Saving Seeds

I love poring over the seed catalogs in the dead of winter, itching to get my hands back in the dirt and watching the green things growing.  Each year, I buy new seeds, ready to try another kind of tomato, or eager to try parsnips for the first time.  I have saved up quite a little stash of seed packets, half-full to nearly empty.  Containers and a 4'x8' plot don't leave me a lot of room to plant, so I can't use much seed, but I use up the seed packets bit by bit.  And each year, I jump with joy with the little seed packets arrive bound up in rubber bands.

But when you think about it, it's kind of silly.  

Plants make their own seeds.  All they want to do is create more plants, so they provide the way to plant and grow them in perpetuity.  (Unless, of course, you have a Monsanto terminator seed, engineered to do the opposite of what seeds have done for millions of years, or a legal agreement with Monsanto requiring you to buy more seeds every year, rather than saving them the natural way.  But I digress.)  Buy seeds one year, plant your plants, and then you shouldn't have to ever buy that kind of seed again.

This is another one of those common sense things that just took a little extra time to occur to me.  I was used to buying food at the grocery store, not growing it.  It appears there all year round, and I just go buy more when I want more.  Growing food takes a lot more work, but provides more fun, too.  But then I would eat the food, go back to the catalog, and plan to buy more for next year.

This year, I decided I wanted to start saving seeds.  Previous attempts were limited only to that one time I saved those heirloom tomato seeds from a farmers market tomato that made a delicious bruschetta.  (It grew a plant, but since I grew it this year, it was a bit of a failure, as were all my tomatoes.)  I read up on seed saving a little, but since most recommendations involved netting your plants and pollinating them yourself and god forbid never plant different kinds of types from the same family within fifty feet of each other (what am I going to do in a community garden?), I wanted to start small.  So I saved some peas.

Just as the internet advised, they stuck around on the vine until the vine started to dry out and die back.  The pods became paper, and the little peas rattled inside.  I opened the pods, dumped the peas in a plastic baggie, and now I'll have peas for next year.

Simple and yet exciting, right?  And maybe if I glue my own photos on the bag, I can make my own homemade, homestead seed packets to approximate the joy I get from the catalogs.

Too much?