It's Time to Save Seeds!
By Sandra Mack
10/18/20242 min read
The cool crisp air of October is so hugely welcome this year, after the long-lingering heat. The harvest is on, and it’s time to save seeds!
The seeds of many native trees are hanging at eye level as we stroll about, ready for collecting and planting. Those seeds can be gathered in a pocket or a bag, and planted at home using instructions on the Cool it Burque website. All winter, in their mulched pots, the seeds will get ready, and will sprout in the spring when the time is right. When your baby trees appear you will sing oh, baby! Bring them to Seedling Graduation in May and we’ll help you repot them, and pop them into our nursery until they are ready to plant.
It’s also time to save seeds from every vegetable that grew this year in your garden or in our local area. Those seeds are precious, as they can help us develop landrace varieties. A Landrace is locally adapted and can continue to adapt to changing conditions. Landrace seed saving is much, much easier than all of the complex steps needed for saving individual heirloom varieties. Simply throw every bean you save in one jar. Plant them out all jumbled together in the spring. It is more than okay if varieties cross, because this will allow your beans to adapt to our challenging and ever more challenging conditions.
Diversity in genetics is a good thing. This is why if we all save our own vegetable seeds, and share them with each other in seed swaps, we will have far better, more successful harvests, because all of our seed will become better adapted each year to our local conditions. To learn more, I highly recommend the book Landrace Gardening: Food Security through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination, by Joseph Lofthouse.
Saving and planting seeds is a wonderful activity, top to bottom. Forests and gardens grow up from this practice. It is a very forward looking, practical action.
We’ll be having a seed swap at our upcoming workshop on October 27th, at the Rio Grande Community Farm. Feel free to bring any locally-collected seeds, from native or climate adapted trees, shrubs, and perennials, and from any fruits or vegetables that have been grown locally. We have tree seeds you can take home and plant, as well.