritima, a sea shore weed (which is why salt is used as a fertiliser for sugar beet), and our cabbages, brussels sprouts and savoys from becoming Brassica oleracea, which only survives wild on cliffs and rocky islets which rabbits have never reached.

Every vegetable in every country began as a weed, just as our beet, our cabbages and our carrots did, and each of them is struggling to get back to its past. Our seedsmen throw out these throwbacks which they call 'rogues' to keep our vegetables true, not only to the improvements that are our heritage from perhaps a thousand years of gardening. but the-very latest products of genetical genius.

Never try to raise any variety that is catalogued as an 'F.1. Hybrid'. This is grown by seedsmen as two pure lines, often not particularly striking, but when they are artificially -pollinated with each other's pollen, the result has the vigour of the first cross. This entails more work than normal seed growing which is why these F.1. Hybrids are always more expensive, but they can be worth the money. If you save seed from them this vigour is lost.

There is another advantage apart from the saving in money. By raising our own seed we can keep varieties in cultivation, which the seed trade has discarded despite their advantages to gardeners, and which now may not be sold without a£100 fine because they are not on the National and European Registers.

Market gardeners prefer vegetables that can be cleared in a couple of days and packed off to market when the price is high. Gardeners, however, want varieties that will last till every one in the row is eaten, have a good flavour and be tough and hardy through all seasons.

Peas and Beans
These seeds involve the problem of the bees, for they can carry the pollen from one variety to another and therefore create problems of race relations. A few vegetables such as salsify are species, or nearer the original weeds or wildflowers and these stay more or less true to type. But most are hybrids, produced by deliberate cross breeding and selection throughout even Centuries, and therefore it is a good idea to grow only one variety in your garden.

You may not be able to control your neighbours bees, but you have a safeguard. Bees hate mixing nectar and pollen. If they-start off on peas they will stick to them until they have finished the job, making a beeline back to the hive to take on another load.

Seedsmen simply put a hive beside one lot of antirrhinums, and another beside the pink ones, knowing that each will stick to the job in hand, because if any worker wandered from pink to yellow, there would be a first class row.

So buy a kind like Kelvedon Wonder, which has mildew resistance, and rapid growth so it can be sown for succession, and put in a series of batches. Reserve a row for seed from the first sowing, and do not pick any of its pods. As the buds go on opening the bees will bring more Kelvedon Wonder pollen from the later sown rows and you have high odds on keeping your stock true. If you like a maincrop, choose one kind and sow it twice, with an early variety like Meteor or Peter Pan. Reserve your row always in the first sown batch because you are not only trying to get your peas as far as green pods for eating, but you want to harvest some of them for drying, and that is not easy in some summers.

Your seed row will gradually dry off with leaves turning yellow and pods light brown. When the first pods to ripen begin to split at the lower ends, cut the pea haulms off level, with the ground and spread them on sacks or polythene bags in the sun, or in wet seasons, hang them to dry in a shed with newspaper below to catch any shed seed. When the pods crack crisply they can be shelled by hand into bags and hung from the shed roof to defeat mice or rats. Seed for raising needs to breathe, so do not store in polythene bags, or jars.

There are three types of bean, four if you count soya beans.

The first is the Broad bean and its relations the field beans. For seed purposes always sow the long podded varieties Aquadulce Claudia in November, which avoids black fly, and simply leave the pods unpicked to harvest when they will be black dry and splitting at the lower end. Spread them in potato chitting trays (unwanted until Spring) with opened out Colour Supplements on the bottoms stacked one on top of the other for free air circulation in a dry shed. When the pods split and twist, shell out the beans by hand, discarding any that are small or misshapen.

Daffa beans are like broad beans with smaller but more frequent pods that point upwards instead of outwards. They are sown in the autumn in the same way and harvested in August as dry seed.

Tic beans are round and spring sown, with rather thinner skins, also ripening in August for storing. Both yield about twice the crop produced by soya beans in countries where these do well, and more than 50 times the production of the Fiskeby V variety in gardens where this germinated in 1974.

