1. Because of the lack of transportation that could develop because of different problems, there may not be any seeds to purchase, at any price. It's kind of hard to grow your own food to feed yourself and your family if you can't get seeds.
2. Acquiring a vital garden skill. Most people today are so far removed from the day-to-day production of food that they don't even know how to garden, let alone how to produce seed for next year's crop. The advent of "seed companies" is a relatively new phenomenon, coming about in the last 100 years or so. Who do you think the farmers prior to the seed companies got there seeds from? Right, they had to produce their own. Now, do you think that they were any smarter than you are? Don't you think that if they could do it, you can too? Sure you can! Back then it was a standard practice for one generation to past seeds onto the next thus guaranteeing family food production, generation after generation.
3. Developing "land strains" of seeds By selecting only the best of your current crop to produce seed for next year, you are "selective" breeding a strain of plants that are specifically well-suited for growth in your environment, your soil. And year-after-year of the "selective" breeding, you will have a very unique seed suited to your conditions.
4. And if any of the above reasons are adequate to get you to start saving seeds, I offer this recent tidbit... On March 3, 1998, the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Delta and Pine Land Company, a Mississippi firm and the largest cotton seed company in the world, announced that they had jointly developed and received a patent (US patent number 5,723,765) on a new, agricultural biotechnology.

Benignly titled, "Control of Plant Gene Expression", the new patent will permit its owners and licensees to create sterile seed by cleverly and selectively programming a plant's DNA to kill its own embryos. The patent applies to plants and seeds of all species.

The result?

If saved at harvest for future crops, the seed produced by these plants will not grow. Pea pods, tomatoes, peppers, heads of wheat and ears of corn will essentially become seed morgues. In one broad, brazen stroke of his hand, man will have irretrievably broken the plant-to-seed-to-plant-to-seed cycle, THE cycle that supports most life on the planet. No seed, no food...unless...unless you buy more seed. This is obviously good for seed companies. As it turns out, it is also good for the US Department of Agriculture.

In a recent interview with RAFI, the Canada-based Rural Advancement Foundation International, US Department of Agriculture (USDA) spokesman, Willard Phelps, explained that the USDA wants this technology to be "widely licensed and made expeditiously available to many seed companies." The goal, he said, is "to increase the value of proprietary seed owned by US seed companies and to open up new markets in Second and Third World countries." The USDA and Delta & Pine Land Co. have applied for patents on the terminator technology in at least 78 countries! Once the technology is commercialized, the USDA will earn royalties of about 5% of net sales. "I think it will be profitable for USDA," Phelps said. (Royalties? Profits? For a Department of the US Federal Government? What's wrong with this picture?)

The Terminator Technology was created to prevent farmers from saving non-hybrid, open-pollinated or genetically altered seed sold by seed companies. Open-pollinated varieties of crops like wheat and rice staples for most of the world's population are typical examples. The stated logic for Terminator Technology is simple, really. A seed company invests money to develop and produce new varieties of seed. It hopes to sell a lot of that seed to recoup monies spent on crop research and seed development, and then to realize a profit on their investment.

Fair enough, it would seem, but there are BIG concerns around the world about how much profit, how much control many of these multinational seed companies actually seek. Many of their proprietary seeds are no more than genetically altered versions of older, reliable, conventionally bred strains that have been in the public domain for many, many years. Change a gene to give a seed resistance to some new strain of disease, the logic goes, and the seed no longer belongs to the people to grow and save as they like, but to the seed company. In the past several years the world community has been outraged as some multinational seed companies have brazenly tried to claim ownership of whole species of food plants based on the logic that they had altered a gene in a member of that species and, hence, now owned its whole genome!

In a world of burgeoning population growth and, hence, demand for food, giant, multi-national seed companies hope to sell a lot of proprietary, genetically engineered seed. Food is a BIG business that will only get bigger, and they want farmers around the world to need to come back to them, year after year, to buy the seed and, in some cases, even the chemicals, to grow it. Plant patents, gene licensing agreements, intellectual property laws, investigations and lawsuits brought against farm families for infringing on a seed company's monopoly on seed varieties are some of the means now used to protect their interests.

