No one tells you this when you buy a packet: depending on what is inside, you may have just bought seeds for the last time.

An open-pollinated plant grows true from saved seed. Harvest its seeds, sow them next year, and you will get the same plant. An F1 hybrid will not—its offspring split into an unpredictable mixture of the parent lines. The results are often disappointing and sometimes sterile.

The words on the packet determine the answer, not the plant itself. “Open-pollinated,” “heirloom,” or “heritage”: you can save the seeds. “F1” or “hybrid”: it is a one-way ticket.

Start with the four easy ones

Tomatoes, beans, peas, and lettuce. These four self-pollinate—the flower fertilizes itself before it even opens. There is little or no risk of crossing, even if your neighbour grows something different.

• Beans and peas — the easiest of all. Leave the pods to dry on the plant until they rattle. That is all.
• Lettuce — let it go to seed. When the white tufts appear, shake the stem over a bag.
• Tomatoes — the only one that requires an extra step. Scrape the seeds and their gel into a jar, add a little water, and let them ferment for two to four days until a film forms on the surface. Rinse, drain, and dry them on a plate—not on paper, because they will stick to it for good.

Peppers are also easy, with one caveat: they cross with one another. Plant a sweet pepper next to a hot one, and next year you may get surprises.

What is best saved for later

Two plant families make things more complicated.

Plants that cross over long distances. Squash, cucumbers, melons, corn, and brassicas. Pollen travels—carried by bees or the wind, sometimes for hundreds of metres. Without isolation, you will harvest a cross.

Plants that take two years. Carrots, beets, brassicas, onions, and celery are biennials: they produce a root in the first year and seeds in the second. In Quebec, that means digging up the roots in fall, keeping them cold all winter, and replanting them in spring. It is doable, but not ideal for a first attempt.

The mistake everyone makes

We save seeds from the fruit we did not eat—the misshapen one, the late one, the one left at the bottom of the basket.

You need to do the opposite. Save seeds from your best plant—the most productive, the healthiest, the one that ripened first. That is how a variety adapts to your soil, exposure, and summers. After five or six years of this work, it is no longer quite the same variety. It is yours.

Drying is where success is decided

A poorly dried seed will grow mouldy inside its envelope, and you will not know until spring, when nothing germinates.

The test: a thoroughly dry bean shatters under a hammer instead of being crushed. A tomato seed snaps cleanly instead of bending.

Next: use a paper envelope, never plastic. Store it somewhere cool, dark, and dry. Write the variety and the year on it. You think you will remember. You will not.

It is a funny thing for someone who sells seeds to write. But that is precisely the point: once you have an heirloom variety, it belongs to you. We are here for that first time—and for the years when you feel like trying something different.

Do you already save seeds?