The second type of bean is the runner, the 'pole bean' of the USA which is not hardy and is sown in May. Sow seed of your favourite kinds in boxes in a cold frame in March and plant them out in early May to give the seedlings a flying start. When you raise for seed, just as with peas, you leave the first large pods and the new few generations because they will ripen first, free from pollen of any other runner in your garden or a neighbours.
When these are dry and brown, towards the end of September, pick them and spread them out in trays like - the broad beans to split and twist, ready to shell for next springs sowings.

The third class of bean is the 'French' bean, which came from Peruvia, Spain, following the equally 'French' marigold. This is also May sown, but because it is a low bush it is easier to protect. Sow your seed in pairs a foot apart in early April, and two feet between rows. As your beans grow, tie them to a stake. Fit a polythene bag over each pair to make a 'cloche' for the early part of the growing season.
French beans for eating will produce a heavy crop, provided they are kept picked, but those for seed need to be high and away from the risk of wet soil and slugs.

Parsnips are best lifted in the same way so that the best roots can be chosen, and replanted in December and January, with great care to avoid damaging the skins, because parsnips rot easily. They will ripen during August and the secret of good seed is to watch for when the pods in the king head split and rattle - the sign that the whole plant is ready to cut and hang up to dry. These will set into heads of long black seeds which should be gathered into paper bags and hung to dry for storage.

Beet are even more attractive in their seeding season. Choose the very best and most shapely roots from those stored in peat and plant them in February, with the tops just below ground level in good well composted soil. If you are growing Cooks Delight, the best for raw eating, choose roots that are not more than fifteen inches long and two and a half inches thick, and discard any that are round, and any that have white ring markings in the middle.

The usual planting method is in threes, fifteen inches apart, where the red stems and foliage and the plumes of flowers rather like those of Berberis stenophylla can be seen to advantage. When the plants reach eighteen inches high, cut them back to a foot above ground so they branch sturdily and do not get too tall. Towards the end of August the whole plant will gradually change colour from deep blood red and darkish green to brownish shades. Then the stalks should be cut off level with the ground and hung up to dry. The seed rubs out quite easily for storage. It looks like small, light brown dried raspberries, and is in fact a cluster of seeds in one, which is why seedling beet must always be thinned to the best in each position.

Carrots, Beets and Other Roots
Every seed is designed for two jobs. First it has its coded instructions on how to be a beetroot (as an example) locked up in the DNA in its chromosomes, all the equipment it needs for the job, and the store of food to give it a starting stock before it can begin to harness the sun, the rain and' the soil to drive it through its cycle of life. Secondly, every plant must find some way of carrying that seed as far across the world as it can, to give it every chance of thriving with less competition or triumphing under new conditions.

Carrots, parsley, celery and parsnips all belong to the same family, the Umbeliferae with the flowers in an umbel or flat head, dull, green and inconspic­uous, because they are not pollinated by bees which hunt by flower shape and colour, but by flies which follow scent alone.

Along almost any carrot row there is a chance of finding one of these hasty seedlings with orange rather than carrot red roots no thicker than a pencil at the top and driving down to pencil length, and sudden foot to eighteen inch long flower stem. Never save seed from one, for its seedlings will be 'bolters' too. Select the best specimens from among the carrots you have stored in peat from the previous summers crop for eating, choosing the largest and strongest in February and March. Plant them in sunny places with the root tops just below the ground.

Seed carrots grow four feet high with a centre head, known as the 'king head' which is ready first in August, the side growths come later. When ripening is near the shoots draw themselves more upright and turn yellow. Watch the king head, for when some of the pods open and spill, the others are ready to cut and hang in a dry shed with paper spread below them to catch the seed. Paper bags can be tied over the heads to collect the seed, snipping out a couple of holes on opposite sides for ventilation.

