Seed Saving.

My seed saving, and crafting, station. AKA the kitchen table. 

I really, really got into seed saving this year. I've dabbled every other year, saving odd seeds from lettuces, greens, flowers, tomatoes, squashes and melons, all the easy things. I grew lots of lettuces, tomatoes, flowers and pumpkins from my saved seeds this year.  I'm not going to get into specific instructions for saving seeds from different crops here as there is a lot of info available online. The instructions vary and can be quite different from plant to plant. If you're saving seed from certain crops, you may only be able to grow one variety to avoid cross pollination. I had to locate the perfect spinach plant to allow to go to seed out of my bed of spinach. I had borrowed a book from the local library at the first of the summer to get all the details for my seed saving project. It was The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds .

  For the most part, seed saving is really straight forward and super simple! Most crops like; kale, lettuces, greens like arugula, radishes,  peas, bok choy and parsnips are simply left to flower and then to seed. The bees love them when they're in flower, more so than my actual flower beds. I had read before that it's best to let the seed completely dry out on the plant in the ground if possible, which seems to work extremely well. Then I harvest the whole plant, making the seed collecting easy-peasy. Most of these dried seed pods need only the slightest coaxing to come out of their papery shells.    

Sugar snap peas, Marigolds, Kale and Spinach seeds. 

More parsnip seed than I will use next year. Parsnip seed is typically only good for one year, so I will share these with other gardeners. 

Radish seed pods. 

Kitty cat amongst all my lettuces flowering and going to seed. 

I love allowing things to complete their life cycle in the garden. It makes me feel even more involved in my food production and saves us big bucks! Seeds are not exactly cheap to buy, although they really are when you look at how much food you can get from one packet, at about $4.00 for a packet of kale containing roughly 40 seeds, I know have about 400 kale seeds, if not more.  Most seeds keep well from year to year, except lettuce and parsnips, but instead of getting carried away and saving all of the seeds I want for 5 years, I'll let my crops next year go to seed too.  The buzzing of bees around these crops going to flower is more than enough reason to let them go.