Seed saving – how to save money in an organic garden
How can we make sure that all the seed we sow in our organic gardens will germinate and give us plants? Wise gardeners store their seed, year after year, especially rare heirloom seeds. Of course, seed saving also saves money. But old seed often disappoints.
If in doubt about old seed, it’s always wise to pre-germinate a test sample. Soak ten seeds overnight and lay them on damp kitchen paper in a warm place in a plastic bag. After a few days, count what percentage are showing signs of life. To do this scientifically you should use at least 100 seeds. But that might be your entire supply! Ten is good enough as a rough guide.
Don’t waste the seed that germinates, of course. Sink it in a pot of weak compost, with its growing tip just visible, and water – ideally – with diluted kelp solution. Kelp is a great help to any young seedling.
If only 20% of your soaked seeds show life you’ll know that – if you plant five seeds from your remaining supply in every module – there’s a good chance at least one seed will germinate.
If nothing germinates from your seed test, the seed is clearly dead or uselessly dormant. Eat the remaining seed! For example, in granola or as a topping for home-baked bread, according to the seed type. Of course, not every vegetable seed is palatable or wise to eat, and obviously you’d shun commercially pre-treated seed. As the late John Seymour of self-sufficiency fame would tirelessly say: ‘use that good old mother, Common Sense!’
Then, when we sow it en masse, we can adjust the quantities of seed accordingly, as we’ve seen. That advice saves a lot of wasted time, but… it’s limited.
Why? Under ideal germination conditions, we might get, for example, 50% germination of parsnip seed that has been saved very well but is several years old. Textbooks say you cannot germinate the seed of parsnips, lovage, angelica and other umbellifers if it’s much more than one year old and has been stored at room temperature.
(That said, seed is full of surprises. One year I grew a large plot of parsnips, and a lot of other umbellifers too, from seed that was verifiably five years old and had been kept in my sock drawer.)
If you germinate the seed of umbellifers, and several other plant species indoors, the results can be misleading. Because parsnips don’t take kindly to transplanting. They have to be planted in situ, outdoors. So how can we test their likely performance outdoors without wasting a lot of seed?
Answer: test the germination of such seeds in sub-optimal conditions. The kind they’ll actually meet – outdoors. Scatter your seed on damp kitchen paper but put it for eight days in a cool, dark place with harshly fluctuating temperatures, say, from just above freezing to 28oC. Or whatever represents the true conditions in your garden.
For example, your garage in spring? Any seedlings that emerge will give you an index to the true percentage viability of that seed! You can now sow the balance of the seed outdoors with confidence. (Or not.)
Here’s another benefit of testing seed under challenging conditions. If you pre-germinate seed under those conditions, and plant out only the seedlings that survive, you will get very sturdy plants indeed. When they grow, save the seed from them. Provided they are open-pollinated (ie. not F1 or other hybrids), and you save the seed from them year on year, and grow it on, you may go on to develop – and stabilise – your very own unique variety. One that is acclimatised just to your micro-climate.
Lo, you have become a plant developer! And your stabilised cultivar is now on its way to becoming a legitimate ‘new heirloom’. Your very own.
Around 75oF is the ideal germination temperature for almost any edible temperate plant. Aubergines, peppers, tomatoes, squash and other hot-climate plants prefer 85oF. But they’ll still germinate well enough at 75oF. Either way, we’ll know in around eight days if that batch of seed will give us eg. 75% germination or just 15% germination. Or none.
For a free big 6000-word ebook Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening Success, brimming with new gardening tips, go to: http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy
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