How to Save Seeds to Regrow Your Best Plants Year After Year

When you save seeds from a plant that thrived in your garden, its descendants can continue to shine in your landscape for years to come. Seed saving is an art and a science that is regaining popularity as gardeners seek to preserve culturally important foods, gain self-sufficiency, and support diversity in our food system, says John Porter with Nebraska Extension at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

By saving and sharing seeds from your favorite plants, you help keep more varieties going while also deepening your relationships with other gardeners, the earth, and the food you grow. You also have the opportunity to create a living legacy by giving seeds to your children or nieces and nephews, setting the stage for descendants of a plant you love to nurture your descendants for generations to come.

What Is Seed Saving?

Seed saving is when you save seeds from one harvest to use for the next harvest. As a newbie seed saver, your goal is to grow a plant that thrives in your garden and produces seeds carrying the same genetic material. A plant that passes along its genetics in a stable way is known as true to seed or true to type.

To keep your plant’s offspring true to type, you’ll not only have to pick the right plant; you’ll also need to grow it under the right conditions.

How to Save Seeds

Getting started is easy when you choose the right plants. Here are tips on how to start saving seeds successfully. 

Decide Which Types of Seeds You’ll Save

Tomatoes, loose-leaf lettuce, peas, and beans are great fruit and vegetable options for beginners, because their self-pollinating flowers are designed to keep the pollen inside the bloom. Sunflowers, marigolds, zinnias, poppies, and calendulas are easy picks for flower seed saving, because they produce a lot of seeds that are easy to collect at the end of the growing season.

As you purchase seeds for seed starting, look for heirloom and “open-pollinated” plants, which typically produce seeds that are the true to type. By contrast, a hybrid plant will have parents from two different varieties and thus will produce a variety of seeds—some with the genetics of one parent, some with the genetics of the other, and some with the same mix as the parent plant.

Plan Your Garden 

Even with self-pollinating seeds, you’ll need to work a little to keep different varieties of the same species from cross pollinating in your garden, especially if you’re lucky to have a lot of pollinators stopping by. The easiest way to do this is by making sure there’s a distance of 10 to 20 feet between different varieties of the same self-pollinating species (the distances get farther for other plants, especially squashes, cucumbers, and melons). 

To produce the best seeds possible, keep your plants healthy and disease free during their growing season. "A few spots on the plant are fine, but if you're seeing a heavy disease or insect infestation, you'll want to do some sort of treatment to make sure that the seeds are high quality and disease free for coming years," Porter says, adding that there are many organic options for controlling diseases.

Gather and Dry Your Seeds

Watch your plants as they grow to identify the ones that seem healthiest and appear to best resist pests, disease, and other challenges, such as extreme heat. Pay attention to when they bloom to see which ones hit the right time window for your area, and note how prolifically they produce flowers and fruit (the term for anything that contains the plant’s seeds). Target these for seed gathering, since they will produce the most vigorous offspring with the traits you want. 

The best time for gathering seeds is after plants have reached full maturity, which is typically well past the phase when you would gather their veggies for eating or blooms for a bouquet. 

How to Gather and Dry Flower Seeds

Follow these directions to gather and dry flower seeds:

1. Allow blooms to fully mature and dry on their stalks before you remove them. Calendula seeds are large and easy to pull directly from the plant, as are sunflower seeds (but you might have to cover your favorite blooms with paper bags to keep birds away while they dry). 
2. For flowers with smaller seeds, cut off the flower heads, snipping at a junction in the stem to promote more blooming on the mother plant.
3. Separate the seeds from the flower heads and spread them out.
4. Use a fan for several days to make sure they are fully dry before removing remaining husks, pods, and other plant material and tucking them away in storage.

Your state or county extension service will offer additional tips for both flower and vegetable seed saving, and Seed Savers Exchange posts crop-specific guides for growing and storing seeds from 35 different fruits and vegetables. 

How to Gather and Dry Vegetable Seeds

Each plant type has its own gathering protocol. With loose-leaf lettuce, you’ll allow your plants to bolt, sending up flower stalks that produce flowers. When you see feathery white seeds that look a bit like dandelions, you can start collecting them, says Jeanine Scheffert with the nonprofit Seed Savers Exchange.

"Some people will bend the stalk into a paper bag and shake it, and the seeds will just fall off into the bag," she says. From there, you can remove the seeds from the chaff—a process called winnowing—by shaking them through a screen or just pulling them out by hand. Allow them to dry fully before transferring them to their storage container.

Peas and beans can stay on the plants until their pods are dry and starting to brown and the seeds rattle inside. You’ll spread pods out to dry for a few weeks and then shell or leave them in the pods to store them until you’re ready to plant in spring.

With tomatoes, you’ll allow the fruits to fully ripen and then scoop out the seeds, placing them in water for about a week and stirring occasionally to separate them from the gel that surrounds them. Pour off the water and any seeds that float to the top, repeating the process several times with fresh water before pouring the mixture through a fine sieve and spreading them out to dry.

How to Store Your Seeds

When it comes to storing your seeds, cool, dark, and dry are everything.

Double bagging them and placing them in the freezer will do all that and extend their lives by slowing the biological activity that takes place inside the seed. "They’re still living, and they’re still consuming the endosperm inside, which is sort of the starch that feeds the little seedling," Porter says.

If you’re going to plant your seeds in the next year or two, you have the freedom to do something more creative. At Schaffer’s house, saved seeds spend the winter in a cute metal cupboard—a garage sale find that she keeps in the main living space. Martha stores leftover seeds in long wooden file boxes in her basement, using cardboard dividers marked with seed types. 

Many seed savers place their seeds in paper envelopes they purchase or make, labeling and grouping them together in tightly sealed glass jars that they then place in a cool, dark basement or garage. If you go that route, add a separate envelope of silica gel to make sure it’s fully dry inside each jar, removing it after a week or two.

When to Plant Your Saved Seeds

In spring, you can sow your saved seeds directly in your garden or start them sooner indoors under lights, depending on their growing window and your climate.

Should You Switch Exclusively to Saved Seeds?

There’s a lot to love about seed saving, and some people avoid commercially grown seeds altogether. But commercial cultivars might have qualities you’ll value, too, Porter says. Some, for example, are being bred to address climate change. 

"I tell people to be open to both saving heirloom seeds and to the newer seeds that you would have to buy in order to have the best chance of success," he says.