The new Terminator Technology could render even these modern, legal measures of control obsolete, as it is potentially so powerful, so effective and so flawless in its applicability that its corporate owners and licensees will literally have complete biological control over the food crops in which it is applied. Seed companies have been working hard to prevent farmers around the world from saving their own seed from plants originally grown with seed purchased from these companies. They are also trying to find ways to encourage farmers around the world in the U.S., Europe and especially the huge market represented by farmers in South America, Mexico and Asia, to switch to genetically engineered, proprietary seed instead of relying on the eons-old practice of saving their own locally produced and conventionally bred seed. If they can produce and offer their "improved" seed cheaply enough to convince even poorer, Second and Third World farmers to switch, they will have captured much of the global market. The Terminator will ensure that this market these farmers and the communities and countries they feed will be completely dependent on the company in order to continue to eat.

There is another potential dark side to the Terminator. Molecular biologists reviewing the technology are divided on whether or not there is a risk of the Terminator function escaping the genome of the crops into which it has been intentionally incorporated and moving into surrounding open-pollinated crops or wild, related plants in fields nearby. The means of this "infection" would be via pollen from Terminator-altered plants. Given Nature's incredible adaptability, and the fact that the technology has never been tested on a large scale, the possibility that the Terminator may spread to surrounding food crops or to the natural environment MUST be taken seriously. The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet...

It's Fun Beyond all the rational reasons for saving seed from your own garden is the simple fact that it's fun! There is a certain sense of enjoyment and satisfaction knowing that you, with an awful-lot of help from Mother Nature, have successfully completed the entire cycle of seed-to-plant-to-seed-to-plant.

Some Basic Concepts To start with you need to know the difference between what is known a hybrid and open-pollinated (non-hybrid) plants. The hybrid plant is one who has several different parents and any seed that they may produce will not reproduce "true-to-type". In other words, any seed that you might save from a plant that came from hybrid seed (usually marked as hybrid, F1 or F2 on the seed packet) will not produce plants like itself.

I. The open-pollinated (non-hybrid) plants will produce seeds that when replanted the following season produce plants just like their parents providing you follow a few rules. Each plant family has its own set of rules and I will cover them as we discuss each family in turn. Based on this information, it is obvious that we will be working only with open-pollinated seeds. The next basic concept that we need to understand is plants can be classified as annuals, biennials, and perennials.

Annuals are those garden plants that grown from seed and will produce seed themselves within the span of a single growing season. This is the "normal" definition for an annual but there are certain plants, which in their location of origination are really perennials, such as the tomato from the tropics. In the garden we will treat the tomato as an annual.

II. Biennials are plants which usually produce an edible crop the season that they are planted (just like the annuals) but, and here is the difference, they don't produce seed until the next growing season.

III. Perennials are plants that can survive from one growing season to the next without the need to replant seed. Perennials will produce seed but we normally do not propagate the plant by this means instead we use a "cloning" or vegatative propagation process. Okay, only one more concept and then we can get down to the family-by-family techniques for grown to and saving seed.

Pollination...you know, the birds and the bees... but in our case its the flowers and the bees. Because of the differences between the various plant families, there are things that we must be aware of in order to produce seeds that are going to be "true-to-type" and give us a seed that will produce plants the next growing season that are just like their parents.

First, there are the self-pollinating flowers. As the term itself suggests, these are plants in which pollination occurs within each individual and does not rely upon other plants. Tomatoes, lettuce, peas and snap beans are all self-pollinating type plants. These plants have what is known as perfect flowers meaning that they contain both the male and the female parts. What does this mean to us as potential seed savers?

Simply that we can grow the self-pollinating plants fairly close to other varieties of the same plant without concern of creating accidental hybrids.

Next is the category of cross-pollination. Here the pollen (male) fertilizes the flower on another plant. It is usually the wind or insects (usually bees) that carry the pollen from plant to plant. Many plants that produce seeds only by cross-pollination may have perfect flowers (both male and female in the same flower) but the flowers are self-sterile and therefore must have pollen from other plants. Cabbage is an example of a plant with perfect flowers, but must have another cabbage plant in order to produce seed.

Obviously, plants which will cross-pollinate pose a special problem for the would-be seed saver. In order to guarantee that the seed produced by a plant is true-to-type, we must isolate the plants from others in the same family, either in time or space. Isolation in time would mean that we would only grow, for example, one type of corn per season. Isolation in space means that either the plants are separated by enough distance that it is unlikely that cross-pollination will occur or that we have grown the parent plants in insect-resistance cages. We cover this aspect later when discussing individual plant families.
 

