How to Save Seeds: 5 Easy Crops
How to save tomato, bean, lettuce, kale and squash seeds at Bethany Farm. Hybrid vs heirloom, the species rule, drying, and storing your seed so it lasts.
Dave & Nicky Schauder
10/26/202616 min read
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Webinar Replay of How & Why We Save Seeds
We Saved & Shared Our Seeds
Chef Jason's of Market Table Bistro's Long de Nice Pumpkin
Last year we saved seed from the Long de Nice pumpkin that sat in our living room all fall. We shared some with Chef Jason Lage of Market Table Bistro, and this year he grew one so big it barely fit in the photo.
One pumpkin, one handful of seeds, and now two kitchens are eating from it.
That's seed saving. It is one of the oldest things gardeners do, and one of the easiest to start.
This guide is for real families who want to keep their favorite varieties growing year after year without buying new seed packets every spring.
It comes from our "Why & How to Save Your Seeds" webinar, taught from our kitchen at Bethany Farm in Leesburg, Virginia.
What Is Seed Saving?
Seed saving is the practice of collecting, drying, and storing seeds, or other reproductive plant parts, from vegetables, flowers, herbs, and grains to replant in future seasons.
That's seed saving. It is one of the oldest things gardeners do, and one of the easiest to start.
When we asked our webinar guests what those "other reproductive parts" might be, the answers came fast: rhizomes, cuttings, bulbs, garlic cloves, ginger, corn cobs. All correct. Anything that grows the next generation counts.
Fall is the season for it. Right now, much of the garden is going to seed. We start the year with seed, and we end it with seed too.
Why Save Your Seeds?
Chart of seed variety loss from 1903 to 1983 and five benefits of saving seeds
Courtesy of Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI)
There are many good reasons. Here are the five that matter most to us.
2. Seeds carry family history
A hundred years ago, it was not uncommon for a mother to give her daughter a bag of seeds on the eve of her wedding. The meaning was clear: "You'll be on your own now. You'll be able to feed your family with these, and you'll take a little part of me with you."
Heirloom collards carry an even deeper story. Enslaved African women hid seeds in their braided hair as they crossed the ocean, and that is how many of the collard varieties grown in the American South arrived. We wrote more about this, including the work of culinary historian Michael Twitty, in our article on why heirloom seeds are valuable and timeless.
1. We lost most of our varieties in 80 years
In 1903, American seed houses offered 544 varieties of cabbage. In 1983, researchers with the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) went looking for those same varieties in the National Seed Storage Laboratory.
They found 28. Beets went from 288 varieties to 17. Squash, peas, and melons all followed the same curve.
Most of the rest are probably gone for good.
Creation is so abundant. God was totally not a minimalist. And yet we've narrowed our plates down to something like living off McDonald's, the same burger, patty, and cheese every day, instead of the diverse foods that feed our diverse microbiomes and our diverse lives.
When we asked why this happened, one of our guests answered in a word: factory farming. Mechanized growing led to mechanized seed selling. We stopped saving our own seed and started buying the same few varieties from catalogs. Permaculture works the other way. Nature is cyclical, and it is unique to your place.
3. Saved seed learns where you live
When you plant seed saved from your own garden, the plant starts to learn where you live. It learns your rainfall. It learns your temperature swings.
Year after year, it figures out how to grow well in your spot.
The tomato that thrives in Las Vegas is not the tomato that thrives here in Zone 7a Virginia. Saving seed is how you build varieties that belong to your garden.
5. Seed saving saves money
Of course you spend less on seed when you grow your own. One tomato can give you a hundred seeds or more, and a seed packet now runs three to five dollars. As microgreens farmers who go through seed every single week, we feel that.
Find your own why before you start. It will keep you going when you're picking apart lettuce seed heads in July.
4. Diversity protects whole ecosystems
Diversity in our seeds becomes diversity in our gardens and in the ecosystems around them. Whole communities of insects and animals depend on particular plants. When we stop growing them, we lose more than a vegetable.
