seed saving: reasons

The saving of seed is a fundamental activity for Ginkgo’s gardeners, with appeals that range from the refined to the primal. We can state clearly and quickly some of the reasons why we go to the trouble of extracting, cleaning, drying, and storing seeds each year; other reasons, because they spring from deeper within us, often are not articulated.

We save seed because it is economical. A back of the envelope calculation: we can buy a pack of 50 tomato seeds from Seed Savers Exchange for $2.75; we can also purchase seed in bulk (a relative term here) at a price of $27.50 for a half ounce (containing around 6000 seeds). This works out to a price range from 6 cents a seed per small packet to half a cent per seed in bulk. When one considers that the plant from a single tomato seed might produce anywhere from 1-10 pounds of tomatoes with a market value of around $4.00 per pound, a nickel per seed is a tiny investment; however, when one of those tomatoes produces around a seed packet’s worth of seeds that you can save for no cost, it seems silly to buy new seed packets each year, especially if you plan to grow next year the same varieties that you grew this year.

The economic argument is weak, to be honest: many of us spend more than the cost of a packet of tomato seeds for the coffee that we buy on the way to the garden on a Saturday morning, and we do not have a problem supporting seed vendors financially. A stronger argument is agricultural: we support open pollinated, true-breeding, heirloom varieties of fruits and vegetables. We want everyone to understand the superiority of produce that has been grown for flavor and nutrition instead of for uniformity of appearance and shelf life. We want plants with stable genotypes that have adapted to the growing conditions in our garden. We want to participate in alternatives to an agriculture that relies on commodity monocultures.

Related to our agricultural motivations are our ecological concerns. The $2.75 that we might pay for a packet of seeds is not the packet’s only cost; a Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, of our purchase would identify additional, often hidden, external costs. As discussed in Daniel Goleman’s Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything, a LCA is “…a method that allows us to systematically tear apart any manufactured item into its components and their subsidiary industrial products, and measure…their impacts on nature from the beginning of their production through their final disposal”. When attempting the LCA of a seed packet, we would consider the environmental costs that arise from the packaging that encloses the packet for shipping and the oil required to power the vehicle that shipped the packaged packet. We might be overthinking things with regards to seed packets, of course: a seed packet delivered through the mail will have relatively small external costs compared to those of a cell phone or a burger in a Styrofoam clamshell package. On the other hand, a tomato grown using organic methods from saved seed—itself a seed packet—will have minimal external costs. (Plus, you can put that seed packet in a salad.)

A sense of community also motivates our seed-saving. We like supporting organizations that work to preserve plant heritage, such as Seed Savers Exchange. When we plant a storied variety such as the Wapsipinicon Peach tomato or the Cherokee Trail of Tears pole bean, we feel linked to earlier horticulturalists. We recognize that much of this connection is sentimental, based on romantic visions of wizened gardeners puttering in small plots. Many plant varieties were built painstakingly by experienced professional agronomists like Luther Burbank—but not every variety: the Mortgage Lifter tomato was developed by the owner of a radiator shop. One day, we might even be able to contribute to that heritage by giving seeds saved from our own garden, perhaps even from a new cross-pollinated variety—a Ginkgo Volunteer Cherry maybe, or an Old Ginkgo German.

Wapsipinicon Peach

We can usually marshal the above arguments when asked to explain the appeal of seed saving. A deeper reason often goes unsaid: the feeling of magic. Arthur C. Clarke wrote that “[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Seeds are the product of eons of advanced organic technology: of emergent statistical methods applied by plant species to develop means to store the minimal amount of information necessary to replicate particular structures and activities. A seed is a vegetable program—a capsule  containing a set of genetic instructions powered by a small amount of stored energy. When activated by immersion into a specific configuration of inputs that include electromagnetic energy and water, a seed will follow a complex chemical algorithm to convert a relatively undifferentiated mass of surrounding organic material and minerals into a highly differentiated plant. I can understand this, intellectually, to a degree; however, when I stand in late summer in the shade of a seven foot tall tomato plant and consider a single seed from a fruit of that plant, I have trouble believing that that the green leafy tower next to me could result from something small enough to fit under my thumbnail. The fact that I can grow an entirely new plant next year from a tiny bit taken from a plant this year feels like magic. Saving seed seems like casting a spell.

november 20, 2010 – sharpening day

On November 20, a small group of us arrived to a garden mostly empty of plants. We had not come to tend to the remaining collards and kales that struggled to survive in the cold, but to tools that were rusty, stiff, dinged, and dull.

We brought our tools out from the shed. A couple of us scoured rust and dirt from clippers and loppers with steel wool. We sharpened the cutting edges of the tools with a sharpening stone and honing oil. Others filed nicks from the blades of shovels and hoes. We sharpened machetes and knives. Finally, we coated blades and hinges with WD-40 and stored tools away for the winter.

