Be self-sufficient and save money by saving seeds

Heirloom tomatoes aren't known for being pretty. Brandywine tomatoes are notoriously oddly shaped. Both Black Prince and Cherokee Purple tomatoes are dark in color, sometimes tinged with a greenish-black or even brown. Marvel Stripe tomatoes never look quite ripe. And Green Zebra tomatoes actually never turn and are as green the day eaten as they are when growing on the vine.

But for what heirloom varieties lack in aesthetics, they make up for in taste. Brandywines are the classically flavored tomato. Black Prince and Cherokee Purple have a sweet, earthy palate. Marvel Stripe is known for being best eaten raw with its mild tang. And Green Zebra are just barely tart.

"Heirlooms offer a huge variety of variety," said Shannon Carmody, public programs manager for the Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa. "They're fun and have some really interesting entertainment value. An heirloom has a history to it, and that could be a history within a family or it could be a historical value in that it used to be offered in the catalogs in the 1930s but is no longer available but someone has kept them going year after year."

Many growers prefer heirlooms for nostalgic reasons, Carmody said: "Their cultural significance, we find valuable. They can have a close tie to our ancestors or customs, land, and things like that. We feel they are important to maintain as artifacts, just like language or architecture or cultural practices would be."

Heirloom vegetable varieties also offer a practical value. Seed companies' hybrids are developed to perform in many regions, but heirlooms are specifically bred to grow in certain regions, so heirlooms can actually out-perform hybrids in specific areas, Carmody says.

In addition, most of the hybrids available today, whether through seed for growers or through the supermarket for consumers, are bred for efficiency or hardiness or shelf life or appearance and what was sacrificed was taste and nutritional value, Carmody adds. Growing heirlooms offer a way to reclaim these lost genetics.

Kaylee Mundwiler, who grew up in Milbank and is now an agriculture student at Minnesota State College in Fergus Falls, Minn., remembers her grandmother's heirloom garden: "From a young age, I could recognize the quality of the garden vegetables. I would eat Grandma's garden beets, but I never enjoyed beets that were from the grocery store."

Finally, growers can save money on buying seed while attaining self-sufficiency in seed genetics by collecting seeds from their heirloom varieties, perhaps selected for specific traits they find valuable, and then using these seeds for their next growing season. Saving seeds can only be done with open-pollinated varieties, which include heirlooms and are those that breed via natural pollination, whether by wind or insects. The result is a seed that will grow a plant identical to its parent plants, Carmody says.

"A hybrid, on the other hand, does not breed true from seed," she said. "You might have one melon that tastes really great and one melon that's really big and you want to find a combination of the two, so you have to take these two different parents of the same species and create a seed for Year One that's going to be great and be big. If you save seed from that and grow it the following year, you might end up with something that was not what you had the year before but rather what was in the parents' generation form two generations before."

Hence, the first rule of saving seeds: Save only from an open-pollinated variety.

The second rule: Make sure that the open-pollinated variety has not cross-pollinated with another variety or species. According to Jack Rowe, who provides a free online vegetable seed-saving guide, this can be done by various planting strategies, such as growing the varieties far enough apart that their pollen would have difficulty reaching each other, growing each variety in a separate cage, covering individual flowers with bags, and timing plantings so that different varieties are flowering at their own times.

When saving seeds, Carmody explains that there are two methods depending on the type of vegetable.

Dry Seed Processing

This method is done with vegetables that grow seeds in a pod or a husk, which are left on the plant until the plant is dead and the pod or husk is dry. These may be annuals like broccoli, corn, and beans or biennials - crops that take two growing seasons to make seeds - like carrots, beets, and cabbage.

"If you're new to seed saving, annual dry seed processing is a great place to start," Carmody said. "A good one to start with is radish or green beans."

The challenge in collecting dry seeds is in timing with environmental factors that may affect seed dryness. Seeds are ideally harvested dry when the pod or husk easily detaches from the plant, but precipitation and humidity can affect the natural drying process.

"It's a fine line between letting seeds dry as much as possible and letting them get eaten by some pest or having them mold after a fall shower," Carmody said.

Once the seeds are harvested, the second step is threshing, which is when the seeds are freed from their pods or husks. This can be done by rubbing the pod by hand, stomping on it, or even driving over it with a vehicle.

The third step is winnowing, when an air current is used to further separate the seed from the non-seed plant material.

The fourth step is screening, which continues the winnowing step by pouring the seeds through a series of metal screens of decreasing hole size to further separate the seed from non-seed plant material.