The Key to a More Resilient Vegetable Garden? A Simple, Centuries-Old Practice

Many beginner home gardeners feel like planting a garden and hoping their crops do well is a total guessing game. You never know how the season will play out, and there are tons of variables to consider — like how much rain, sunshine or wind you’ll see that year. There are also variations in soil types. However, one of the biggest variations is the genetic differences in the seeds you plant. Take tomatoes for example; there are thousands and thousands of varieties that are planted worldwide, all with a different genetic makeup that alters things like texture, taste, color and disease resistance.

So how can you ensure consistency in a garden? If you’re a fan of one specific variety and want to ensure that plant survives from year to year, start saving your seeds. Seed saving is a practice that has been employed by farmers and gardeners for centuries. It’s simple: observe your garden throughout the year, select the plant that’s doing the best, then save the seeds from that plant to use next year. “Seed saving is, at its most basic, a way to capture an important evolutionary moment of one season — the success of one season — and pass it along to future generations,” said Jason Grauer, Executive Director at the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture. Here’s how to do it.

What Is Seed Saving?

Seed saving is an easy gardening practice that involves harvesting and saving the seeds from the most successful plants in your garden to plant again next year. By doing so, you’re guaranteeing that you’ll pass down the genetics of that successful plant, rather than purchasing new seeds that could deliver an uncertain or random result. “The seeds that you save are selected from the best plants in your garden, which should equate to the next generation having the exact same traits,” said Tim Hetrick, Parks & Grounds Superintendent at Mohonk Mountain House. “Over time the plants will become more successful as the selection progresses after each season. That way, you help your garden grow more consistent and resilient every year,” he added.

To start, examine your garden and select the plants that are proving to be most successful. Harvest and save the seeds from the fruit of that plant to plant again next year. “When you're saving seeds, you’re looking for the most productive plants and the healthiest plants,” said Tucker Taylor, Master Culinary Gardener at Kendall-Jackson. “If you have plants that are really healthy looking, and if you save the seeds from the fruit of those plants, they’ve already shown that they’re more adapted to that climate than the others that aren’t doing so well,” he added. By saving seeds from the healthiest plants, you’re not only ensuring consistency from year to year, but you’re also ensuring a fortitude and a natural adaptability that will evolve from year to year.

How Can Seed Saving Create a More Resilient Garden?

Seed saving is a form of selection — just like natural selection — that sees farmers and gardeners selecting the most robust plants, because they’re more likely to survive and adapt to their surroundings. If you select the strongest tomato plant from one year, save the seeds, plant them the next year, and repeat the process year after year, your plants will naturally adapt to the conditions of your specific home garden. “I believe that when you save your seeds from season to season and year to year, plants do adapt to whatever climate in which they’re growing,” said Taylor. If you’re looking to plant tomatoes in the same spot in your garden every year, the plants will adapt from generation to generation to the specific micro-climate of your garden. “Saving seeds helps build local adaptation and resilience to communities,” added Hetrick.

“The way that plants evolve is that they’re expressing themselves based on the conditions around them. If you grow a tomato this year, it’s growing in the conditions of that specific year. If you have one tomato that survived a rainy year, there’s a potential to pass that resilience on to the next year,” added Grauer.

Which Plants Work Best?

Both Grauer and Taylor agree that saving seeds from open pollinating plants is your best chance for success. Open pollinated plants, including heirloom varieties, ensure consistency, while hybrids can be unpredictable. “If you pick a hybrid, you’ll get a massive amount of genetic expression which could be fun, but would not be consistent,” said Grauer. “It’s important for everyone to know that you can’t just save any seed and expect to have this beautiful result. You have to really know your seed to start,” he added.

Open pollinated plants are plants that are naturally pollinated by things like wind, birds or insects. Alternatively, hybrid plants are plants that have been manually cross-pollinated by breeders, and they don’t always grow to be true to the characteristics of the parent plant. Taylor recommends starting with things like tomatoes, melons, peppers or cucumbers.

How to Save Seeds at Home

The process for saving seeds at home is simple, but it can require multiple steps depending on what type of plant you choose. There are two styles of seeds: wet and dry. Wet seeds are contained within the pulp of a plant's fruit, such as tomatoes or cucumbers, while dry seeds grow within its pod, such as peas and okra, or its flowers, such as dill. Plants grown for their roots or bulbs, like radishes or onions, will need to be left in the garden to flower in order to collect and save the seed, sometimes for a full year; that's why it's easiest to start with fruiting and podding plants.

If you’re working with dry seeds (like those from a pea plant):

1. Collect the seeds from the plant and let them dry somewhere in your home out of direct sunlight.
2. Once they’re dried, transfer them to a container that does not allow any moisture to get in — Grauer recommends a paper envelope or jar.

If you’re working with a wet seeds, like those of a tomato plant, the process is slightly more complex.

1. Grauer says to cut the tomato in half and scoop out all the seeds, then transfer them to a fine mesh sieve and rinse under cool water. Make sure that all you have left is the tomato seed and the gels that naturally surround them.
2. Dump the seeds into a Mason jar and cover with just enough water to cover completely, then close the jar and place it somewhere out of direct sunlight.
3. In a few days, you’ll notice that the seeds go through a bit of a fermentation process and grow a moldy film at the top of the water. Once you see that, Grauer says to dump the seeds back into the sieve, rinse again, then lay them out to dry on a clean paper towel.
4. Let them dry and then transfer to an envelope to save for next year. “Always label the container with year, the crop, the variety and the certain traits that you loved about it,” Grauer said.