Seed saving as a radical act

Seed saving is a radical act.

For thousands of years, rather than buying new seeds each year as many of us do today, farmers and smaller scale food growers would have saved their own seeds each year. They would have selected the best and strongest plants to save seed from, meaning that, over time, plants would become well adapted to their specific growing conditions.

But over the last 50-100 years, food growing was taken out of the hands of local communities, and transformed into a global industrial process. Now, a limited number of high yield crops are grown and flown around the world for people to buy in supermarkets. As part of this process, seeds are no longer a resource belonging to the people, but another product to be sold to them for profit.

Growing our own food is a way of regaining some ‘food sovereignty’ i.e. taking it back into our own hands. And seed saving is an important part of this too.

I’ve dabbled in seed saving over the last year or so (without really knowing what I was doing) after learning it was even possible. Before that, I had never thought about it at all - I’d just assumed seeds of the quality needed to grow your own veg had to be bought from a seed catalogue, which just shows how entrenched our current reality is.

These days, many seeds are F1 hybrids too. This means that two different parent plants are artificially crossed for specific traits or disease resistance (rather than ‘open-pollinated’ that is, reproducing naturally). It may produce stronger plants in the first generation, but it means the seed from these plants is not suitable for saving, as they won’t look anything like the parent plant (they won’t be ‘true-to-type’).

Recently, I’ve been working through a seed-saving course from Vital Seeds (a provider of UK grown, open-pollinated seed). I was given it for Christmas but finally got round to starting it last week. I’d definitely recommend the course, but also having a look at the free resources on Vital Seeds’ website - there’s so many brilliant free resources about seed saving.

I’m so excited to save seed from some of my veg this year, with more of an idea of how to do it properly! I haven’t finished the course yet, but I wanted to share a few more amazing things I’ve learned so far.

1. Some vegetables we eat only produce seed in their second year - so we’ve normally eaten them before they get to this point. Carrots and parsnips do this, and in their second year will grow much bigger plants above ground, and flower. I’m going to leave a few of my carrot and parsnip plants in the ground over winter, to hopefully save seed from them next year. You can also dig them up, store and replant in the spring, but I’m going to keep it simple.

2. Some of the veg we grow, although they look very different, are actually varieties of the same species, which means they can cross-pollinate and reproduce, unless they are totally isolated from each other. For instance, courgettes, lots of squashes and some pumpkins are all Cucurbita pepo. For me, this means I won’t be able to save seed from my courgettes, squash or pumpkin, as they are growing close to each other on my allotment. They will probably have been cross-pollinated, so the resulting seeds will not be ‘true-to-type’ and might end up looking nothing like a courgette or squash! But my cucumbers, despite looking a lot like courgettes, are a separate species - Cucumis sativus - and won’t cross-pollinate with the others, so I can hopefully save these.

3. I should probably have remembered this from school/university, but…some plants have male and female parts on each flower (like a tomato), while others have separate male and female flowers (like a courgette or pumpkin). Others have male plants and female plants (spinach). Some plants that have male and female parts on one flower are set up to ‘self-pollinate’, for example tomatoes - the flowers are quite closed, meaning the pollen is likely to fall from the male anthers on to the female stamen within the same flower - rather than more open flowers which encourage pollinators to move pollen from one flower to another. Apparently self-pollinated plants are some of the simplest to save seed from, so I’ll be saving some tomato seeds this year!

I’m really enjoying learning about seed saving, and feel so inspired to take power back in this small way. Can you do the same?

Save your seeds, smash the system!