How To Start Your Own Seed Bank

For the past few weeks if you walked into our kitchen you’d actually be able to see the surface of the kitchen table, with placemats, cloth napkins and a vase of cut flowers from the garden. This is about to change.

In the next week or so it will begin to fill up with coffee cups, cereal bowls, and small clear plastic condiment containers that you get with fast food takeout for things like salad dressing and ketchup and a range of other small containers and cups. Yes, it’s once again seed collecting and saving time.

Maybe it’s that lupine that you want to save seed from. Possibly it’s the sweet William in your neighbor’s garden or the columbines that you want to try your luck with. Maybe it’s the heirloom tomatoes or pumpkin that you want to grow again next year or something more exotic. Maybe just a plant that you’re curious to see if you can grow from seed.

Well, the seeds are beginning to ripen and the saving process will start any day now and continue into the fall. What do you need to know to be successful? What will you store your seeds in? Do they need to be refrigerated? Frozen? Sown as soon as they’re ripe? What? Seeds need to be ripe?

The first part of the process is to know when the seed is ripe. The plant will give you ample clues. In some cases you need to be one step ahead of the plant though, and here I’ll remind you that Impatiens, especially the native ones, are called touch-me-nots for a reason. Just lightly touch a ripe seed pod (or even think about it) and it explodes, sending the seed up to 10 feet from the parent plant.

Now not all seed will germinate, and some plants won’t even set seed as a result of them being sterile hybrid crosses. However, most of the seeds we want to collect come from heirloom plants, or plant species that are seed bearing.

Seed is always enclosed inside an outer layer. Sometimes this can be a berry, like the red berries of asparagus where the seed needs to be extracted then allowed to dry. The Impatiens are enclosed in a outer covering called a valve, and if you’re timing is right you can surround the valve with your hand, just as it’s ripe, and catch the seed. With columbines the outer vessel that holds the seed is green and as it turns to brown the seed ripens and falls out of the capsule end as it opens. At the first sign of the capsule opening at the brown end you can pick off the capsule with the stem and put it in your bowl and just wait for the seed to fall out.

First, the seed must be dry. If it’s moist or damp during storage you will inevitably end up with rot or fungus issues. The seed can be left in a cereal bowl or even on a piece of paper for several days to allow it to dry.

The collection steps are pretty simple though some cautions are needed along the way. First know what you’ll store your seed in. After mine are dry and packageable they go into a small glassine envelope (2 ¾ inch by 1 ¾ inch) then into a small, sealable plastic bag (5 inch by 3 inch). You can find both on Amazon. A small piece of paper with the name of the seed type goes into the envelope and the flap is closed or folded. I often put a small piece of tape on the flap to ensure there’s a good closure.

Next the seeds in the glassine envelope are ready to go into the plastic bag. The bags I use have a writable window on them, and I use a marking pen to again write down not just the name of the seed but the date it was harvested. You can never label enough to avoid mistakes and confusion.

While it’s important to package your seed as soon as it’s dry and ripe I will confess that many times the seed will sit on the kitchen table in cereal bowls for weeks and even months before it gets packaged and stored. This reminds me that the very first label you make should be for the cereal bowl or initial container. This tag should have the name of the seed as well as the date collected then be taped to the rim of the bowl. Every year I lose one of these labels or forget to make one, and the seed becomes a mystery. This can get especially confusing if you’re collecting from several colors or varieties of the same plant where all the seeds look the same, as the columbines do.

Some seeds do not need to be stored, and in this case, I make two batches from the same seed. One will get directly sown into the garden and the other stored for future use. In the case of columbine, the seed can be sown wherever you want the plants to establish and by the end of the summer you’ll have nice sized seedlings that will overwinter in the garden.

Do not cover columbine seed; simply scatter it on open soil. It’s what we call a light germinator.

Ripe lupine seed should be planted about a third of an inch deep late in the summer or early in the fall. These will, or may, germinate next spring as the soil warms.

Seed that has been properly packed and dried — yes you can over-dry some seeds — should go in the refrigerator but never, ever in the freezer. I keep my seed packets in a closeable plastic container inside the fridge. In one shoe box size container I can store several hundred seed packets as well as the left over seed packs from the salad and vegetable seeds that were not used during the season.

Do not refrigerate seeds from tropical plants. Tomatoes are tropical plants and their seed can be saved for up to a year without refrigeration.

One important thing to remember in the seed-saving process is how your refrigerator can destroy your seeds by simply sucking the moisture out of them. These days most of us use frost-free refrigerators. These work by constantly removing moisture (humidity) from the refrigerator so ice can’t form. The same process that keeps them frost-free will also suck the life-sustaining moisture from your seeds. This is why the packaging process is so important. First the glassine envelope, then the plastic bag and finally the plastic box with a cover.

This is only one part of the process though. The next phase is getting the seed to germinate, and that’s when the real fun begins. Most of the seed we collect are easy germinators, but you need to know if they are light, dark or ambivalent germinators. Then there are those that need vernalization, or alternate periods of cold and warmth, and these are usually done outside in flats or pots during the colder months.

Start your own seed bank. No matter how small or humble, it’s a gardening project that gives incredible dividends and can be full of wonderful surprises. Keep growing.

In 2020 slug baits containing metaldehyde were banned. This was a very effective and rain-proof bait but was also being ingested by pets and children. Not a good idea.

The replacement baits seem to degrade very quickly in rain and irrigation so they will probably need to be applied more frequently. With all our rain recently both the slugs and snails are becoming rampant. If you didn’t apply baits before they slugs emerged now you have to play catch-up. There are a number of safe home remedies, including coffee grinds and diatomaceous earth around the base or banded around plants. Beer in pie plates at ground level also works. Copper tape will repel them and will last all season.

I’d apply store-bought baits just after a rain and monitor the plants for new feeding then reapply. Don’t apply the baits to the plants but under them. Read the label before using any of these commercial baits in the vegetable garden. And of course, chickens and ducks are great slug and snail eliminators.