Collecting Vegetable Seeds - Part I

I always recommend my fellow gardeners to leave some of their produce to mature so we can collect the seeds and use them to plant next year.

You can collect your bean seeds from your ripe fruit and dry them in the sun. Below I have seeds drying in the sun for Asparagus beans, Italian heirloom beans, Anaheim peppers and Red chillies.

My husband made the below drier rack from an old window screen. It will protect your precious seeds from animals like squirrels and other pests.

The below seeds are a hybrid between Italian heirloom beans and regular beans.

Remember to check periodically those fruits and vegetables that you earmarked for seed collection. if left too long in the plant the seeds may spoil. In the below picture you can see how some of the beans are dark and discolored. The seeds inside were discolored and damaged. What happened here is I left the beans on the plant for too long. Only a couple of the below beans yielded good quality seeds. The peppers are all ok though.

Even if you don't plant everything in your garden, you can still collect seeds from super market produce that you bring home. I usually collect the seeds of red/yellow/orange bell peppers, sweet peppers, acorn/butternut squash. If the fruits are ripe/mature then in most cases you can collect their seeds.

The seeds are then cleaned and left to dry out so it can be planted next year. Be careful and remember to collect seeds only from healthy looking fruits. If the fruits are damaged or has mould then it is probably not a good choice for collecting seeds.