Seed Saving: 5 Nutrient-Dense Vegetables You Should Be Planting Now

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Seed Saving: 5 Nutrient-Dense Vegetables You Should Be Planting Now

When starting a garden, one of the biggest costs is the seeds, but the good news is that you can provide your very own organic seed stock each and every year with a little patience and planning.
Being able to collect seeds from your garden is really pretty simple. You just have to plant a few extra individual plants and let them flower and develop the seeds. But make sure that you aren’t relying on every single plant in your garden to provide you with food. Thankfully, plants tend to make a lot of seeds, so even letting one or two “go to seed” should give you more than enough to plant next year.
Not all seeds are created equal, though, and it is important to let them mature properly. It is equally important to store them correctly. However, it’s not that difficult to store the seeds for the winter, and you may even be able to stop buying any seeds once you figure out what grows best in your garden.

As far as storage, there are a few rules to follow for almost any common garden plant. First, you must ensure that the seeds are fully developed. This will vary some depending on the plant and what region you live in. For most plants, though, this will mean late fall, when the rest of the plant is dying back and the seeds are dry. The majority of garden plants have small seeds that will be attached to the stem of the plant.
It is best to cut the entire flower stalk that contains the seeds. You can let this sit and dry, and a lot of the seeds will simply fall off after a couple of days. The rest you can get by hand picking or even thrashing the stalk in a contained area.

I recommend that you put the drying stalk on top of a piece of paper or something else white. Since the seeds are so small, this will allow you to better keep track of the seeds as they fall out, and will also allow you to more easily transfer the seeds from the paper to whatever you’re storing them in.

There are plenty of resources to find specifics for individual types of plants, and we won’t get into that too much here. But you can help yourself by planting some of the following vegetables that will easily set you up with seed crop for next year.

Remember: The seeds need to be dried prior to storage, so be sure to lay them out in an area with low humidity, and out of direct sunlight.
Many seeds will keep for several years, but it’s best if you can rotate your seed crop each year. Here are some of the best:
1. Carrots — carrots are nutritional, hardy, and will store for a long time refrigerated or in a root cellar. They don’t take up much garden space, and the greens that we don’t eat can be fed to chickens or added to the compost bin…..More Here

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Seed Saving: 5 Nutrient-Dense Vegetables You Should Be Planting Now