Seed Saving - why we so often fail.

This is the first of a series of blog posts by Dawn Mclachlan getting to the root of why we so often fail at seed saving, and what we can do to correct that.

When I was nine years old, my grandad gave me a packet of sunflower seeds. I planted them out in a small patch of dirt behind the shed. As spring turned to summer I cared for my little green babies. Taller and taller they grew until they towered over me. Neighbours commented over the low fences as my sunflowers stretched upwards, turning their faces to the sun with heads as large as dinner plates. That summer I was the talk of the neighbourhood as my sunflowers could be seen over the gardens, tossing their golden petals in the breeze. I was so proud. I let the beautiful golden discs turn to wrinkled brown, then black, and waited for the seeds. When the time came, my dad cut the towering plants down for me and I left the heads dry out on my windowsill in the last rays of the year. Then I collected the seeds and laid them out to dry, and then filled a jar with them. That jar lived in the dark under my bed as a memento of the summer, and a reminder of the spring yet to come.

Spring came and I was so excited to get my little seeds into soil. I had my pots filled with compost and I set them up on the windowsill in the shed. This was where my disappointment began. I did exactly the same as I’d done before, but fewer than half of my seeds showed their little green noses above the soil and the ones that did were weak. The weeks rolled on and my sunflowers failed to thrive. They grew spindly and nothing I did made a difference. When they eventually flowered their blooms were no bigger than my hand and they waved their apologetically small faces at me as I peeped around the shed to check on them.

The crushing disappointment meant I didn’t grow sunflowers again until adulthood. What I didn’t realise then was that there was nothing I could have done to make those second-year sunflowers a success because I was a victim of the F1 hybrid seed trap. I didn’t know that the seeds I had so carefully gathered and kept all winter were doomed to return to type and instead only grew a weak version of one of the original sunflowers used by the hybrid creators. I hadn't known this and most of us when we see that "F1" label on a packet of seeds our minds run momentarily to racing cars and have no idea what it means in terms of seeds.

Most of the seeds we now see commercially available to us have been cross bred to create seeds that are strong, reliable and in many cases resistant to disease. Crossbreeding plants for a better end result is nothing new. The desire for larger fruit, better colour, more vigorous habit has driven cross breeding for millennia. Growers want bigger, better plants which have a lower failure rate and that can come from these commercially produced seeds, but at a cost. This F1 hybrid seed is basically a seed created by crossbreeding and the commercial seed creators want to protect their creation to protect their investment. Creating hybrid F1 seed is an expensive process and the seed producer must maintain the original “pure” lines to create more of this stronger, faster, bigger seed. This means that the seed is not only more expensive but becuase of the hybridisation process the plant you grow from it will not set viable seed that you can reuse in your own allotment or garden.

Seed gathered from plants raised from F1 hybrid seed will grow a plant that will revert to one or other of the original parent plants. It will not grow the same plant you had last year. After one season hybrid seed will revert to its true nature rather than the enhanced version you grew because it is not seed from a plant that has naturally adapted and evolved over many generations of growth. Hybrid seed is from a plant that has had this process forced upon it for a single season of growth and it is almost always unable to reliably hold those qualities to further seasons.

There is no doubt that there is a financial draw for commercial growers to use F1 hybrid seed, but there is another way for us seed savers. This is to seek out heirloom or open pollinated varieties. Open pollinated plants are those which are either self-pollinating or will cross with their neighbours, and heirloom varieties are open-pollinated plants that are over 50 years old. These are plants that are pollinated by wind or natural pollinators like insects. These plants are the ones that are most genetically variable and likely to adapt over generations to changing conditions and climates. These are the plants from which we can collect seed, and share seed, and grow on from generation to generation. If you want to begin learning how to successfully save seeds for future use, start with the packet you buy today.

It is only two or three generations ago that almost all of our food came from open-pollinated varieties but, over the last 50 years, thousands of varieties have disappeared from the seeds lists. The science that dominates the agricommerce industry has focussed almost exclusively on creating F1 hybrid seed. The seed industry has, over this relatively short period of time, achieved an inbuilt dependence on F1 varieties as growers purchase new seeds every year.

For those of us interested in freeing ourselves from that self-perpetuating trap of repurchasing seeds every year, there is seed saving. Seed saving itself is a learned skill and there is something intrinsically powerful about learning the many and varied methods of pollination of these varieties but it can get fiddly. I'll be unpacking that over the growing year but for now let's by checking those packets for the F1 label and look for open pollinated or heirloom varieties. When you're planning on saving seed we start before we've even broken any ground.

In the coming weeks I’ll go over the details of seed saving in more detail and give you the tips you need to start saving your own. Follow along and you may never need to buy another packet of seeds again.