What are the best seeds to save for growing my own fruits and vegetables?
Q. Has anyone ever developed a list of vegetables and fruits that can or can’t be grown from seeds from the seeds of what you buy from the stores to eat? If so, what kinds of things do you have to do to have a better chance of getting them to grow? What about seeds and pits from store-bought fruit?
Many gardeners like to save seeds for several reasons. As the quality and availability of commercially available seeds continue to decline while prices steadily increase, seed saving can be a worthwhile activity.
With a bit of effort and a sense of adventure (a little more about that later), one can certainly save seeds for next year’s garden. As you’ve noticed, you can harvest viable seeds from store-bought sweet peppers and get quite a lot of them from a single pepper. Tomatoes, too, can yield plenty of viable seeds. We did this with a variety pack of “heirloom” tomatoes and the resulting plants produced fruit that was similar to the source fruit.
Some fruits and vegetables are usually harvested before their seeds have matured. Zucchini, eggplant, and cucumbers are some examples of this. If you are growing these yourself and want to save their seeds, you could simply allow the fruit to remain on the plant until the seeds have developed. Remember, though, that if you do this, the plant may stop flowering and producing fruit until the overripe fruit has been removed.
Other garden vegetables can be left to flower and set seed. Carrots, leafy greens, herbs, radishes, beets, parsnips, onions and garlic will form seed heads which can then be saved for future use. We’ve had “volunteers” come up all over our garden due to dropped seeds germinating in random places. One spring we even had a head of lettuce appear in our front yard!
What about that “sense of adventure” I mentioned? Although many plants will give seed that comes up true to type, other plants are prone to cross-pollination. Squash (both summer and winter type) will cross with each other to produce some interesting offspring. This means that if you save seeds from that monster zucchini that you forgot about until it was 3 feet long, you might get a nice summer squash, a sweet little pumpkin, or a warty gourd. I recommend purchasing seeds for squash because of this.
Garlic purchased from the store can be separated into cloves to plant, and each clove should produce a full head of garlic in a year and a half. Shallots can be grown this way as well. These are biennials, so they will take longer to mature. Wait until the tops die and dry out before harvesting, then store in a cool, dark, dry place to cure before using.
Seeds and pits from fruit are unlikely to produce good-tasting fruit due to cross-pollination. All commercially available varieties of fruit are selected cultivars that are grafted onto a compatible rootstock. Your chances of getting a good-tasting apple from any random apple seed is negligible.