Survival Garden - Saving Your Own Seed

Saving seed for future use if society were to collapse will be crucial to being able to grow and maintain diverse gardens. There is a bit more to it than just saving enough seeds so that you have enough for next year's crop. Genetic diversity needs to be considered.

It is easy to think that you are growing a particular variety of squash and that you have basically all the same seed with the exact same genetic code (DNA) in each plant. This is false! Even within a variety (think breed of dog) there are countless differences in the DNA. The genetics are diverse and that diversity is needed.

Scientist know that saving a species from extinction is for most species impossible with only a single male and female specimen. I know of a bird species that survives today after rebounding from a population of only five individuals. However, being able to recover with a population that dips that low is the exception and not the rule. Inbreeding is a potential issue and with detrimental effects and precautions are required.

There are two important steps you can take to unsure you maintain the genetic diversity of your garden plants. Neighbors is one and seed collection procedure is another.

Neighbors growing the same variety is like an insurance policy. Should disaster ever strike your garden and wipe out all of your tomatoes, it sure would be nice to have a neighbor that can give you some seed so you can start over again. You don't want all your eggs, or in this case plants, all in one basket. Neighbors are that insurance and planting more than one bed of each crop is another, as well as always saving more seed than you plan to use. Periodically trade like seed with you neighbor to maintain or increase the genetic diversity of each of you gardens.

This brings us to the second method and this one is extremely important to adhear to because if you don't you will be guaranteed that your garden loses diversity and becomes weaker. This method is collecting not just lots of seed, but collecting your seed from lots of individual plants.

Each species and variety of plant has diffent amounts of dna and each plant has a diffent amount of individuals you need to collect from the help insure that the genetic diversity is maintained. Below is a chart for some potential garden plants and the corresponding number of plants that you should collect seed from to maintain diversity and minimize the effects of inbreeding.

And now you know the rest of the story.

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