Saving Vegetable Seeds

Save vegetable seeds as you harvest so your favorite plants can grow again next season. In this Storey BASICS® guide, Fern Marshall Bradley covers everything you need to know to successfully save seeds from 20 popular garden vegetables, including beans, carrots, peas, peppers, and tomatoes. Learn how each plant is pollinated, where to store your collected seeds through the winter, and how to test their replanting viability in the spring. Now you can grow the delicious varieties you love year after year. Grow vegetable favorites year after year with expert tips on choosing, collecting, preparing, and starting seeds from the home garden. 
Fern Marshall Bradley, author of Building Raised Beds and Saving Vegetable Seeds, is a long-time editor of books about organic gardening, organic farming, and sustainable living. Bradley lives and gardens in Cambridge, New York.
EXACTLY WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Become more self-sufficient by saving your own seed from one year to the next. Fern Marshall Bradley clarifies how to select the best plants, make seed saving a part of your garden plan, save both wet and dry seed, overwinter biennial crops like carrots, store seed, and test viability before planting. A crop-by-crop guide explains the details of saving the seeds of beans, carrots, corn, cucumbers, lettuce, melons and watermelons, onions and leeks, peas, peppers, radishes, squash, and tomatoes.

Introduction



Chapter 1: Getting Started with Saving Seeds

What Is a Seed? – Are All Seeds Worth Saving? – It's in

the Genes – Simple Seed Saving – Coaxing Seeds from

Leaf and Root Crops



Chapter 2: Seed-Saving Techniques

Growing Great Seeds – Overwintering Biennial Crops –

Harvesting Seeds – Cleaning and Drying Seeds –

Storing Seeds – Testing Seed Viability



Chapter 3: Saving Seeds, Crop by Crop

Beans – Carrots – Corn – Cucumbers – Lettuce – Melons and

Watermelons – Onions and Leeks – Peas – Peppers – Radishes –

Squash – Tomatoes



Resources



Index