How to Save Bean Seeds {Tutorial}

As the garden is dying down and preparing for winter, I've been out collecting my open pollinated bean seeds to plant in following years, and wanted to share this easy tutorial.

As with all seed saving, be sure that you are only collecting seeds from plants that have been grown from open-pollinated (heirloom) varieties.  Any plant that is not open-pollinated, or hybrid, will not produce seed true to the parent type.  If you are unsure, check the seed packaging.  Most hybrid seeds are not labelled, but most open-pollinated seeds are.

Bean flowers are perfect, meaning that they self pollinate and produce without the help of bees.  This makes them one of the easiest seeds to save, because you do not need to worry about cross contamination or hand pollination.  The only thing you need to do is allow the beans to grow to full size, dry out, and harvest.

Most green beans are picked while young and tender, when the seeds are very small.  If you are planning on harvesting seeds, you will need to allow them to grow until the seeds are fully developed.  At this point the beans are not good for eating; they become tough and stringy.  Once they have reached this point, simply allow the pod to dry out, and you can harvest the seeds.  Here's how:

How to Save Summer Squash Seeds

I love September.  The nights start cooling off, but the days are still hot enough that the garden is still in full blown production mode.  Before all of the warm weather crops start dying off, I wanted to share a tutorial on how to save seed from summer squash plants.

As opposed to, say, tomatoes, squash plants do not have perfect flowers; meaning they do not self pollinate on their own.  They require the help of bees, or in this case, you.  Because of this, they are not the easiest seed to save successfully.  However, they are far from the most difficult, and anybody with a little know how can do it.  Today I'll be walking you through step by step.

As with all seed saving, the most important thing to remember is to choose plants that were grown from open-pollinated seeds.  Open-pollinated means that the plant will produce seed true to the parent plant.  Hybrid seeds are just the opposite: the seeds will not produce "true seed".
Open-Pollinated = Good for seed saving
Hybrid = Bad for seed saving

For this tutorial, I will be saving seed from an open-pollinated Rampicante Italian Vining Zucchini:

Keep in mind that this same process will work for seed saving from any summer squash plant.

How to Save Tomato Seeds

It is the middle of September.  The nights are cooling down, and so are some of the plants in my garden.  The tomatoes however, are still in full swing.  I wanted to share this easy technique on how to save your own tomato seeds before those delicious beauties are done producing for the year.

Tomatoes are one of the easiest plants to save seed from.  The flowers are "perfect", meaning they self pollinate without the help of you or the bees.  There are only 2 things you need to keep in mind when choosing which tomatoes to save seed from.