In this pocket of the southern hemisphere, the weather has been insisting it’s still autumn. But the forecast confirms that the cooler days and nights of winter are just around the corner. Yet while we are less than three weeks away from the shortest day, the very last remnants of summer crops are doing their best to hang on. I have just picked what is likely to be the final tomato that has been able to turn colour on a plant in a sheltered spot that captures the morning sun. That brave plant is also putting on new flowers. Yet these have zero chance of becoming mature fruit. It is way too late in the season for that.
But it may not be too late for something else that started out as young flower waiting to be pollinated by a passing insect. If you had a summer vegetable garden and haven’t cleared it out, there may still be a chance for some seed saving.
The best chances of saving seeds from warmer season vegetables, given where we are in the year, could be in any bean pods that evaded picking and have been sitting on their plants as they fatten up. Have a close look at any remaining bushes and vines (if you have some of these) and a mature pod or two could well be hiding. They will need to have gone from green to yellow to a lighter brown shade, almost to the point where the pod resembles thick paper. You’ll know they’re ready if the seeds rattle inside them!
On a fine day harvest the pods and allow them to dry out more inside somewhere (I put mine in a garden shed on a shelf that gets some sun). In a few weeks the bean seeds will almost voluntarily fall out of what remains of the pods. Place these seeds in an envelope (I use small manilla wage envelopes on which I write the seed type and year of collection), and store them somewhere dry. I have my seed envelopes and packets stored in old containers with good lids – an old metal tea cannister works well.
Beans would be my choice if I was just starting out on seed saving to grow my own home adapted varieties of plants. Their seeds are relatively big and don’t get blown away in that inevitable gust of wind that comes when you are collecting them. Put any soft and squishy ones into the compost and save the rest. Bean seeds are super easy to sow (the normal guideline is to put any seed in the ground about twice the depth of its size). They don’t mind whether they are sown directly in the garden or in a tray or small pot before being transplanted into the garden once they are a few centimetres tall.
Scarlet runner beans are a genuine garden classic, and if you allow them (by not pulling out the roots and lower stem at the end of the season), they will come back next year, growing perennially. If you have a neighbour or family member who grows some of these wonderful plants, they’ll probably be able to give you some seeds to kick-start your collection.
For me, though, there are two bean varieties that have done especially well. One is “kaiapoi”, (often known outside New Zealand as “Canadian Wonder”) that I originally purchased from Kōanga (which maintains genuinely impressive collections of seeds, including varieties passed down many generations). The kaiapoi is a bush bean: low growing, so no staking or support needed. These little reddish-pink seeds produce plants that may take a little while to set fruit, but when they do, watch out! They will go on and on producing yummy green pods.
The other bean is “vitalis”, a green runner-style bean (which will need support to grow up – a fence is great!). I got a packet of these from Kings Seeds a few years’ ago and save my own seed from the children and grandchildren (and so on) of the original plants each year. Their pods grow large without getting too tough for eating (I constantly err on the side of picking them young when I could easily leave them to grow on). When allowed to mature, they produce white seeds that are also easy to collect and store. Here is a picture of a vitalis bean pod that has gone from green to yellow – not ready to collect yet for the seeds.
If beans are my number one seed saving choice for the summer and early autumn vegetable garden, what about something that produces food in the cooler months? Something that literally can do the saving for itself is pak choi (or bok choy). The seeds of this versatile leafy green mature in their pods after flowering and will fall onto ground nearby if you let them (which I often do, knowingly or otherwise). You will know that the pods aren’t far away from developing when the yellow flowers show up (and attract insects for pollination). The picture here shows a mix of self-sown pak choi, including some with yellow flowers and, in the foreground, green pods.
Seed saving time has arrived when pak choi pods have gone light brown in colour, and are almost translucent. At that point their tiny black seeds will be there in abundance. Collect these seeds before they fall on the ground, dry them on a bench, and store them, and you’re likely to have more seeds for these greens than you quite know what to do with. When you come across a bit of ground where there is space left from a departing crop, pop these seeds into the ground at almost any time of the year (avoiding the hottest weather). I also sow these tiny seeds in pots – pak choi germinate so reliably (even as old seed in my experience) you’ll probably need to thin them out (or do what I do and prick them out into other pots) before they are ready to transplant.
