GO-3.0/tools/qortino-knowledge/docs/gardening/seed-saving-storage.md

Seed Saving and the Home Seed Bank

Why this is the keystone skill

A gardener who saves seed never starts from zero. Saved seed also adapts: selecting seed from your best plants, year after year, breeds varieties tuned to your soil and climate. In any long disruption, viable seed is among the most valuable and tradeable things a household can hold — light, dense, and renewable.

Open-pollinated vs hybrid

Save seed from open-pollinated (OP) and heirloom varieties — their offspring grow true to type. F1 hybrids are crosses; their saved seed grows, but splits unpredictably into ancestor traits — fine for experiments, wrong for reliability. Seed catalogs and packets mark hybrids "F1". A resilience-minded gardener builds the core garden on OP varieties and buys hybrids only knowingly.

Pollination and purity basics

• Self-pollinators (easiest): tomatoes, peas, beans, lettuce, peppers (mostly). Different varieties barely cross; modest separation or a mesh bag over a flower truss gives pure seed.
• Cross-pollinators: squash, cucumbers, corn, brassicas (cabbage family), beets/chard, onions, carrots. Insects or wind carry pollen between varieties — and between related crops (zucchini crosses with pumpkins; carrots cross with wild carrot). Purity requires distance, timing (only one variety flowering), or hand-pollination (tape a female squash blossom shut in the evening, hand-pollinate and re-tape at dawn).
• Biennials: carrots, beets, cabbage, onions flower in their second year — roots/plants must survive winter (in ground under mulch, or stored and replanted) before they yield seed. Plan for this or keep extra purchased seed of biennials.

Harvesting and processing

Dry-processed (beans, peas, lettuce, brassicas, onions, most flowers, grains): let seed mature and dry on the plant until pods rattle or heads brown; finish drying indoors on screens; thresh (crush pods in a sack, rub heads between palms) and winnow — pour between bowls in a light breeze so chaff blows away.

Wet-processed (tomato, cucumber, squash, melon): scoop seeds from fully ripe fruit. Tomatoes benefit from fermentation: seeds + pulp + a splash of water in a jar for 2-3 days until a film forms — this dissolves the germination-inhibiting gel and kills some diseases — then rinse in a sieve until clean and dry on a plate or coffee filter (not paper towel; they glue themselves down). Cucumber and squash: rinse clean and dry. "Dry" means snap-dry: a seed that bends is too wet to store.

Storage: cool, dark, dry — and labeled

Enemies in order: moisture, heat, light. Store bone-dry seed in paper envelopes inside an airtight jar, in a cool dark place; a silica gel packet (or 1-2 tablespoons of dry rice or powdered milk wrapped in cloth) guards humidity. The refrigerator is excellent; the freezer stores truly dry seed for many extra years (let jars reach room temperature before opening to avoid condensation). Label everything with variety and year — memory fails by February.

Typical viability well-stored: onions/parsnips 1-2 years; corn, peppers, carrots 2-3; beans, peas, brassicas, squash, tomatoes 3-5+ (tomatoes often far longer); lettuce 5-6. Roughly double these under refrigeration.

Germination testing

Each spring, test doubtful lots: 10 seeds rolled in a damp paper towel or cloth inside a loosely closed bag somewhere warm; check after the packet's germination window. 8-10 sprouting = sow normally; 5-7 = sow thickly; under 5 = replace, or sow very thickly and hope. Test before the season, not during it.

Building the household seed bank

Keep three tiers: this year's working seed; a reserve of last year's proven varieties; and a deep reserve (frozen, dried hard) of your core calorie and staple crops — enough to replant everything twice. Refresh the deep reserve every few years by growing it out. Prioritize OP varieties of: potatoes (as tubers — save small healthy ones, though disease accumulates; refresh with certified stock when possible), dry beans, winter squash, kale, cabbage, carrots, onions, tomatoes, and a grain if you have space. Trade seed locally: locally saved seed is pre-adapted to your conditions and seed swaps build exactly the community networks that matter in hard times.