Simple Trick to Save the Best Seeds from Your Garden

Use this tip while your flowers are blooming to guarantee you save top-quality seeds for next year’s planting. The healthiest flowers, fruits, and vegetables have superior genetics, so be sure to mark your best for later.

If you are new to seed saving, see Seed Saving For Beginners.

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How to Save the Best Seeds

Seed saving isn’t just a matter of gathering the seeds at the right time—when they are dry and mature—but choosing from your very best flowers for the finest future plants.

Ever notice how the quality of blossoms can vary within the very same plant?

Sometimes a few flowers will be healthier, bigger, stronger, and better formed than others. This is because even within the same plant the genetics can vary, which means the best flowers have the best quality seeds.

And that’s where this tip comes in handy.

By saving seeds from the finest specimens, you will have the best possible flowers next time.

Seed Saving Tip

• Just like your best flowers, your best quality fruits and vegetables also have the best quality seeds. If you’re saving seeds, keep seeds from your best fruits.

1Mark Your Best Flowers

Tie tulle bags to the stems of your best flowers during peak bloom time.

I specifically like using tulle (organza) bags because they help with Step 2 (below).

I used a white tulle bag so it would stand out in the photo but you can get them in other colors as well.

You can buy tulle bags here at dollartree.com (US shipping) sold under the name Baby Shower Organza Drawstring Bags. They are also sold as wedding favors. If you’re shopping in-person, check dollar stores.

Bonus Tips

• Medium and large size tulle bags are also helpful for protecting fruit and vegetables from birds and other animals while they are ripening.
• Tulle bags are also used to protect flowers from cross-pollination. Very useful when you want to breed plants by hand.

2Hang Tulle Bags Over Your Best Flowers

As the flowers start to fade, move the tulle bags to enclose the flower heads. This will ensure they are in place to catch any seeds that form later.

In the pictures (above), you can see the flowers have turned to seed within the tulle bags.

The bag allows good air flow, keeps animals from taking the seeds, and catches any seeds that fall from the plant.

When the seeds are dry and mature, you’ve got them in one handy bag.

Mark the Best Flowers While You Can

These poppies came from seeds in a neighbor’s garden.

I had my eye on one particularly massive bloom and placed a ribbon on the stem (with his permission).

Months later on a dry, cool fall day, the flower was long gone but the seed pod was filled with seeds.

Planted next spring, they were just as beautiful as expected.

Without something marking them, by the time plants have gone to seed, it would be nearly impossible to recall which blossoms were the total showstoppers because the evidence is long gone.

Stock up on tulle bags and get ready for blooming season.

Resources

More Tips

• How to Get Started With Seed Saving
• The Right Way to Store Seeds in Your Home
• How to Keep Seeds Organized
• Seed Viability: How Long Seeds Stay Fresh in Storage

~Melissa the Empress of Dirt ♛