Day 13: Seed Saving

Dear Student,

Seed saving is a rewarding task that can ensure true self-sufficiency in your garden. Correctly done, you can start with a few seeds and have many more to plant or sell next year, alongside a bounty from your garden, saving you significant money.

You can also selectively breed your own seeds for characteristics that most ideally suit your soil and climate. This is not genetic modification (GMO), but over several generations of plants, selecting seeds for particular traits allows great control of the attributes of the plants in your garden.

If, for example, you save the seeds from tomato plants that have yielded bigger bounties, in several generations you will have a plant that produces many more tomatoes than its ancestors from several years ago. You can also select from hardiness traits or long yield traits or to be more suitable for your local climate.

On the other hand, heirloom seed savers concentrate not on improving the genetics of the seeds they save, but to preserve them exactly as they were a hundred years ago so that we might safely select crops from old genetic lines to help us adapt to a changing future. Genetic diversity in crops is collapsing at an alarming rate, and the preservation of older genetic stocks is critical to our ability to adapt to climate change in the future. However, if you take this tactic in your seed saving, remember to bring in some new genetic material (plants not grown from your saved seeds) every few years to prevent inbreeding and its associated weaknesses.

Three types of seeds are available:

• Genetically modified seeds: A threat to our ecosystem and our way of life, these seeds are not selectively bred for certain attributes, instead they contain DNA from other plants, animals, even new creations altogether spliced into their original DNA.GMO plants are owned by corporations (e.g. Monsanto) and can infect nearby farms when their seeds pollinate neighboring crops.While selecting seeds from plants for natural modification through crossbreeding is a great idea, transplanting DNA into seeds that makes them create chemical pesticides or glow in the dark is not. GMOs have an as yet unknown effect on our biosphere and are being banned in countries all over the world (except the United States and Canada).

• Hybrid seeds: Hybrid vigor is a phenomenon that occurs when seeds from the same family but different varieties cross-pollinate. This increases their genetic diversity and, as we touched on in mule genetics in the lesson on working animals, often results in a new plant with the most positive traits of both parent plants.
  
  You can hybridize seeds from the same family in your garden by planting them close together. However, these positive traits are unstable mutations and often don’t pass down through the generations. After a generation or, two the resulting plants will deteriorate in quality and characteristics.
• Commercially bought hybrids are often sterile, and those that are not are unstable. Don’t save seeds from plants grown from hybrid seeds for more than one generation before re-hybridizing the parent plants. (You could go through the process of selecting a new stable variety though this hybridization process but its labor intensive and difficult.)If you mean to breed hybrid seeds, you should keep the parent plants separated from the other varieties in your garden (a distance of over 150 feet, most pollinators stay within this range) to preserve the genetic structure. Or for stronger protection, grow them in a greenhouse. Some seeds do not easily cross-pollinate: tomatoes, beans, and cowpeas are a few.
• Open-pollinated seeds: Open-pollinated seeds are stable varieties that breed true. You can achieve the benefits of hybridization or even GMOs by carefully selecting plants for the characteristics you are looking for.