Harvesting the Future: Seed Saving

George Jones Farm interns Danny Cowan, Rachel Cotterman, and Emma Cunniff saving celery seeds.

The growing season is finally done.  The fields are covered in snow and the last cuts of salad mix have been harvested from the greenhouses.  Temperatures are hovering in the 20s during the day and snow is a daily occurrence.  But one more harvest remains:  seeds.

Over the course of the year, I made sure to leave some of our crops alone.  Collards overwintered from last year rose up into billowing towers of creamy yellow blossoms followed by slender aqua blue seed pods.  Intensely flavored soup stock celery provided a nice early spring crop before stretching up to the sky and bolting into a profusion of delicate and very fragrant umbels that gave way to the tiniest of seeds.  Both collard and celery flowers made for great seasonal additions to our salad mixes (dill and parsley flowers also offered bright accents), but I always made sure to leave some alone. 

As spring turned into summer the collard's glaucous seed pods weighed heavy and the stalks bent low, the pods shifting from blue to gold as they dried.  As summer turned to fall, the celery's green seeds turned deep brown and dry.  This is the time to harvest the future.  In the mad scrabble of harvest season to get every ripening tomato before it splits and every head of lettuce before it bolts, take some time out on a dry day to cut back these dry seed heads, put them in a paper bag, label them and stow them away in a dry, dark place. 

Now in these cold days, those crumpled paper bags can come out of hiding and slowly but surely seeds can be separated from chaff and sealed in paper envelopes and carefully labeled for next spring.  When I trained as a horticulturist at Stonecrop Gardens, I spent all of January 2004 cleaning and saving seeds.  What a wonderful time to spend in the potting shed hunched over bins of an incredibly diverse array of seeds.  Shimmying the pans, tossing them to winnow chaff, using strainers of varying gauges.  Campanula seeds like shining dust and shimmering silver Ricinus seeds like sinister coffee beans. 

Why save seeds? 

Firstly, from those training days, poring for hour after hour over seeds and dried inflorescences was for me the best way to develop an intimate and intuitive understanding of plant families.  Each family of related plants has its special way of conveying itself through time from one generation to another.  Apiaceae (celery, parsley, fennel, e.g.) seeds for example have a ridged coating and a bend in them that makes them unmistakable, whether large like angelica or lovage seed or miniscule like celery seed.  This may seem an abstract reason, but most of us have grown up so removed from intimacy with nature that this kind of learning develops a powerful intuition later in the field later.  I may not know what wild mustard is but as soon as I see those yellow flowers and then later those narrow silique seedpods waving in the wind, I know exactly what those seeds are going to taste like.  Playing with seeds inside in winter can offer one avenue for becoming conversant with the world around us through the rest of the year.  And the best way is to hold them in your hands, sift them from the chaff, roll them between thiumb and forefinger, hour after hour.

Beyond this, there is utility.  Seeds make plants.  The next growing season is only too close and those seed packets can add up to big bucks once your greedy eyes have perused the stack of  bewitching catalogs that show up in your mailbox.  Saving seeds from your own plants is a way of trimming costs and making next year's garden truly "local" from the very start. 

Back to the abstract, for me the most exciting reason to save seed is participating in a years-long, decades-long, centuries-long process of developing bioregion-specific -- even site-specific -- vegetables.  When I grow a patch of collards and one plant grows noticeably bigger leaves or fends off cabbage worms particularly well or makes it through summer droughts better than others, and I save seed from that plant I am joining a line of farmers stretching back to the beginning of agriculture.  And when I save collard seeds consistently year after year, the resulting plants will become ever better at growing in just this set of circumstances that Oberlin, Ohio presents.  They will truly be of this particular place. 

In this way, seed saving truly is harvesting the future.