If you have a favorite open-pollinated bean, dry and save some seeds for next year. Since they are annuals, mostly self-pollinated with only a little help from bumblebees buzzing the blossoms, tomatoes need to be 10 feet away from other tomato varieties to keep the plants from crossing. The seeds often saved by home gardeners are for those luscious heirloom tomatoes. Who doesn’t love a juicy, flavorful heirloom tomato? Share the seeds from your best one with your friends and family. Seed Libraries at Public Libraries Are Growing The amount of distance required between plants of different varieties depends mainly on the method of pollination and the life cycle of the plant. To keep the strain pure, the vegetables need to be planted far apart from each other. It doesn’t affect this year’s fruit but if you plant those seeds next year, you will get a totally different outcome. Ever seen a “Frankensquash” resulting from, say, a winter squash and pumpkin cross pollinating? It can be fun but you never know what you’ll get and the flavor is usually inferior. The result is unintentional cross-breeding so that your seeds will not resemble the original vegetable. Learn more on our Seed-Saving 101 Guide.īut also even if plants are open-pollinated, some vegetable plants are very promiscuous and, with the help of insects or the wind, their pollen will travel between different plant varieties and mix up the genetics. The hybrid does not reproduce fruits that are true to the parent plant. The first rule of seed-saving is that you must select “open-pollinated” vegetables such as heirlooms and not commercial hybrids. Here are distances between common vegetables for seed-saving. If you’re prepared to do it right, you’ll avoid disappointment. Have a favorite heirloom tomato or bean? Want to try saving their seeds to use again next year? If so, success depends on enough distance between plantings.
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