Many of the varieties we've lost also carried natural resistance to the pests and diseases breeders now spend years trying to engineer back in.
Cut off the diversity, and that knowledge goes with it.
Hybrid,
Open-Pollinated, or Heirloom?
Seed shopping can be confusing.
Packets say hybrid, open-pollinated, heirloom, organic, non-GMO.
What do each of those terms mean?
Heirloom seed is open-pollinated with a story
An heirloom is simply an open-pollinated variety with a history behind it. Brandywine, Amish Paste, Cherokee Purple, and Black Krim are all heirloom tomatoes, and all of them are safe to save.
Your first step is the easiest: check the packet. If it says F1 or hybrid, don't save it.
If it says OP or heirloom, you can.
Like we said above, we write more about heirloom seeds on this blog.
Hybrid seed won't grow true
A hybrid, often labeled F1, is a cross between two parent lines. The plant you grow from it is fine. But the seed that plant makes is not stable.
Save it and plant it, and the children may look nothing like the parent. A red hybrid tomato might give you yellow tomatoes next year.
So how do seed companies keep selling F1 seed if it isn't stable?
We often get asked this question. They never save seed from the hybrid plant. They keep the two stable parent lines, and every season they cross those same two parents again, by hand or in isolated fields.
Every packet of F1 seed is a brand-new cross. That's why hybrid seed has to be bought fresh each year, and why it often costs more.
Open-pollinated seed grows true
Open-pollinated, or OP, means the variety is stable. Save the seed, plant it, and the children will be very close to the parent. They'll never be identical, but you can count on the main traits carrying through.
Breeders usually grow a new cross out for six or seven generations before a variety is stable enough to be called open-pollinated.
The One Rule Every Seed Saver Needs
Courtesy of Quail Seeds & the Utopian Seed Project
Open-pollinated tells you a variety is stable. It doesn't tell you whether that variety will cross with its neighbors. For that, you need the plant's scientific name.
As gardeners, we only need three levels of plant taxonomy: family, genus, and species. Family is useful for knowing what a plant likes. All members of the Fabaceae family, the beans and peas, fix nitrogen from the air and make their own fertilizer. That's why, when we teach kids to grow from seed, we always start with a bean.
For seed saving, genus and species are what count. Here is the rule:
Plants of the same species can cross. Different species usually can't.
Common names fool us.
Collards, curly kale, lacinato kale, broccoli, cabbage, and kohlrabi look nothing alike, but they are all Brassica oleracea, and they can all cross.
Red Russian kale and Siberian kale are called kale too, but they are Brassica napus, the same species as rutabaga.
They will cross with each other, not with collards.
Squash works the same way. Zucchini and acorn squash (Cucurbita pepo) can cross.
Butternut (Cucurbita moschata) won't cross with either one.
And so to keep things straight, especially with these crops, we encourage you to write the Latin name on your seed envelope. It takes ten seconds and saves you a season.
That being said, it's not necessarily a bad thing when we cross our crops. Sometimes, that we get a jackpot variety that has all the best traits we want.
And sometimes we get an interesting variety like a this purple-veined ultracross collard that was intentionally grown to cross with other collards!
Table of which vegetables can cross: Brassica oleracea, Brassica napus, Cucurbita and Phaseolus
3 Seeds to Start Saving This Year
Cut it open and squeeze the seeds and gel into a jar. I usually do this while I'm canning tomatoes, so the seeds come out naturally and I pass them through a sieve.
Fill the jar with water and set it beside the kitchen sink.
Then leave it alone for about three days. It will get moldy, and that's fine. Each seed sits in a gel sac that keeps it from sprouting inside the warm, wet tomato. The fermentation breaks that gel down. If you think it's done, it's probably not done yet. Be patient.
Once the gel has broken down, rinse the seeds. Good seeds sink; pour off anything that floats. Spread the seeds on a paper towel and let them dry until they're brittle. Over our farm tour weekend, someone asked me for seeds, and I handed them a whole paper towel of them.
