About buying seeds from a grocery store and planting them in coming years. The problem is that so many modern seeds are hybrids and hybrids being of dissimilar parents do not come "true" from saved seeds but revert to the parental types. You can plant them if you are of an experimental nature and realize that you won't get what you had before. Commercial seed packets should say whether they are hybrids or not.

It is possible to buy Open Pollinated seed even from the racks at grocery stores, box stores, etc. If the packet doesn't say hybrid it is probably open pollinated. OP seeds do come true since they have been selected to do just that and if you are careful about how you raise them--don't let them cross with others of their kind--you can save the seed and get what you started with. Some seed packets will say Heirloom. These are OP seeds. To learn more visit www.rareseeds.com and check out Bakers' OP seed offering. George (MacMex) is very knowledgeable about seed saving and willing to answer questions and even send you his prepared instructions for various veggies. He'll probably check in here. Ask about specific veggies and you'll get specific answers. Dawn can talk about heirloom tomatoes and if you run a search here you can find lots of info.

Casey or Connie, there are open-pollinated seed and there are hybrid seed. Open-pollinated seed is the kind you can save. Hybrid seed can be saved and planted and it will germinate and grow, but what it bears will not be the same as the vegetable or fruit that it came from.

The only seed that I know of that you probably shouldn't save and plant is the genetically-modified (GMO) stuff. This would be some soybeans and corn and maybe some other things that are not occurring to me right now. If you Google "The World According to Monsanto", and watch the series of video clips, that will probably explain more about GMO's than I ever could.

To my knowledge, Monsanto has never sued a home gardener for planting GMO seeds but I suppose there's always a first time.

For seeds that come from a moist environment, such as tomato, cucumber and melon, you can use the method that I've linked below. For flowers and certain other things where the seed is on the end of petals or umbels and such, or inside a dry pod, just make sure that you wait until the seed is mature and that it looks dry. Seed that is in a pod should rattle inside when they are dry. In some cases, it really depends on what you are saving seed from.

You'll get better information from some of the others than I have provided here, but this is a start till they see your post and start answering. --Ilene

Here is a link that might be useful: Wintersowing seed saving tips

Connie,

As others have previously stated, open-pollinated types (often referred to as heirlooms) of vegetables come true from saved seed, but hybrids generally don't. Hybrids have parents (and there can be more than 2!) and those parents have to be bred specifically with one another to create the seed that gives you the hybrid variety....so A + B = C. Right? So, when you save seed from C, some of the resulting plants may, but also may not, resemble C or B or A or could you give you something else entirely. If you save seed from a hybrid variety, you have no idea what you'll get or if it even will produce or will be edible.

Some types of open-pollinated seeds are easy to save, but others are more complicated. Tomatoes are relatively simple. If you follow any of the generally accepted methods of saving tomato seeds from an open-pollinated variety, you'll generally get seeds that come true to type. Occasionally, you may get crossed seed because bees cross pollinated two or more varieties of O-P tomatoes, or you might get a genetic mutation--but that is rare.

Corn, on the other hand is a lot more complicated. You would think it would be easy....just leave the corn on the cob on the plant and let it dry, then harvest the kernels from a couple of ears and save them for next year, right? Not exactly.

Corn is wind-pollinated and crosses quite readily with every any other corn plant in relatively close proximity that is tasseling at the same time. So you have to isolate your corn from other varieties if you're going to save seed. You can isolate by pollination time or by distance (Suzanne Ashworth recommends 2 miles) or you can hand-pollinate and bag your corn to prevent windborne cross-pollination. With corn, you are supposed to plant at least 200 corn plants of one variety in order to prevent inbreeding depression. Inbreeding depression means if seed from too few plants is saved, you'll see a loss of genetic diversity that is irrevocable and is immediately noticeable. In the case of corn, this means that you'll start seeing shorter stalks, fewer and/or smaller yields, and longer dates to maturity. That doesn't mean you have to save the seed from the 200 corn plants, but that you do need to have the diverse qualities offered by the pollen from the 200 corn plants. In general, it is recommended that you save seeds from a population of 20 inbreeding plants or 100 outbreeding plants, or 200 for corn. I do know plenty of people who save from smaller populations though.

How you save seed of different vegetables varies depending on how they are pollinated. Some veggies self-pollinate, some are insect-pollinated and some are wind-pollinated. Some, like tomatoes are self-pollinating/self-fertile, but then insects can complicate the process by carrying pollen from one type to another too, resulting in cross-pollination.

To maintain purity within an O-P variety of seed, you have to ensure cross-pollination doesn't occur. There are different ways to do this, such as:

Growing only one variety of each vegetable (this works if other gardeners aren't growing the same vegetables within a mile or so of you, and the distance varies by veggie);

Growing two or more varieties using time isolation so that they pollinate at different times. For example, if you plant two corn varieties and one is a 65 DTM corn and the other is a 90 DTM corn, they shouldn't be pollinating at the same time. However, after the 65 DTM corn pollinates and has formed kernels, you do need to remove all the tassels so there's no stray pollen hanging around when the 90 DTM corn starts pollinating.

Growing using distance isolation. The isolation distance needed between two types of the same vegetable varies.

Growing using a natural plant barrier. You can get away with planting two varieties of the same veggie near one another if they are wind-pollinated (not if they are insect-pollinated) if you plant a barrier of tall plants between the two. You can use very tall plants like sunflowers and amaranths, or vines like ornamental beans or morning glories if you think they'll climb the trellis and get tall enough to serve as a barrier before the other plants pollinate.

You can bag blossoms using little bags that fit over the flower/fruit from which you'll be saving seed. This works very well with tomatoes. To do this, you place the bag over the flower before it opens. You can remove the bag after a fertilized fruit appears, but be sure to mark that tomato with surveyor's tape to remind you which one is for seed-saving. You also can use floating row cover material like Remay to cover any individual flower or a group of flowerheads.

You can provide mechanical isolation by placing plant cages (picture cubes made of wooden frames and window screening) over the plants from which you're going to save seed.

Saving seed correctly can be very complicated. (To me it seems much easier with flowers than with food!) I'd suggest that anyone who wants to save seed simply has to invest in Suzanne Ashworth's book SEED TO SEED: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners. This is a marvelous book and teaches you everything you need to know in general plus everything you need to know about each specific vegetable addressed in the book.

And, of course, we have George. He and Jerreth are long-time seed-savers and I don't think there is anything about seed-saving and seed storage that George does not know.

Dawn