These are my seed saving notes - the best source I found for detail is Carla Emery's book: The encyclopedia of Country Living

General Notes: Biennials require more work and commitment, as they do not send up seed stalks until the second season. Biennials include beets, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, onions, parsley, parsnips, rutabaga, Swiss chard, and turnips.

Broccoli: See Cabbage for most of the process BUT spring planted broccoli. Fall planted broccoli makes seed the Next spring when the seed pods are mostly brown and dry, harvest, thresh out the seed and winnow it clean. It is also good for 5 years.

Cabbage: Cabbage is insect pollinated biennial. Choose the best plants and mark them then carefully store them alive during the winter in a container of soil and laid close together in a root cellar. Some plants are self sterile so save at least 6 of them. Plants must be chilled enough to break dormancy before they’ll grow the seed stalk. Set out the next spring.

The branched flowering seed stalk grows up out of the center of the head and stake it cause it could be as high as 5 feet (you can cut an X in the head to help it push through faster). Cut stalk when the pods are changing color. Dry on paper or cloth. Strip pods put into bag and beat. Winnow. Seeds good for 5 years.

Carrot: These are insect pollinated biennials. You have to winter your parents after choosing the best of your plants. IN the fall break off the tops leaving about an inch of green. Store them buried under ground deep enough not to freeze (which in MN means 4 feet down so a bucket of dirt in the root cellar works). In the spring set them out with the crowns level with the ground. The second year they become inedible because they are making seeds sending all the nutrients out of the root. They stalk up and branch out. Wait until the greenish color disappears from the seeds and th branches they hand from. Cut the stalk, air-dry, rub out the seed by hand and screen. Sift or winnow out the sticks. 12 plants should be enough seed for a family. Seed keep for 3 years.

Mustard Greens: These are bee-pollinated. Let it bolt cut the stalk once half the seed pods have dried, dry on cloth, thresh and winnow. Seeds stay viable for 7 years.

Onions: They produce seed by putting up one slender stalk that flowers and then makes seed. Onion pollen is carried by insects. Onions are biennial if you’re going from seed to set and then set to bulb. You save good sets from the plants you choose as parents and use them nest spring. To keep seed making plants from losing your onion seed by scattering before it is ripe on the plant, put a paper bag over the seed head secured with a rubber band.

Harvest the bag and all when you’re ready, but give the insects time to do their job. Dry the seeds and they will last for years if sealed in glass free from humidity. Don’t dry them by artificial heating or it will kill them - drying conditions have to be just right. Since they seem to be so sensitive I would suggest buying plenty of packages of scallion seeds to avoid saving these seeds.

Pea: Peas are a self-fertile insect pollinated annual. Let peas stay on the vine until the pods are well developed. Dry then shell out of the pods. They can last up to 8 years.

Peppers: Select a mature pepper, preferably one that is completely red. Cut the pepper open, scrape the seeds onto a plate, and let the seeds dry in a non-humid, shaded place, testing them occasionally until they break rather than bend. Leave at room temperature until completely dry. Beans, peas, and other legumes: Leave pods on the plant until they are "rattle dry."

Pumpkins: This isn’t seed saving but how you can tell male blossoms from female blossoms. If you have no bees in your area you may have to hand pollinate the crop. Male blossoms have a THIN stem. The female is bright yellow and generally has a tiny pumpkin or cucumber already forming around the stem. When the male blossom is so full of rip pollen that it will dust off on your fingertip, cut off the blossom and carefully touch the sticky stigmas of the center of each female blossom with this pollen. Typically there are more males than females.

Radish: They NEED bees plenty of bees, temps under 90 degrees and normal moisture and tend to be difficult to produce seeds. Get rid of early bolts. The second group of bolts will produce stalks. You might want to stalk the more fragile stalks because you don’t want them touching the ground. Let the pods develop and ripen on the plant. harvest the pods by breaking off the stalk. Don’t open until you can hear them rattle. Keep drying them in a shady airy place out of direct light. When totally dry store them in a jar or envelope. The stay viable for about 4 years.