Tomatoes are "the hardest of the three beginner seeds," but only because of the waiting. Southern Exposure recommends keeping heirloom tomato varieties about 20 feet apart if you want zero crossing.
1. How to Save Tomato Seeds
Solanum lycopersicum, the nightshade family
Tomatoes, beans, and lettuce are the best place to start because they pollinate themselves. Insects rarely get the chance to cross them, so the seed you save grows true.
The three we have here are also the seeds that the experts at Seed Savers Exchange believe are perfect for beginning seed savers.
Tomato seeds are ready when the fruit is fully ripe, the same day you'd want to eat it. Choose your best-looking tomato from an open-pollinated plant.
When we choose what to save, we look for three things. They must be:
Easy to save
Hard to find, and/or
Precious to you
Heirloom tomato cut open to save tomato seeds, Solanum lycopersicum
2. How to Save Bean Seeds
Phaseolus vulgaris, the Fabaceae family
Bean flowers pollinate themselves inside a closed petal called the keel, before bees can reach them. That's what makes them so easy to save.
Leave the pods on the plant until they are brown, brittle, and dry. The test is simple: a ready pod shatters when you squeeze it. If it's still soft and bends, it isn't ready.
Dave's rule is to dry pods in a ventilated spot out of direct sun, so they lose their moisture as fast as possible. We learned this one the hard way. One year our kids worked hard shelling a big batch of borlotti beans, and we put them straight into a jar. They molded. Don't jar beans until the pods are brown, brittle, and really hard.
For a big batch, put the dry pods in a pillowcase and stomp on it. Kids love this job. Then pour the beans from bucket to bucket in front of a fan to blow the chaff away.
One caution: runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus) are bee-pollinated and do cross with each other. Bush, pole, and dry beans are the easy ones.
Dried bean pod split open to save bean seeds
3. How to Save Lettuce Seeds
Lactuca sativa, the aster family
We don't pull our lettuce. We cut it and let it grow back, harvesting leaves from the top all spring. When the days heat up, lettuce senses the change and bolts. It sends up a tall flower stalk, the leaves turn bitter and woody, and the plant switches from eating to reproducing.
That's your chance. Dave's tip: you only need about one plant in ten to go to flower. Nature is very giving.
The flowers turn into feathery white "parachutes," the way lettuce spreads its seed on the wind. Once the stalk dries, put it in a paper bag and shake it until the seed heads fall out.
That can take months of drying, so Dave has a faster trick. Look just below each spent flower for a small, fat ball. Pull it apart like a cracker, and 30 or 40 seeds drop out. Spend 15 to 20 minutes doing this and you'll have enough seed for a couple hundred heads of lettuce.
Clean lettuce seed with a kitchen sieve, not the wind. It's light enough to blow away.
Bolted lettuce plant and harvested lettuce seed for seed saving
Dried lettuce seed heads in a paper bag, ready to shake out the seeds
2 Seeds to Grow Into
Kale, collards, and squash are just as easy to harvest.
What makes them "level two" is that insects pollinate them, so they cross easily with other varieties of the same species.
4.How to Save Kale and Collard Seeds
Brassica oleracea, the Brassicaceae family
Collards and kale are biennials. They grow leaves the first year, survive the winter, and flower the next spring. In Zone 7a, the plants in your garden right now will bolt next April.
Let only one Brassica oleracea variety flower at a time, and save from at least five plants. When the flowers fade, they form small pods, like tiny legumes. When the pods and the seeds inside are brown, you'll hear them rattle. Dry them two weeks, then crush them in a paper bag and shake the seed out. I also hang seed heads in mesh bags in our garden shed, like laundry.
Collards were close to disappearing about ten years ago, as the farmers who kept them were dying out. Ira Wallace of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in Virginia took it on herself to help track down the old varieties, and that work grew into the Heirloom Collard Project. We grew collards for one of their trials. We didn't have the 300 feet of space needed to keep a variety pure, so we grew several together on purpose, to see what new collards came up.