While we worked on tools, Susan cleaned up in the front. She raked ginkgo leaves into a pile, only to encounter a father and child jumping into the pile when she returned with a wheelbarrow. She reraked the leaves and brought them into the garden, depositing them next to a pile of older leaves in an impromptu Goldsworthy sculpture.

Before leaving for the day, I collected the seeds that we had saved over the season, paying special attention to the heirloom tomato seeds. A couple of months ago, Evelyn finished cleaning and drying tomato seeds, storing them in small plastic containers that takeout restaurants use to store sauces.

The image illustrates one of the problems of this season—our difficulties in identifying tomatoes late in the season. We labeled our tomato starts when we transplanted them to the raised bed in spring; however, the growing plants obscured the labels, and rainwater eventually washed away the writing. When it was time to identify tomato varieties for seed, we wound up guessing. Next year, we plan to map where we plant our tomatoes so that we do not have to rely on written labels.

A beautiful day, a good harvest and some seed saving

Apologies for the lateness of this posting! One blogwriter was ill and others were out of town, so a quick update for Saturday, September 19th....

Harvests continue, though the total was down from last week’s bumper high. If memory serves, the total for the 19th was about 125 pounds. And thanks to the DePaul Oxfam group and the Loyola vegetarians for their help!

A number of volunteers worked hard harvesting the Italian beans, which have continued to produce well:



Check out the eggplant, daikon, radishes and carrots ready for transport:



And we were happy to see a good crop of red peppers:



It seems like the neem oil treatment is helping the cucumbers and zucchini. The cucumber plants don’t look beautiful but they have continued to produce both the more familiar dark green variety and the paler, striated Armenian variety. There was some debate about whether to pull up the plants this week so that a cover crop could be sown, but we decided to give them another week since there were a number of smaller yet-to-be cucumbers still on the vine.

The zucchini look fab, and this blogwriter can vouch for their lovely sweet taste, delicious grilled with a little olive oil and rosemary. (Last week, a rather large specimen was overlooked during harvest and serendipitously ended up in my kitchen.)



Super-volunteer Al was the only one brave enough to continue the seed-saving process. Having fermented in the shed for a week, the cups of saved seeds did not look appealing:



But Al set about washing and then drying them on plates so we’ll have them for next year.

Our bumper harvest

After the cool summer of 2009, which slowed the growth of some of the warmth-loving veggies, we're finally hitting peak production.

On Saturday, September 12 we welcomed volunteers from Chicago Cares and with their help, picked a total of 212 pounds of fruit and veg to donate to Vital Bridges' Groceryland food pantry.

We also saved seeds from about 15 tomato varieties for planting next year, and rounded out the day with a pot-luck to send off our star volunteer, John Cahill, who is moving to Massachusetts.

Our haul this week included two crates of pears, 60 pounds of plums (two crates like the one below)



48 pounds of tomatoes, our first really red bell peppers



pumpkins, cucumbers, patty-pan squash, collards, kale, and a host of other goodies.

With the harvest picked and heading off to Vital Bridges, we turned to a few seasonal tasks. One group picked herbs for drying, another scraped paint off benches in the front garden (we'll seal these with soy sealer before the weather gets too wet), and others weeded the more recently sown beds.

After a while, we brought everyone together to help with saving tomato seeds from some of the varieties we grew this year. We started by assembling a collection of some of the weirdest, most prolific and best tasting fruits known to homo chicagoensis.





Then we assembled a fine collection of willing volunteers and instructed them in the simple art of saving tomato seeds. You start by selecting a fully ripe tomato from a variety you enjoyed. Then you slice it vertically into chunks and separate the seeds from the flesh in a bowl of clean water.



Unbelievably, one of our longer-serving volunteers then instructed people to take the tomato flesh and throw it in the compost pile. It took a particularly smart Chicago Cares volunteer to come up with the bright idea of just eating the leftover tomatoes, instead.

Then, the next task is to strain the water off the seeds. Our makeshift solution for this was a mesh floored seed tray that has been sitting behind the shed for as long as we can remember.



After that we scraped each variety of seeds into it's own small pot to begin the only slightly counter-intuitive part of the process: fermenting the seeds for 3-7 days in order to rot away the gel coating on each one. The gel contains a chemical that suppresses germination, so it has to be removed before the seed can be dried and stored. The seed pots have to be fermented until they have a thick coat of mold on the surface. But at the start of the process, they look pretty appealing:



We finished up the day with a pot-luck send-off for John Cahill, volunteer, writer and former carpenter. We wish him well in Massachusetts. (Check out those garden-grown tomatoes, basil and sorrel upon which we feasted!)