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5 Tips for Planting Your Seed Saving Garden

Bob Wildfong

1. Give More Space  

You might be accustomed to planting your greens close together. You normally harvest them before they grow large, because they're more tender and mild-tasting when they're young. And besides, crowding tends to prevent them from growing too large. But if you're growing the plants to seed, they need lots of room to grow fully, make flowers, and form seeds.

Leave at least a full foot of space around each of your lettuce plants if you want to get seeds from them. Remember that they'll grow 3-4 feet tall, and many varieties will be at least a foot wide at the bottom.

A great strategy is to plant lettuce and other greens closely, but when you harvest them to eat, leave one in the ground about every foot, to grow to seed. That way, you make use of the space when the plants are small, and give your seed crop the space it needs.

If that's your strategy with greens, remember that you're growing seeds now. Spinach, lettuce, chard, and other leafy vegetables are fine in partial shade if you just want the leaves, but they need more solar energy to produce flowers and seeds.

2. Seeds Need Sun

Plants are solar powered, and flowers and fruit need a lot of energy to grow. Since seeds come from fruit, and fruit come from flowers, you'll find that a seed crop needs more sun than the same plant would need to grow leaves.

For example, you can grow nice spinach or kale in part-shade. The leaves don't need intense solar energy to grow, and though thye might take a little longer to grow, you'll get tender greens. However, if you want lettuce or kale seeds, the plants have to grow a lot more, and they need more energy to do that. Sow your eating greens in part-sun, but save your sunny spots for the seed crop.

3. Water Only When Necessary

You water your garden when it's dry, because the plants grow more tender, fuller, and faster. That's important when the soil is really dry. But if the soil is just a little on the dry side, watering really only matters for crops that will become bitter, strong-flavoured, tough, or stringy. For instance, lettuce and radishes get that way when they grow in dry soil.

For a seed crop though, it doesn't matter whether the radishes get too spicy because you won't eat them anyway. It matters more that they produce flowers and seeds. Nature's way of dealing with drought is to coax plants to make seeds faster; to reproduce quickly so new seeds can survive any dry days to come. Use that to your advantage, and only water when the plants show signs of being really dry (if the leaves droop, you're not helping by withholding the water anymore).

4. Sow Biennials Later in the Season

Many biennial vegetables, such as beets, carrots, turnips, and cabbage can handle some frost, so it's common to plant them early in the spring. That's excellent if you're going to eat them, because you get a longer season of produce.  But if you plan to save seeds from those plants, sow the seeds a little later in the season; about 70 days before the end of the season (for most of us that's sometime in June). The reason is that smaller roots often store better over winter than large ones.

Imagine if you sowed beets in early May, and kept them in the ground until September to store over winter for seeds next year. Those beets would be huge. It turns out that they won't store as reliably as if they were only a few months old. Think of it this way: if you use a succession of sowings, say to get beets and carrots in several separate harvests during the season, your biennial seed vegetables should come from the last of those harvests, because then they will be just the right size for storage until next year.

5. Interplant Short Season Crops with Your Seed Crops

Although the first tip says you should leave lots of space between your seed plants, they only need that extra space when they grow up. While they're small, they can co-exist with other small plants just a few inches away. For example, lettuce needs at least a foot of space around it when the plant is mature with flowers and seeds, and radish plants can grow up to three feet tall when they bear seeds. However, during the first 4-6 weeks of their lives they are small, and you can grow and harvest short-season plants right next to them.

Sow spinach just 6 inches next to the radishes you want to grow for seeds. When you harvest the spinach, let the radishes fill the space.

Sow arugula, cress, or kohlrabi just 8 inches next to the lettuce you want to grow for seeds. When you harvest the greens and small kohlrabi after about 5 weeks, let the lettuce fill the space.

You can also grow baby beets, baby carrots, and other varieties of radish and lettuce this way (just be sure to remove plants of the same species as your seed crop before they flower, so they don't cross-pollinate).

Seed saving is practical and educational, but it should also be fun. The best way to learn is to watch your plants, and save some seeds for fun. You'll see that the plants do all the hard work, and saving seeds is actually pretty easy. 

You can find lots more information about saving seeds in our book How to Save Your Own Seeds. 

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Bob Wildfong is the Executive Director of Seeds of Diversity, and has been a seed saver for over 25 years.

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