Flowering brassica and a jar of saved kale and collard seed
5. How to Save Squash Seeds
Cucurbita species, the cucurbit family
The cucurbit family is huge: pumpkins, squash, zucchini, cucumbers, and melons. Squash have separate male and female flowers, and bees carry pollen freely between them. They are notorious for crossing.
The simplest way around that is to grow only one variety of each species. Our Long de Nice pumpkin is Cucurbita moschata. It happened to be the only moschata growing near us that year, so its seed came true, and Chef Jason's pumpkin proves it. You can read that story in our Save Your Seeds newsletter.
To save squash seed, let one fruit go well past the eating stage, until it is big and hard. Cure it on the counter for a month. Then scoop the seeds, rinse off the flesh, and dry them for three weeks.
That winter squash on your counter right now could be next year's seed, if it's open-pollinated and was the only one of its species in your garden.
Cut winter squash and cleaned squash seeds drying
Curved Tromboncino squash, a Cucurbita moschata that can cross with butternut
How to Store Seeds So They Last
Seeds sprout with warmth and moisture, so storage is the opposite: cool, dark, and dry.
Johnny's Selected Seeds teaches a simple test called the Rule of 100. Add the room's temperature in °F to its relative humidity in percent. If the total is under 100, your seeds will keep well. A 60°F room at 35 percent humidity scores 95, and that works.
Dry first, then seal. Seed sealed in a jar while it's still damp will mold or sprout. Label every envelope with the crop, variety, Latin name, date, and where it came from.
We keep ours in what we call the seed shop. It's really a set of shelves with labeled boxes, sorted by season and family: one box for cool season, one for summer, and a big one for peas and beans. Each variety goes in its own paper envelope, like our Cherokee Purple tomatoes.
Most seed lasts several years. Johnny's storage chart gives these averages:
Tiny seeds, like lettuce and many flowers, fade faster.
Onion seed is the worst; plan to replace it every year or two.
To test old seed, roll 10 to 20 seeds in a damp paper towel, seal it in a bag, and keep it somewhere warm for a week.
Count how many sprout. This is called a "seed germination test."
Labeled boxes of saved seeds sorted by season on shelves at Bethany Farm
Crop Average storage life
Tomato 3 to 7 years
Squash 3 to 6 years
Lettuce 1 to 6 years
Kale and collards 3 to 5 years
Beans 2 to 4 years
Onions 1 to 2 years
Where We Buy Seeds
We don't save all our seed yet. We were once not saving any. Wherever you are on that journey, the little you save is precious.
When we do buy, we buy open-pollinated seed from companies that tell you where their seed comes from. These are the ones we use: Seed Savers Exchange, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Johnny's Selected Seeds, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, High Mowing Organic Seeds, True Leaf Market, and Fedco. Smaller regional seed companies are popping up everywhere, and seed grown near you is already adapted to your area.
Dave's advice is to look at price against quantity. Twenty-five tomato seeds is plenty, because tomatoes germinate easily. But if you want lettuce all year, a packet of a couple hundred seeds, about a thimbleful, won't go far. Some companies sell larger amounts. Here are some of Dave's words from the webinar above:
"Don't forget the Seed Savers Exchange online seed swap, where members list seed they've saved. I fell in love with a yellow pole bean called Gold of Bacau from Baker Creek, and then they stopped carrying it, I was bummed for a while, until he found it on the Seed Savers Exchange swap."