About October rub the seed heads through the fingers or spread them on a flat surface on paper and run a rolling pin lightly over them. It is as well to clean your seed to some extent. Nylon sieves can be bought for the different sizes, the finest to take the dust out and the coarser to remove the husk from the different seeds, leaving in those pieces which happen to be the same size. A small box with a perforated zinc bottom is worth making for a preliminary sift that removes the bulk of the rubbish.

The Cabbage Family
One of the many differences between cabbages and men, is that we have the genes that carry our inherited qualities in forty-six chromosomes, and they have eighteen. Broccoli, cauliflowers, most kales, cabbages and kholrabi are all descended from the wild Brassica oleracea from the cliffs of Britain and they all have eighteen chromosomes. All of them can meet and join and change parthers in the dance of life. For men and cabbage are alike in sharing their qualities good and bad, because they have no chromosome difference.

This is why the Cabbage family, or 'brassicas' as they are called are the worst of all subjects for amateur seed raising. All we can do is raise the easiest kinds, and trust to the fact that very few cabbages will be flowering in other gardens when you are saving seed to keep your stock moderately true. Your other safeguard is that the seed of this family keeps up to nine years.

Turnips, however, are Brassica rapa with twenty chromosomes and keep themselves to themselves. They should be sown in May or early June to lift and store just like carrots, for March planting a foot apart and two feet between rows if you need a quantity.
The bright yellow florets set round a sturdy stem will grow into long pods that should be picked'when they yellow and start to split, and placed in papered chitting trays to dry and sift clean enough for garden purposes.

Radish seed is so cheap that it is hardly worth raising, but it is easy, provided you uproot all the wild radish in the garden, for this species with larger leaves than our familiar kinds, and only small red roots, was also selected by the monks of the past, and the two cross freely. Simply leave behind one good radish roughly every nine inches along the rows when you pull from the first sowing of spring in March, so the white flowers will have had time to set to tat pods up the flower stems before there is any other brassica pollen about. When the pods turn yellow and begin to split, showing the black seeds inside, cut off the flower stems to dry in the trays, then clean ready for packaging and storing.

Seed of all the bradicas is so cheap that it is hardly worth saving your own, but if you must save it, choose one of the cheaper varieties because this is likely to be the easiest. Raise your cabbages in the ordinary way, but go over them carefully and take out anything which is not perfectly typical of the particular kind. Then in September or October, cut the cabbage hearts from top to bottom along the row and then across it.

This treatment lowers the risk that moisture will collect in the cabbage during the winter, and makes sure that the plants will grow new shoots from each quarter becoming about two feet . high and four feet square and a mass of solid bloom.

Brussels sprouts are rather easier.
Grow your crop in the ordinary way, then stake them firmly and allow the top cabbage shaped portion to throw up a flower and set seed in August. The commercial method is to cut the stump down to the foot in spring and let the side shoots flower.

The problem of raising Brassica seed is the length of time that the ground is occupied, roughly three years, and the fact that though a seed grower can rotate his cabbage crops round his farm so each field gets a turn every nine years, the amateur gardener never has that much room.

Lettuces, Leeks, Onions and Spinach
Start by reserving the first row of each of your first two sowings for seed, and cut all the smallest for eating, leaving yourself with really nice specimens; Watch for the first to begin throwing up flower stems or 'bolting' and pull these out until you are left with perhaps four good ones, which will grow taller and taller until, in July or August, they start to seed.

The pods will 'fluff up' or become downy in appearance, ready to blow on the wind for their dispersal, and it is important to pick them to dry before they blow and waste.
Saving lettuce seed involves leaving a row in till it matures, and therefore it should be sown where it will not block too much land. This applies still more to leeks because these occupy the ground for two years. Sow your row of leeks In March or April to provide your normal plantings, but leave good specimens at fifteen inch intervals to grow on for seed.

They will look much like ordinary leeks through their first winter but through their second summer they will grow larger and larger, finally reaching four feet. They will need staking to support their heavy flower heads, and these should be cut with the main stalks in October, hanging the great drumstick to dry until December.

