1. Always label, mark and identify seeds and growing plants. Use permanent inks!

2. Don't plant all your seed from one variety in one year. You never know when a natural or man-made disaster will appear and wipe out your plants. Always keep a reserve, or know how to re-supply yourself, at least!

3. Seed to be saved must be fully mature to remain viable. Know what a mature fruit looks like, for each variety and type you grow. Example: most cucumbers are yellow when fully mature. Green peppers (unless their final colour is green) are unripe in 98% of all cases. Harvest seed from fruit just before the point of it rotting. Use your eyes, nose and sense of touch. Again, experience and knowledge will be your aids.

4. Learn how to spot the signs of all diseases that your plant can be subject to. In particular, find pictures of what viral disease symptoms look like. Viruses can and will be passed into the seeds. Collect no seed from fruit or plants in trouble, unless it catches a disease and beats it with great vigour. If this is the case, the plant will carry the code of how to beat the disease within its genectics, and the seeds produced from champions is highly prized.

**This is one advantage hybrids have over heirloom, o/p varieties. Hybrids have had the instructions to win if it gets involved in a disease, purposely tweaked by the hybridizer (person developing the hybrid). If you live in an area wracked with viral and bacterial diseases, consider growing hybrids for the period of time the disease is prevalent. However, in some cases, like the troubles watermelon growers are having in the southern U.S., it may be of your advantage to stay with an heirloom. Heirlooms learn from their mistakes, improving it's immunity from year to year. It is much more likely that your 'Moon & Stars' watermelon has come across fusarium disease in its history - but you may get a drastically reduced crop.

5. Survivor: Garden. Survival of the fittest. Save seed from the best looking, vigorous plants, with the fruit that holds all characteristics of it's variety - colour, shape, taste. Know what these are in each case of heirloom o/p's. Ensure that from generation to generation, the best are passed on through generations.

6. Know what characteristics are not in keeping with the variety. If your 'Green Zebras' are not pale green/yellow with dark green stripes, but are orange with red markings, know that this is not normal for the type. You may have a unplanned cross, a hybrid on your hands. Pull potato-leaf plants that come out with regular tomato leaves. If your semi-bush squash runs ten feet, it is no longer the heirloom you meant to have. Saving seed from these mutants will perpetuate the abnormality, or result in non-viable seed.

On the other hand, be open to change. Organic growing is an ever-changing experiment. If you are up for it, eat those red Green Zebras, sow seed from your jogging 'semi-bush' squash. Try them out the next year from the saved seed. You may have created a new open-pollinated winner. Or, you may have a complete dud. Just don't say your mutants are 'Green Zebras' anymore. Give them a new name.

7. Know your plant families, who has 'perfect' virgin flowers, who is a promiscuous cross-pollinator, and who they will 'get into bed' with. Knowledge is power, in everything.

If you can purchase, beg or borrow the book "Seed to Seed" by Suzanne Ashworth, do so. Make notes. Ask questions.

OG Seed Bank Home  Growing Basics by OG  Growing Seed Files  Crop Specific Files  Members' Garden Photos  Links to Members' Home Pages  General Gardening Links SUBSCRIBE TO