Ok I’ve been obsessed with harvesting the garden and getting ready for our first cold snap tonight. I think I’m ready for it. But now the weather people say it will be 38°F tonite which is still plenty cold for tomatoes but hopefully it won’t get down to freezing tonight in the garden and then the nighttime temperatures will go up into the 40’s. Definitely cooling off but I’m hoping we will get another 3-4 weeks without freezing weather to extend the season. I’m already FRIED with all the harvesting I’ve been doing but I always have the winter to recoup. rest. recharge-and dream of the next season.

So are you saving any vegetable seeds yet? Do you remember this past spring when COVID 19 first hit? I don’t know about you, but I remember a vegetable seed shortage not only locally at our nurseries but also many national seed companies ran out of seeds too. Plus many veggie starts were sold out right away in our local nurseries. And I heard it might happen again next spring. So with this in mind, I’m saving some of my seeds of my favorite crops so I will have some vegetable seeds for next year to grow.

I will save tomato, winter squash, lettuce, beans (both green beans and dry beans), summer squash, sweet Italian peppers and many different flower seeds. How do you save seeds? There are many online sources on how-to save seeds for you to investigate and I will have a mini-series on saving different seeds starting with tomato seeds by next week, once I film the whole process.

Besides saving seeds to replenish our supply of seeds, you can also save seeds of any unusual varieties or abnormalities within a variety that you grow. Look around your garden. Have you found anything unusual that you like?

Pink Glass Gem corn

For instance, I found 2 ears of glass gem corn I grew that were different shades of pink out of many rows of multiple color glass gem corn 5 years ago that I continue to grow to stabilize it. Now there are no other colors other than different shades of pinks. It is now an F5 (fifth generation) so it’s probably pretty stabilized. You can read about it here.

Santoro lettuce

I also save a particular open-pollinated lettuce seed that for the last couple of years I couldn’t find online anymore. It is called Santoro, a wonderful butter lettuce that melts in your mouth and produces large heads. My Santoro lettuce seed supply still germinates at 100% but I want to keep the supply fresh since I can’t find it anymore. You can read about it here.

Moby dwarf cherry tomato with anthocyanin on the shoulders

I’m currently doing a trial on a Craig Lehoullier dwarf yellow cherry tomato plant called Moby, where I’ve discovered 2 years ago some tomatoes that had a slight purple blush called anthocyanin on the shoulders and they are sweeter on the Brix scale than the regular yellow variety. This in the second year of growing it out.

I went to Italy 2 years ago and while there got some dry beans from the market in Florence that are not available here. This one is called Rossa de Lucca and comes from the Tuscany area. They are hard to find here in the states and so I did cook some up and saved some to grow out and now I have a steady supply of them.

So you can save seeds to not be caught shorthanded for next year (like we were this year) or for saving new possible varieties. Try it, it’s fun!