Home Ideas. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. The Rise of the Cleanfluencer. I really enjoyed the info on the seed lifetime… never realized that they were different, although it makes sense… knowing some plants produce every year and some at varying intervals.
Something new for me to learn about. All in all an excellent article. I like your blog very much. Thanks so much for taking the time to share. Do you think coffee cans work for storing seeds?
My basement is old, damp and drystack stone, I am not sure if this would be a good location and there is not enough room in the fridge. I have a lot of seeds? My concern with the coffee cans is about the moisture getting through. As long as you use a good number of those silica gel packets in the cans to absorb the moisture, they should be okay. Perhaps try it with a few seed packets before betting your whole collection on it! Thanks for sharing!
So informative! As a new gardener, I thought simply laying the seed packets out are totally fine! Oh, my! That would have been quite a disappointment. The Seed Collection advises to not store in the freezer for vegetable seed will likely be killed. All seed banks freeze their seeds for long term storage, so even though many vegetable crops are sensitive to frosts, their seeds are not.
You can use both if you like for longer-term storage. There are a lot of individuals that fall into this category, which surprises many people, who think that serious seed saving and seed banks are reserved for seed companies or government agencies.
Local knowledge on what grows well is indispensable and is not possible to have at a company or government level except for possibly at the local level, as the time and interest is just not there. Some, like tomatoes need a little more work, such as fermenting the gel coat off of the seeds, washing and then drying them. Start with an easily processed seed to get the feel and see if this is something you want to do. Also, start with saving something that you like and are interested in eating again.
Be warned though, once you start it becomes a bit of an obsession as you realize that you are starting to take control of your food and the future of what you eat! It is a powerful and liberating feeling. You might even become a food rebel! If I freeze a fresh, whole pepper, can I remove the seeds and dry them at a later date…will they grow? They might or might not. When saving seeds, one of the most important steps is to thoroughly dry the seeds before storage.
Freezing the seeds inside a fresh pepper will more than likely kill the seed as the moisture expands and breaks the seed. The only thing to do is plant or eat them, as they are starting to sprout. Pumpkin seeds need to be removed quickly, as they will start to sprout fairly soon. A few years ago my wife and I planted a short row about 20 feet of Roma tomatoes. Plants came from a local green house. At the end of our season I just tilled everything under and forgot about it.
The next spring we had Roma tomatoes coming up all over the garden. A section 25 feet long and 10 feet wide were covered. I tilled tomato plants under all summer…. It is a good lesson in just how resilient many of those seeds are! I have read a couple of reasons why this may not be working for me.
And is there any truth that there has to be male and female seeds for the plants to produce? If so, how do you tell which is which? I thought just drying them was enough, but from some of the articles on here it seems that the vegetables have to be rotting in order for the seeds to be salvageable, What am I missing?
Thank you in advance if you can shed some light on this. Sincerely Mary Crane. During that time period, orthodox seeds do not get old. Seed banks are trying to store seeds for centuries. For such long term storage, cold temperatures are important.
Orthodox seeds continue to lose moisture as they mature. It is important to let this moisture escape, or else the seed can get moldy. For this reason they should not be stored in closed plastic bags.
Some form of paper is a much better option. Recalcitrant seeds need to be treated differently. Even with this type of storage, these seeds tend to have a short life span of a few weeks to a couple of years. The comments I made above about maturity are a bit simplified. In reality maturity can be defined different ways.
One way to define it is to consider maturity as being the point where the seed can germinate. When the Norway maple Acer platanoides , an orthodox seed, is compared to the sycamore A. The Norway maple reached germinability 4 weeks before physiological maturity. At a minimum you first need to determine which type of seed you are dealing with; orthodox or recalcitrant.
To complicate the matter there is also a third category sub-orthodox which is half way between these two extremes. How do you determine which type of seed you have? Unfortunately that is not easy. BotanyCa also does a good job of identifying seeds that need moist packaging and Genesis Nursery, Inc. If it is an orthodox seed and it will be germinated within the next year, store it in paper and room temperature.
If your goal is to store the seed for many years, make sure they are very dry and have had enough time to mature several months , and then store them in the fridge — not in the freezer. Recalcitrant seed should be stored moist. Use a temperature that is similar to their native environment. For temperate seeds, store at outdoor temperatures, and gradually cool them down as winter approaches. Then store in the fridge. In both cases it is best to plant as soon as possible for best germination.
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