Mama Gone Green is a blog dedicated to raising happy children and reducing our impact on the Earth. My name is Taryn and I am the mother of 2 young kids and an environmental studies instructor at a community college in Portland, Oregon. Please join me as I journey through life as a mama, teacher, knitter, photographer, gardener, and environmentalist!

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Seed Saving 101

After reading Seed to Seed last spring, I realized that jumping head-first into seed saving was not going to work for me. A lot of plants (like everything in the squash family for instance) will cross pollinate with each other, creating seeds that will produce hybrids, or "mutts" if you will. Most of the time, these randomly crossed seeds will not produce the particular fruit that one would expect of hope for, and so saving seeds from your garden zucchini will not necessary produce zucchini fruits if planted next year. Basically, for many plants, saving seeds properly takes a lot of space, time and technique, none of which I currently have.
However, some plants are super easy to save seeds from, like snow peas. So while I decided that trying to save seed from everything I plant was not feasible, saving seeds from the easy-savers was something I wanted to try.
So, last week, Finn and I had our first attempt at saving seeds from our garden. We made sure to leave some of our snow peas unpicked and waiting for them to turn brown and die. Then we just shelled the peas and put them in a jar. Viola! Seeds for next year.
My only problem was that once we popped open the shells, some of them had peas that still had some green color to them, which means they must still have moisture in them. So,... I am letting the jar sit without a lid for now, and am hoping they will all turn brown eventually?? Once everything is brown with no moisture left,  I will lid the jar and put in a dark, cool spot. However, I really have no idea is those green one will turn brown without rotting, or if I should remove them from my stash. Maybe some of you more experienced seed savers could lend a hand.....?
Have you saved seeds before? What kinds?



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3 comments:

  1. We've been saving seeds from flowering plants and bushes that we encounter on our walks.

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  2. I have saved poppy seeds and sweet pea seeds. With both, we gathered the seed pods while still green, but obviously about ready to burst on their own. We filled a brown lunch sack with these green seed pods and then left them in the carport about this time of year....when its still very hot and dry where we live. We made sure to shut the bags very tightly. We'd forget about the bags and when we came back a few days or weeks later, we'd find the bags full of popped pods and lovely dry seeds. It worked well b/c they were in the dry heat, but the bag could breath so once popped, they dried further.

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  3. I save a alot of seeds but have never saved peas so i can be of no help. Great that the kids are into it as well,
    Mxo

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