General Guidelines to Seed Saving

Remember the adage "What you reap, so shall you sow." Well, that can be taken quite literally in the world of seed saving (with the exception of plants that easily cross-pollinate). If you harvest small tomatoes, you're likely to get small tomatoes. If you harvest the first tomatoes of the season, their offspring will be more likely to produce earlier in the season.

When choosing which seeds to harvest consider the following:
  • Vigor
  • Taste
  • Size
  • Ability to tolerate drought, wind or other extreme conditions
  • Ability to compete with weeds
  • Early-, mid- or late-bearing fruit (whichever is desired)
  • Long storage life
  • Late to go to seed or bolt
  • Good fruit texture
  • Disease resistant
  • Productivity
  • Cold hardiness
  • Resistance to insect pests
  • Larger fruit or flowers
  • Attractiveness
  • Color
  • Shape
After you save the seeds, make a note of why you chose these particular seeds, where you grew them, and when you harvested them. This process will help you to learn from your plants and to start creating the varieties that work best for your location.

Seed Protocol

We want people who borrow seeds to get what was on the label and we want to ensure folks only share healthy plants to minimize the chance of spreading plant diseases. The following is our basic protocol:*
 1. Save from healthy plants. Even if a disease does not get passed on through the seed, we do like to have some selection for disease resistance by only saving from healthy, strong plants.
 2. Save from a number of plants so that the seed has some genetic diversity in it. The quantity that is optimum depends on the type of plant, for self pollinating plants a minimum of 6 plants is encouraged, for cross pollinating you want to save from much a larger population. In home gardens the seed saving population sizes may not be realistic. So save from as many as you can. When we pool our seeds together in community, we can get closer to those ideal numbers.
 3. If the plant cross pollinates you want to make sure you keep it isolated so it stays “true to type.” 
Check with a seed saving chart or book to get isolation distances. Some species are hard to save in home gardens, so mark those as "crossed?"
4. When you bring seed to share at the Seed Lending Library please label with as much information as you can. A bare minimum on the label is common name, variety name, and year harvested. 
5.    On occasions, we may save seed from a favorite plant that might not be from a large population of plants or isn’t super healthy, or maybe we like some interesting crosses that happened. You are welcome to bring those seeds in just make sure you clearly write on the label those relevant facts so others know they are participating in your experiment. 

*The Seed Protocol is from the West County Community Seed Exchange, Sonoma Co., California.


​Seed cleaning

  • Most seeds can be cleaned using a variety of screens of different mesh sizes. You can sometimes pick up different sieves at thrift stores that do the job for many crops when working on a small scale.
  • If you are saving seed for your community, having a set of different screens is useful.  The Seed Garden book will tell you which mesh sizes to use with different crops. 
  • If you are at a community level of seed cleaning, this do-it-yourself seed cleaning machine is super helpful.