Gardening 101: Saving vegetable seeds, part 1

Saving vegetable seeds from your garden is a great way to not only save money - those seeds in the pretty packages can get expensive - but it's also a way to ensure you can grow your favorites year after year without scouring the catalogs, internet and stores for the seeds you need.  The only caveat is that hybrids won't reproduce the following year with the same wonderful features you enjoyed this year.

What you need

Harvesting seeds can be done with a bare minimum of equipment or supplies, most of which you already have: such as scissors and paper envelopes.

Some seeds are easier to harvest than others. They all develop from the flowering part of the plant, but they end up in different types of carriers such as pods, flower heads, and fleshy fruit.

Saving seeds from pods

Let the pods dry on the plants.

Beans and peas are among the easiest to gather and save. Here's how:

1. Identify some of the best pods on the plant and tie a colored string around them to make sure you don't pick them before they're mature by mistake.
2. Try to identify 1.5 times as many seeds as you think you'll need next year since there will likely be a few seeds that won't germinate when it comes time to plant them in the spring.
3. Let the pods start to dry and turn brown on the plant.

Insert photo caption or credit here

4. Once the pod is brown, carefully remove it from the plant.
5. Collect all of the brown pods into a labeled paper bag.
6. If you have a clothes line available, hang the bag from the line so air can circulate around it completely, thus reducing the possibility that the seeds will mold.  You could also place the seeds on a paper towel that's on top of a cooling rack to dry.
7. Let the seed pods dry out completely - usually 1,-2 weeks.
8. Split the pod open and pour the dry seeds into an envelope labeled with the plant type and the year. This will help you keep track of extra seeds carried over more than 1 year, since many seeds become less viable over time.
9. Store the labeled envelope in a cool dry place until planting time next year. Try these templates to make your own seed-size envelopes.

As you can see, there's really not much to saving seeds from vegetables in pods. To learn about saving seeds from other types of vegetables, check out the other articles in this series.

Gardening 101: Saving vegetable seeds, part 2

Gardening 101: Saving vegetable seeds, part 3