Why Save Seeds from Your Garden?

Why save seeds from your garden?

Many of the heirloom vegetable varieties we have today have been passed down from generation to generation for hundreds of years. Some have been passed down for thousands!

Sadly, seed saving is becoming a lost art and some of these unique varieties have gone extinct. When you save seeds from your garden, you are part of preserving these historic vegetables!

Before the modern supermarket, flavor played a huge role in which varieties became popular.

If you’ve ever compared a supermarket tomato to a homegrown heirloom variety, you’ll know that the flavor has no comparison!

But why is that? When a tomato is going to be harvested by machine, shipped for hundreds, or thousands of miles, and often stored for long periods of time, it cannot be tender or it would be crushed.

Modern tomato varieties have been developed to have uniform size, thick skins, and a toughness that will stand up to machine harvest, transport and storage.

Why Save Seeds From Your Garden?

The good news is, there is still an abundance of delicious heirloom varieties to be had, thanks to a handful of devoted seed savers that have gone to great effort to preserve them for us!

I’ve fallen in love with heirloom vegetables. There is a thrill about growing unique, rare and delicious varieties from all around the world. And saving my own seeds means that once I obtain a rare variety, I can continue to preserve it and grow it year after year!

I think that for me, preserving these varieties is at the top of my list of reasons to save seeds from your garden. Trying to locate and paying top dollar for my favorite rare heirloom seeds is not really feasible for me to do every year.

The good news is that by saving my own seeds I don’t have to. I can keep a constantly growing collection of fun vegetable varieties with rich histories. I save seeds from the varieties I already have, and add a few new ones every year.

Seed Saving Can Save You Money

If you have a tiny kitchen garden, the money-saving side of saving seeds might not be a big deal to you. But if you’re like me, with a garden around 1/4 of an acre in size, seed saving will save you hundreds of dollars in seeds each year.

Just that you save seeds from your garden doesn’t mean you can’t ever buy seeds. It does mean that you can preserve your favorite hard to come by vegetable varieties, and that you can save seeds from plants you use a lot of. If you are planting ten packets of pea seeds every year, then peas would be a good choice to save your own seeds from!

Even though I teach seed saving, I do still buy seeds. Every year I add new varieties to my collection.

Sometimes a crop I was saving seeds from fails. Just last year, I had picked out about 40 beautiful pole bean pods from several varieties to leave on the vines for seed.

The pods had matured and were starting to dry out, when a pesky deer broke through my garden fence and went straight for the beans. In one night, she walked down 90 feet of pole bean rows and ate each plant to the ground! I must admit, I was pretty angry at that dumb deer!

When I scavenged through what was left, I came up with a mere 20 seeds. Although I had saved back some seeds from the year before, I’ll still need to buy more bean seeds this year.

Whether it’s the weather, pests, or a simple mistake, sometimes a seed crop just fails. And when that happens, I am thankful that I still can buy seeds!

But seed saving does literally save me hundreds of dollars each year.

Becoming More Self-Sufficient Through Seed Saving

With everything going on in the news these days, survival techniques and survival gardens are a hot topic. Some of the most popular and successful blogs I know of are in this niche.

If you plan to depend on a survival garden in case of an emergency, it is imperative that you not only learn how to garden ahead of time, but that you know how to save seeds from your garden.

You don’t want to be trying to figure out gardening or seed saving in an emergency when your life depends on it. You’ll have enough other things to worry about, like how to get water to your garden!

And if you ever do have to grow a garden for survival, seeds don’t last forever. You’ll have to know at least the basics of saving seeds. Remember, in the type of emergency situation survival gardeners are preparing for, there won’t be any internet to look up how to do it!

Am I saying you need to change your entire lifestyle and become a full-time gardener and seed saver? Absolutely not!

If that’s not your thing, just take a little time now to learn how to garden, preserve food and save seeds. Practice till you have it down, and keep some seeds on hand for an emergency. You can read here how to store them!

Learn More About Saving Seeds

You’ll find quite a bit of seed saving information here on our website!

Some of our most popular seed saving articles:

How to Save Seeds

Seed Saving: Learn How to Save Seeds from Garden Vegetables

Seed Saving: How to Save Tomato Seeds

You can find a growing list of seed saving topics here: Seed Saving

Subscribe to our newsletter to continue learning about seed saving! (on desktop you can subscribe on the upper right sidebar. On mobile, you’ll find a subscription form if you scroll down below this article!)

And finally, if you are serious about learning how to save seeds from your garden, we have an online course available that simplifies seed saving for beginners.

This is a great resource if you are intimidated by all the information out there and don’t know where to start!

You can learn all the basics and get started saving seeds in as little as one afternoon!

The course also includes downloadable reference charts, and access to a private Facebook group where you can post pictures and ask questions!

You can find out more about Simple Seed Saving here!

I hope you enjoyed this article and were inspired to get more serious about seed saving! Saving seeds has become a passion of mine that I love to share with others!