When some of the pak choi leaves are big enough to harvest, I don’t tend to grab the whole plant in one go. I pick the outer leaves, meaning that the centre of the pak choi plant will go on growing for several harvests. Our favourite way of eating them is to do so with minimal cooking – wash and dry them, cut them in half, put a little oil in the bottom of a saucepan, and heat them. They will provide their own liquid, so no added water required. Almost as soon as they have collapsed down in the hot pan they are good to go (adding some chilli flakes earlier can be a nice touch). We use the same cooking style for plant relatives such as the delicious darker green leaved tatsoi and the uber-productive rappini which are both worth growing.
What about a herb? My recommendation is a very distinctive-tasting plant which produces seeds that go through two obvious stages. The first is a green stage that arrives after the bees have pollinated the many tiny white flowers which sit in clusters. The second is a light brown mature stage. At either stage, green or brown, the seeds are eminently edible, and great in savoury recipes of all sorts. You save them when they are light brown, and the stems holding them up have also gone a similar colour. You may have guessed that I am talking about coriander (or cilantro). A must for so many recipes, (and eating the green leaves raw when you are in the garden is a wonderful thing). Like beans and pak choi, coriander seed are easy to collect – I cut the straw-like seed heads off with a pair of secateurs and knock them against the inside of a clean dry bucket. The brown seeds come off readily, you can blow the chaff away, and then the drying and storing awaits.
There is nothing quite like the pungent aroma and flavour of your own coriander. They grow better in the cooler months and fantastically so in the shoulder weather of autumn and spring. In hot and dry conditions, however, coriander bolt (run to flower) before they have a chance to grow properly. You might want to put some shade-cloth over them, or find a shady, damp, spot in the garden, if you’re wanting some summer coriander leaves.
Generally I find seeds scattered randomly in a pot or in the garden – with a little soil sprinkled on top and with some moisture added most days - will germinate and grow quickly. Some fairly old saved seed I sowed in a pot towards the end of April is growing fine and we’ve eaten from it (small amounts so far) a couple of times already. Here is a picture of that coriander which is growing with some peas, another crop that enjoys cool weather and whose seed are easy to save and store.
For an edible flower, my pick for a super-easy seed to save, store and sow is calendula. Their bright orange (or yellow) flowers brighten up many a dull winter day. You can add their many petals to a salad (put the centre of the flower, you guessed it, in the compost). They may not be my favourite edible flower (I prefer the spicy kick of nasturtium or the delicate flavours of pineapple sage) but calendula petals are eminently edible and so colourful in a green salad. Each flower will produce several seeds which are ready when they come off easily in your fingers – they are curly in shape and quite large seeds for a relatively small plant. I find that I am harvesting calendula seeds quite a few times in the year. The plants really seem to enjoy cooler weather, making them good growers when summer flowers have done their bit.
Like pak choi and coriander, calendulas will self-seed in the garden if you let them. In fact, once you have them in your garden, you are very likely to have them there for good (let the sower of beware!). So adept are they at multiplying themselves, one market gardener whose podcasts I listen to suggests not growing calendula as companion plants in vegetable rows (preferring marigolds to which they are very closely related). But I like calendula growing all over the place, even if they sometimes need a bit of management. These ones pictured here have self seeded into the lawn and so the mower handles the extras.
That’s a short selection of seeds that I’ve found easy to save, store, germinate and grow. And here is a photo of these seeds saved from my garden – clockwise from top, the curly calendula, the wonderful Kaiapoi, the productive vitalis, the tiny seed of the pak choi, and the very useful coriander. A ruler shows that the largest of these seeds (the kaiapoi bean) is less than 2cm in length.
You may find that different seeds become your easy-to-save favourites. Go for it! See what works for you. If you are looking to buy some seeds or plants from which your saving journey will begin, you might find it helpful to keep a look out for “open pollinated” or “heirloom” varieties. These tend to produce subsequent generations of plants that have similar characteristics to their parents, and yet should nonetheless adapt over time to the specific conditions of your garden.
Seed saving is a healthy habit to maintain. Collecting seed almost becomes a form of foraging in your own home garden – a sometimes unexpected bonus from a set of plants which have already graced your table with fresh food to eat. There is the satisfaction of running the full circle in vegetable garden terms – from sowing to growing to harvesting to seeding to collecting and then to sowing again. You will be part of one of the great cycles of life that can occur in a humble vegetable garden. You’ll get to keep growing some of your favourite varieties from year to year. And you will always have a supply of fresh seed that you can pop in the ground as soon as you’d like. You’ll be building a little bit of local food resilience along the way. Seeds are normally inexpensive, but these will be free.
Any of those effects are good on their own. In combination they’re genuinely splendid.