The seeds inside the flower head should be black, and the flower should have started to turn yellow before cutting with about a foot of stem. Leek seed is large and heavy and one way to clean it is to tip the sifted seeds in water, when the chaff and any poor quality seeds will float, and the good seed fall to the bottom. Do not leave this long in water but spread in a thin layer on paper in an airy place to dry.

Today fewer and fewer gardeners raise onions from seed. Sets, which are small bulbs to plant in March are far easier, giving a more certain harvest in August whatever the summer, needing less care in preparing the onion bed which used to be a major operation, and avoiding onion fly completely.
It is possible to grow your own onion sets. There are British firms selling home grown onion sets, notably Messrs Marshall of Wisbech, whose Giant Fen is a favourite with those who know their onions.

Select a bed with really poor soil and sow your seed in an inch wide strip so they crowd each other, about half an inch deep in mid-May. Harvest them in September just like ordinary onions, but pick out any larger than 3/4 an inch in diameter for cooking. Leave the smaller ones in trays to dry out thoroughly, remove the foliage and store them in a cool (35°F is ideal) dry place until March planting time. The key to onion set raising is poor soil.

Onions for seed should be selected for size and shape, choosing those that weigh at least half a pound, and are as hard as bullets. Unless you are growing for friends you will need only two or three, for like parsnips and scorzonera, onion seeds keeps only for one season. Plant them again between the end of November and the end of January.

Dig in compost and prepare the ground in the normal way, firming it as well as you can, and planting the bulbs a foot apart each way and with the soil right up to their necks and well firmed round them. Towards the end of March the leaves should start away followed by the flower stems which should be staked when they reach two feet and retied as they grow to over three feet by August. Never put off staking because the plants can easily blow over, breaking the roots and finishing the seed crop. We have bred onions for weight and size and even a good root system but not for the extra strength to hold firm the seed stem, it is cheaper and easier to stake them.

By the end of September the pods should be fully grown, and there will be four seeds in each. Peel back the skin and when the seeds are black the heads should be cut off with eighteen inches of stem. Tie a paper bag over each head, with ventilation holes as for leeks, and hang the crop in a dry-and sunny atmosphere to ripen, ready to husk and packet for next year's sowing only.

Spinach is easy seed, but choose the rows for seed just as though they were lettuces, pulling up the first to bolt until only the slowest are left. Leave the heads until the seeds blacken and the lowest start to 'shed' or come out of the pods, then pull them, to hung in bunches over newspaper or the cut open polythene fertiliser bags which are a feature of the modern countryside that may last like flint arrowheads.

This is the round seeded summer spinach. The prickly seeded winter variety sown in August, or September should be saved from those which best came through the winter, which may well mean a large area of ground tied up if these were dotted over the bed. Sow other crops in between and pull the seed spinach as it ripens in May. The seed of both varieties last for about three years.

Perpetual spinach or spinach beet lasts up to six years. It should be sown in April or May and the best row left unpicked to make sure it comes through the winter and throws up a seed stem like a beet ready to save seed in the same way.

Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Marrows and Pumpkins
Both tomatoes and cucumbers need a greenhouse with heat to start them as plants for cultivation in the open. Outdoor cucumbers, especially the new Japanese varieties that give frame or greenhouse quality from outdoor plantings can be sown under the polythene 'cloches' recommended for french beans for seed, but they must be grown under glass to gain the time they need to ripen their seed.

We in Britain enjoy good tomato ripening weather about three years in five, with a wet summer full of potato blight (which also attacks tomatoes and there are unfortunately no resistant varieties) making us give up in disgust, only to see our neighbours rejoicing in ripe fruit.