Here's a handy list of some of our favorite places to buy good seeds from:
Seed catalogs
Baker‘s Creek https://www.rareseeds.com/
Farm2Farmers https://www.beafarmer.com/
FedCo Seeds www.fedcoseeds.com
Johnny's Selected Seeds www.johnnyseeds.com
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange www.southernexposure.com
Seed Savers Exchange www.seedsavers.org
Restoration Seeds www.restorationseeds.com
Sow True Seeds https://bit.ly/5dollarseeds (for a $5 coupon code)
High Mowing www.highmowingseeds.com/
True Leaf Market https://bit.ly/True-Leaf-Seeds
Territorial Seeds https://bit.ly/True-Leaf-Seeds
Ujamaa Seeds https://ujamaaseeds.com/
Vermont Wildflower Farm https://www.vermontwildflowerfarm.com/
Frequently Asked Questions
What plant parts can I save besides seeds?
Anything that grows the next generation. Our webinar guests named the big ones: rhizomes like ginger, cuttings, bulbs, garlic cloves, and corn cobs, where the seeds are the kernels. Potato tubers and sweet potato slips count too.
Why have so many seed varieties disappeared?
One of our guests put it in two words: factory farming. As farming mechanized, so did seed selling. Gardeners stopped saving their own regional varieties and started buying the same few from catalogs. Between 1903 and 1983, cabbage went from 544 varieties to 28.
Does open-pollinated mean a plant won't cross with other varieties?
No. Open-pollinated means the variety is stable: its seed grows true to the parent. It's pollinated naturally by insects, wind, or itself rather than by a controlled cross. An open-pollinated variety can still cross with another variety of the same species. That's why species matters.
How do seed companies keep selling F1 hybrid seed if it isn't stable?
They keep the two stable parent lines and cross them again every season. The F1 seed in the packet is always a fresh first-generation cross, so it grows uniform plants. Only the seed those plants make is unstable. That's why you buy hybrid seed new each year instead of saving it.
What is the Rule of 100 for storing seeds?
Add the storage room's temperature in °F to its relative humidity in percent. If the total is under 100, seeds will stay viable for years. Dry the seed completely before you seal it in a jar, or it can mold.
Why are tomatoes, beans, and lettuce the best seeds for beginners?
They are self-pollinating, so each flower pollinates itself and rarely crosses with other varieties. They are also annuals, so you plant in spring and have seed by fall. Christayla got this one first in our quiz and won a packet of our seeds.
Why does a plant's species name matter for seed saving?
Plants of the same species can cross; plants of different species usually can't. Common names don't tell you which is which. Collards and broccoli are the same species, Brassica oleracea, while Red Russian kale is a different one, Brassica napus. Dorothy won the second quiz question with this answer.
Can I save seeds from Red Russian kale?
Yes. Red Russian kale is Brassica napus, so it can cross with Siberian kale and rutabaga but not with collards or curly kale. It's a biennial, so let it overwinter and flower in spring. Save from at least five plants and harvest when the pods are brown.
Can I save basil seeds?
Yes. Let a few flower spikes dry brown on the plant, then rub the seed out into a bowl. Bees pollinate basil, and different basils can cross, so you'll get the truest seed when only one variety is flowering in your garden.
Can I save cucumber seeds?
Yes, but cucumbers cross easily, so grow only one variety. Leave a cucumber on the vine weeks past eating stage, until it turns yellow or brown. Southern Exposure recommends scooping the seeds into a jar, letting them sit two days, then rinsing and drying them for three weeks.
Your Next Step
Already planning your beds? SAGE, our permaculture garden planning app, helps you work out spacing, companion plants, and timing.
Prefer to watch? The full webinar is on YouTube, including the kitchen demos.
And if you're local, come say hi at the Leesburg Farmers Market starting Saturday, November 7.
Shows us pictures of the seeds you save. We'd love to see them!
Seed saving closes the loop. You start the season with seed, and now you can end it with seed too.
If you want help growing your 2027 garden from seed to harvest and back to seed again, that's exactly what our Grow-It-Yourself program was built for. GIY is a series of short courses over nine weeks: design, install, grow, and maintain. The first course, garden design, opens in December.
Permaculture Gardens - your online resource for organic & sustainable gardens.
Contact
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Bethany Farm
41558 Stumptown Rd.,
Leesburg, VA 20176