Squash: Summer squash is at the seed-saving stage when you cannot dent the squash with a fingernail. Cut it open, scrape the seeds into a bowl, and then wash, drain, and dry them

Tomato: The seeds are encased in a gelatinous coating, which prevents them from sprouting inside the tomato. Remove this coating by fermenting it. This mimics the natural rotting of the fruit and has the added bonus of killing seed borne tomato disease. Squeeze the seeds from a fully ripe fruit into a bowl, add water, and let stand at room temperature for about three days.

Once fermentation occurs, mold will form on the surface of the water. Add more water, stir, and then gently scrape mold and debris off the top. Repeat until only clean seed remains, and then strain, rinse, and leave the seeds at room temperature until dry.

Storing seeds: Store most seed in airtight jars. The exception is legumes, which store best in breathable bags. To keep the seeds dry, fill a small cloth bag with about one-half cup dried powdered milk. Place the packet in the jar beneath the seed packets. Label your container with the variety, date, and other information. Store your seeds in a cool, dark, dry place; a refrigerator is a good choice. Avoid opening the container until you are ready to plant. Stored seeds will retain their viability for different lengths of time. Melon seed can be stored for as long as five years, while sweet corn is only good for one year. Other types of seed remain viable for two to three years except as noted.
 

Reprinted by permission from Coping with Turbulent Times newsletter, c/o III, Box 4630 SFA Sta., Nacogdoches, TX 75962. $5/four issues, $1 & SASE for sample.

SAVING SEEDS: THE GARDENER'S GUIDE TO GROWING & SAVING VEGETABLE & FLOWER SEEDS (revision of '78 Growing & Saving Veg. seeds), Marc Rogers, '90, 185 pages 6x9 (wide margins), $10 + $2.75 p&h in '92, Garden Way, 105 Schoolhouse Road, Pownal VT 05261. 800-827-8673. Free catalog of 250 + titles: gardening, animals, cooking, crafts, building.

With petunia seed over $10,000 and tomato over $2,500 per pound, Marc Rogers concluded that seeds aren't cheap. Seed saving can cut costs, and reduce dependence on seed companies. And, by careful selection "you can produce plants best suited to your climate and your growing conditions." This book gives directions for saving seeds of 48 vegetables and 61 flowing ornamentals.

"Watch your plants throughout the growing season.... It is the whole plant, rather than an isolated fruit, that you should consider...." Save seed from early-bearing plants, to encourage that trait. Mark your seed producing plants with a ribbon, or stake, so they're not accidentally harvested.

Seeds picked before they're mature won't have enough stored nourishment for a good start, or even to last the winter. (Seeds "carry on their basic life processes even while dormant, but at a very low rate.") Fruits, such as tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, should be allowed to get "a bit overripe, before seed is collected." Harvest melons for seed and eating at the same time.

Tomato and cucumber seeds separate from the pulp easier after fermenting in a little water. Stir a few times daily to discourage mold. The good seeds will sink to the bottom. After 4-5 days rinse them and spread to dry, "Most seeds, in most climates will dry adequately for home storage if spread on paper towels or newspapers in an airy place for a week." Turn seeds and replace paper several times if necessary. Larger seeds take longer. If conditions are damp and you use artificial heat, don't go over 100(better 90) F.

Fungi are almost inactivated at 50 F, and bacteria at under about 18% moisture, therefore, "keep your stored seeds dry and cool. ... Long-term storage in the refrigerator or freezer is your best bet ..."

Silica gel (at drug, camera, craft, or hardware stores) may be used as a desiccant. Most "is treated to turn color when it has absorbed its maximum of moisture." It may be repeatedly oven-dried for reuse.

"It's hard to go wrong growing peas or beans for seed", thus they are perfect for beginning seed savers to start with, says Marc.

Scientific as well as common names are given for all plants. Address and catalog price given for 50 seed companies, large and small. The U of MN's Source List of Plants is mentioned as listing "over 20,000 varieties...commercially available in N America." For info about the Seed Savers Exchange, Marc says to send a SASE to RR3 Box 239, Decorah, IA 52101. Their 418 page Garden Seed Inventory ($17 1/2 ppd) describes 5,000+ non-hybrid veg. varieties from 240 catalogs. County extension agents may know of local/regional seed exchanges.