Let us assume you have two dozen tomato plants coming ready to pick before the key date of September 6th. Each good fruit will hold between 150 and 250 seeds and it will keep at least three years, so you have plenty to choose from. For outdoor fruit, earliness is the main quality, so put a label against the first plants to ripen fruit on their first trusses. Ignore the first two trusses for seed but note how they ripen, for you want seed from the plant that produces the most fruit before September 6th, and it is worth keeping notes of your three best performers.

The third and fourth trusses will produce the best seed, so choose the most shapely fruit from these, missing the two next to the stem. Tie a tag label round the trusses and leave them on the plant till they are fully red ripe, which means about a fortnight more time than for ordinary picking. If they split it does not matter, for splitting is caused by dry weather hardening the skin and then rain pumping the fruit full of water, and acquired characteristics are not inherited.

You should not pick miss-shapen tomatoes for seed, or perfect ones off the same plant because a tendency to have miss-shapen fruit is inherited. Do not take fruit with green patches at the stalk end, because that also is inherited. A flat brown patch at the blossom end is caused by calcium shortage, which can come from too much potassium sulphate fertiliser. This is not inherited, but the seed may suffer and give poor germination, so do not use for seed.

Cut your fruit from side to side, scoop out the core into a soup plate and wash the pulp well in water, meanwhile rubbing the seed gently with the tips of the fingers, changing the water once or twice while you are separating the seed from the pulp, and finally tip the seeds into a strainer to drain. Spread the washed seed on a sheet of glass, or ideally a sheet of blotting paper and left to dry overnight in a warm room they can be packeted in two days time. It takes roughly ten pounds of fruit to yield one ounce of seeds, which is a great many.

The cucumber family differ from all the other vegetables in this document because they have separated male and female flowers, just like bananas.

The new 'Burpless' cucumbers are F.1 hybrids so cannot be saved successfully, and so is Femina, the almost all female flowered variety. The Chinese Long Green and the Japanese varieties, Kaga and Kariha can be saved and so of course can the old ridge varieties which are greatly inferior. It is worth watching for new outdoor cucumbers that are not F.1s and breeding them, just as my first employer did over forty years ago.

Raise your plants in pots and' and train from them up the wires inside the greenhouse, running strings beside them and tying the side shoots to these. Cut these shoots off after the second female flower which will have a tiny cucumber behind it. When the male flowers, with simple stalks, open, pick these, cut away the yellow trumpet flower from round the stamens or to male organs in the middle and brush this on to the centre of the female flowers when these are fully open. It is usually recommended to use a camel hair brush for this operation.

Apply plenty of pollen during the three days when it is fully open and the female flower withers, and leave the cucumbers that develop on the plant until the lower end of each fruit bulges out leaving the upper half slim, and they all turn yellow. This will be far sooner than they will in the open.
When you clear the greenhouse, about late October, slice the cucumbers lengthways and inside there will be rows of cream yellow hard seeds just like those which were in the original packet. Wash these and separate them from the pulp, just as with tomatoes, and dry them in the same way. Cucumber seed can keep eight or nine years so one seeding will last for a long time.

Marrows need no pollination but it is only possible to select them on the female side, for by the time you have a fruit, the male has done his worst. Ideally you need plenty of small marrows rather than monsters which take all the strength from a plant, so choose your seed marrow from the plant which has produced most individual fruit. Leave it on till it is fully ripe and so hard it needs a saw to cut, which is the right stage for making marrow jam.

Pumpkin seed, like marrow seed, improves with-age up to seven years and old seed is reputed to produce plants with a higher proportion of female flowers. The seed should be plump and heavy, from mature fruit weighing over 7 lb, for the smaller ones are usually immature and their seed will not germinate well. Dry it like tomato seed and store it in a cool dry drawer.

Seed Potato Saving
We don't use the real seeds of potatoes, of course. We use the tubers, specially and expensively prepared.
The cheapest way to get a good maincrop potato variety is to buy Desiree at your greengrocers and reserve those which are the size of large eggs.
If you look at a potato you will see that all the 'eyes' are at one end known as the 'rose end'. Cut your spud down from the rose end to the bottom, lengthways as it were, just before planting, ideally with the eyes upwards.

