Seed Saving & Plant Breeding — Keeping Your Own Varieties Going, Season After Season
Every gardener who ever lived saved seed, until about a century ago when it became something you bought.
The case for going back is not mainly thrift, though a packet of tomato seed costs four dollars and a single tomato contains a hundred and fifty of them. It is that saved seed adapts. Seed companies breed for wide adaptability and shipping durability, because that is what their market needs. Your garden needs neither. Save from the plants that thrived in your soil and your climate, repeat for several seasons, and you have a strain suited to your ground in a way no catalogue variety can be.
This book covers how plants make seed, the difference between open-pollinated and hybrid and why it decides everything, how to keep a variety from crossing, how many plants you need, how to harvest and clean dry and wet seed, biennials, drying and germination testing and storage, and a crop-by-crop progression from beginner to advanced.
You can start this season. Beans, peas, tomatoes, lettuce and peppers are self-pollinating and need no special technique, no isolation to speak of, and no equipment. Chapter 11 covers them.
Adapted from public-domain USDA and extension service literature on seed production and storage, rewritten in plain English.
What's inside
- 33 pages, 14 chapters, 4 appendices, 15 diagrams
- Flower anatomy, and self versus cross pollination
- Open-pollinated, heirloom, F1 hybrid — and what you can and cannot save
- Isolation by distance, time, cage, bag, and hand pollination
- Hand pollinating squash, step by step
- How many plants each crop needs — including why corn needs a hundred and nobody mentions it
- Selecting, roguing, and never saving from the first plant to bolt
- Dry-seeded crops: harvest, thresh, winnow
- Wet-seeded crops: over-ripening, fermentation, floating off the duds
- Biennials, vernalisation, and the two-year cycle
- Drying properly, the shatter test, and the rag-doll germination test
- Storage: the temperature-plus-humidity rule, and seed longevity by crop
- Crop by crop, from the easy five to the genuinely demanding
- Full crop reference table and troubleshooting
Who it's for Vegetable gardeners, seed library members, homesteaders, and anyone who wants a variety to still exist in ten years.
Note on scope Saving for your own use is ordinary and lawful. A few modern varieties are legally protected and the book explains how to check before you distribute seed.
Format Instant PDF download. Letter size, prints cleanly at home, reads on any device. Yours forever, no subscription.
