Saving seeds refers to the practice of collecting/harvesting seeds from your homegrown plants to be used the following year for planting. Farmers have been saving seeds since the dawn of agriculture and for good reason too.
Saving seeds allows you to ensure a crop for the next season, and to have seeds adapted to the local climate, soil, and whatever taste or texture preferences you may have. It’s a straightforward process that allows you to retain food security, and preserve the genetic diversity of food crops thus reducing disease susceptibility.
Not only is saving seeds much cheaper than ordering from seed catalogues every year, but it also allows us to improve biodiversity and lessen the grip of big agricultural companies on the food chain, By saving seeds we can help take back our rightful autonomy as creatures of this earth.
Let’s look at the some of reasons you should consider saving seeds for your garden.
Key Takeaways
Food Security
Saving seeds allows you the best chance of ensuring a bountiful harvest the following year. This is because you can choose which seeds to save.
By selecting those with the characteristics you want to highlight, you can breed more adaptable seeds year after year. You can choose characteristics like size, sweetness, early or late ripening, disease resistance, drought of flooding adaptability, vigor of growth as well as the behavior of the plant.
By buying your seeds from big agricultural companies, you are decreasing the gene pool and leaving plant species more susceptible to diseases that can obliterate crops and decimate harvests. Seeds from catalogues come from two main companies and are often hybrids, as opposed to open-pollinated, meaning the seeds collected from these won’t grow true to type if they grow at all.
Locally grown seeds have more adaptability and can ensure a bountiful harvest, whilst protecting genetic diversity for generations to come.
It’s also free!
Preserving Heritage
By saving heritage seeds, you are saving indigenous plant varieties that have been cultivated over generations and are locally adapted to the climatic variabilities of your area. These seeds have been carefully selected over many generations to be the best suited for your locality as possible.
By saving heritage seeds you are harnessing the power of nature and can be sure to obtain a high reward for your efforts, likely with much less effort than if you were growing generic seeds that lack local adaption.
Environmental Considerations
Many seeds from catalogues may struggle and inexperienced gardeners may think them in need of large doses of chemical fertilisers, which can disrupt local ecosystems. This can be because they aren’t adapted to local conditions. By saving seeds you allow yourself the best chance of obtaining a healthy harvest year after year as you develop your landrace seeds. Saving seeds allows you to ensure your seeds are natural, organically grown and bursting with nutrients.
Seed saving promotes sustainable farming practices. It is how farming has been done since the inception of agriculture itself, whereas purchasing seeds from multinational agricultural conglomerates has only been commonplace since the prevalence of industrial agriculture a handful of decades ago. By not ordering seeds from far-off places, you are also saving on packing and carbon emissions, making it more ecologically friendly in this sense too.
Those concerned with seed saving also tend to favour organic production, due to its connection to natural cycles, and tend to shun chemical and industrial interventions.
Promotes Community Engagement
By saving seeds, you can create a local seed bank, and swap with other farmers, growers and hobbyists in your area. Saving seeds and swapping them in this way is the best way to promote local varieties and pass down these varieties to future generations, and their accompanying stories. Saving and passing down seeds is a great way to feel rooted and grounded where you live, and to feel a true sense of belonging.
Heritage seeds could even be grown in community gardens, fed by compost made by a community composting initiative for even greater community interactions and sustainability credentials!
Creates Independence
Saving seeds allows growers to distance themselves from industrial agriculture and obtain greater self-sufficiency and independence. This works best in a community with others doing the same thing. Many if not all vegans are concerned with living a more compassionate and sustainable life, and by saving seeds, can distance themselves away from farming practices that exploit, degrade and poison the land.
By supporting and furthering seed-saving initiatives, vegans and non-vegans alike can enrich their diets with high-quality food.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Saving seeds can pave the way for a more ethical, sustainable, compassionate and future-proof food model. Best of all, it involves no special technology, little knowledge and does not have to be outsourced to ‘experts’ and then sold back to us at an extortionate cost.
Saving seeds provides a great way of connecting to your ancestral heritage or that of the place you live in. It provides food security and a way to live more sustainably and compassionately by choosing to opt out of ecologically destructive practices and align your food and consumer choices closer to that of the natural world and away from exploitative, destructive systems.