Before seed potatoes are planted they should stand, rose end up in 'chitting trays', which are the light wooden trays with raised pieces at the corners that sit one on top of the other which hold grapes or tomatoes. The trays should stand in a light, frost free shed, even a spare bedroom from about January onwards, growing stocky dark green shoots from the eyes.

Choose the best potatoes for seed because the ideal size and shape has the best chance of doing well. Discard any with the pustules of potato scab because you do not want to spread this nonserious but unsightly condition further in your garden. Grow your potatoes with good compost because you want your crop to have the finest flavour, and your next year's seed to have the resistance to disease that is reputed to come from good feeding.

If you want to grow large potatoes for baking or because you dislike peeling little ones, disbud your seed by rubbing out all the little shoots, leaving only the two best on each tuber. When you are raising your own seed you can pick out those with the most shoots for planting in your seed row, because you want plenty of the smaller sizes.

Should you decide to buy in seed potatoes, it is better to order varieties chosen for flavour and disease resistance from the few nurseries who offer a choice, to raise your own seed.
Never buy imported new potatoes, because, even if these were mature, they would be specially grown for the country they come from.

Seed potatoes are of course tubers, not the seeds of the potato plant. These are in the green 'potato apples' which will be found in profusion among the potato foliage in some seasons. They look like small tomatoes, for tomatoes and potatoes belong to the same family and are highly poisonous.

It is easy to save potato seeds by the methods described for tomatoes in a later chapter, and to raise them like tomato plants in a greenhouse, planting out about June from March sowing. The result will be some bantam egg size tubers by October, which can be grown on to produce full-sized crops the following season. Every single seedling will be different.

Plant your potatoes in the ordinary way, putting plenty of compost in the trenches because if your soil is short of magnesium from too much potash, you will get the leaves going yellow, with veins staying green and this can be mistaken for a virus. Ideally, reserve an end row for seed

Then, by the middle of August for maincrop and the last week in July for earlies, cut down the haulm of your selected row with shears and compost the foliage. This means less than a full crop of course, but you do not want large potatoes, you want standard eggsize seed tubers which will keep. Spread your crop on the surface and leave it in the sun for 2-3 weeks. If the tubers go green with the light, then so much the better, and if you have time, turn your tubers so they have plenty of sun to ripen the skins all over.

Store them in shallow boxes in the dark with not more than a three inch layer in each so they have free air circulation, until they are ready to set out in the chitting trays. Potatoes, like apples, keep best at 34-35°F, and it is more important to keep them cool than to worry too much about frost.
It is always believed among gardeners that potato varieties deteriorate when grown for long periods on the same soil. Today this is regarded as a legend from the period when potato eelworm was called 'potato sickness' and viruses were not understood.

Home Seed Testing
Every seed you buy has been tested to the high standards of purity and germination laid down by the Ministry of Agriculture under the various Seed Testing Orders, of which the first was in 1917, and there is an official seed testing labouratory at Cambridge.

All seeds can be tested in an airing cupboard. The temperature should be 68°F, and if you put a thermometer inside this will show how near you are to the maximum of 86°F. Then count at least twenty seeds with tweezers and space them out on moist blotting paper in a saucer. Finally cover with another disc of blotting paper which should be moistened before placing in the heated box or airing cupboard.

Look at your samples at intervals and keep the blotting paper moist. The normal test time is three weeks, but radish seed and a few others may germinate in 24 hours. At the end of the period, count how many seeds have put out roots or even leaves.

If your germination is low, you can simply sow more generously. If your beans are below standard sow them in pairs and take out the smallest of each when they are well up. A problem of home seed raisers in fact is that because they have so much seed they sow too thickly and give their seedings the handicap of a crowded start and themselves the work of extra thinning.

This is a much shortened version of Lawrence D. Hills excellent pamphlet, price 50p from HDRA, Bocking, Braintree, Essex.