How to Save Seeds From Your Garden: Easy Crops to Start With

Saving seeds is a great way to become more self-sufficient, save money, and be more sustainable by reducing packaging waste. But it can also feel overwhelming. How do you know which seeds can be saved despite the risk of cross-pollination, which varieties are heirloom, and which are hybrids?

Here are some of my tips on where to start out saving seeds

First of all, this is not a professional guide, just some tips I picked up from my gardening journey. I started saving seeds with some of the easiest crops. Since this is just for my home garden, I don’t worry too much about cross-pollination.

Lettuce Seeds

Let your lettuce go to flower. At some point in summer, you just can’t stop it from bolting. Harvest what you can if it is not too bitter yet and let the rest go to flower. It makes for some pretty colour in the garden. The pollinators will appreciate it too. Then let the flower die back and you can cut it off and save the seeds. For me all, of this started out with laziness. I was too late to harvest my lettuce, let it flower, then was too lazy to cut it and it self-seeded. Fast forward another season and I have lettuce growing everywhere without having put in any work. For me this is the easiest way to do it because even if I plant other veggies in those beds I don’t mind having some lettuce in between. If it’s too much, I can very easily pull it and put it in the compost.

Coriander Seeds

Coriander is very similar to lettuce in that when the warm weather hits, it can go to flower very quickly. If you can bear the space, let it bolt and dry on the plant. Once fully dry, cut off the whole bunch of flowers — seeds and all — and store it in an airtight You don’t even have to separate all the seeds from the stems. When it comes time to planting again just crumble it all in the soil.

Basil

Towards the end of summer, the race starts with basil; trying to pinch off wherever it is trying to go to flower. But eventually, it will bloom. Like with coriander, harvest any leaves you still want to use or preserve, then let it flower and collect the seeds after they have dried. Just beware the seeds are tiny and can easily fall all over the garden.

Saving Marigold Seeds

I plant marigolds in between most of my veggies, especially my tomatoes. They bring pollinators and beauty to the garden, plus they are great companion plants for deterring pests. To extend their blooming time, I pick off the dead heads whenever I walk past. I usually just throw the heads somewhere next to the garden bed. A lot of them also fall into the raised bed. Not long after, there are marigold popping up everywhere. Just in case, I also take some of the heads that dried on the plant, bring them inside and keep them for a future planting. But to be honest because I throw them around the garden everywhere I have not had to intentionally plant them since.

Poppy Seeds

Another flower that self-seeds easily is the poppy flower. To encourage self-seeding make sure to leave the flower heads on the plant until they have fully bloomed and died back. Because the seeds are so tiny they will inevitably fall somewhere in the garden and come back. You can then also cut some dried heads off carefully and keep them for another planting. If the heads are fully dry, the seeds will just fall out It’s worth tolerating a short phase when the plant might not look its best. It will save you money and time and bring back beauty in the next season.

Saving Pepper Seeds

A little bit more work is needed for peppers but even for these it is very easy to save seeds. It is best to go with heirloom varieties. This will ensure that the plant you grow from the saved seeds will have the same properties which is not necessarily the case with hybrids. For peppers, you let them fully ripen on the plant, harvest, cut open, take out the seeds. Let the seeds fully dry on a paper towel and then store in a cool, dry environment. As much as you think you’ll remember which seeds you saved, chances are you’ll forget by next planting season, so labelling might be helpful.

These are some of the easiest ways to start out saving seeds. It could even be considered letting the plants self-seed instead of doing any saving.