The seed starting season is well past and plant-out is complete or nearly so for those of us in the northern hemisphere. In advance of a hopefully busy harvest, my thoughts turn toward my first attempt at seed saving.
I’ll start by saying: if you don’t feel the need to guarantee you’re growing what you intend to, you enjoy a felicitous hybrid every now and then, or you just prefer keeping things simple, there is no need to worry about this at all. Anyone growing from seed, let alone saving it, is already way ahead of the class.
But for those who want to accurately maintain a variety, whether a recent creation like NuMex Trick-or-Treat or a timeless landrace like Jalapeño Zapotec, and be confident that it will remain vigorous and true to type generation after generation, things get a little more complicated.
I think we tend to focus too much on whether seeds were isolated or not. This is insufficient on its own: perfectly isolated seeds from just a few plants will have a genetic bottleneck which is difficult to correct without outside seed sources, whereas open pollinated seeds gathered from the center of a large group would represent healthier diversity and still minimize undesired crosses.
Of course, most of us don’t have space for large groups of one variety. If we want to enjoy peppers widely and also save seed which is reliably true to type, we must rely on some amount of population mitigation and variety isolation. I’ll try to highlight the primary difficulties and their possible remedies.
Population Mitigation
There is no sample population large enough to perfectly represent the full diversity of a variety. In a sense, this is freeing. It also means the big lists you’ll see of minimum populations to maintain a type, such as from the Seed Savers Exchange, are ultimately arbitrary and represent social best practices rather than objective facts. Thus, we should grow as many individuals as possible within the constraints of our garden. If that is fewer than 50 (as a rough guideline, per the SSE above), extra precautions should be taken, such as…
- Extending your population by regularly introducing new seed sources. For instance, you might save and use your own Scotch Bonnet MOA every year, but since you only grow 4 individuals, every so often you plant half your own seeds and half seeds from a friend, seed train, exchange, or vendor. Each time you do that, you’re injecting the genetic diversity of the external population into your own. If you switch up your external sources from time to time, you add even more to your effective population. Yet, you’re still not reliant on anyone for seed in any given year; if sources of a niche cultivar start to dry up, you can take steps to maintain a larger personal population.
- Delaying negative genetic effects by skipping generations. If care is taken in their storage, most pepper seeds are quite viable after 5 years, down to maybe 50% germination after 10 years. (This is from book learning, not experience; take it with a grain of salt.) As such, you needn’t save seeds every generation. If the genetic quality of the population is likely on the decline for any reason (like lack of population), you might regenerate the seed stock only once every 5 years. At that pace, your children and grandchildren could likely enjoy your seed legacy and never notice much genetic decline.
(Seed storage is opinionated, even among experts. In my opinion, one example of good seed storage would be: seed packets kept in an airtight container with self-indicating desiccant which is refreshed when needed, the airtight container then placed within an insulated container (like a styrofoam cooler) which is stored in a refrigerator. The airtight container and desiccant keep things dry, the refrigerator keeps things cool, and the insulated container minimizes temperature variation overall.)
Variety Isolation
“Blessed are those who love one variety, for their seed saving is effortless.”
For the rest of us, maintaining a variety will usually require isolating it from the other sexually compatible varieties we grow. The main problem is that most home isolation methods don’t just isolate varieties, they also isolate the individuals within the varieties.
We want a family tree which looks like lots of Ys and ⅄s, diverging and recombining in myriad ways. Isolating the individuals results in a family tree of parallel lines: a population of non-interbreeding, mostly unchanging clones. This doesn’t allow for the active, recombinant variety and resulting adaptation which provides a properly maintained variety with its broad resilience. A few remedies include…
- Using mesh enclosure over a capacious frame, covering the whole population. I would love to see cheap, collapsible plastic frames with fitted mesh covers sold at ridiculous markup by gardening companies. If they lasted a few years, I bet they’d sell like hotcakes and everyone would be happy. Until then, we’ll have to get handy with bamboo and mosquito netting, or something. For this method, if your area isn’t windy, you will need to schedule sexually compatible varieties to be unmeshed on alternating days (changing before dawn or well after dusk), so every variety you’re maintaining gets rotating access to pollinators. Or, if your population is large enough for it to make sense, you can buy in pollinating insects to release in the enclosures.
- Hand pollinating. This is really only feasible for maintaining a personal seed supply; even producing enough to share in a seed train would become pretty annoying. This would involve carefully pollinating and marking the specific flowers which you will later gather seeds from. The choice of the control freak or the retiree. You could, if desired, ensure a “perfectly diverse” seed population representing every combination of parents, every generation. Time and labor intensive.
- A combination of a lot of common sense measures. I think this is what most casual seed savers arrive at. It looks something like this: these early varieties flowered weeks before anything compatible with them, so selecting their first fruits for seed saving is effective isolation; these few do flower together, but are grouped with incompatible varieties at opposite ends of the garden; this group is my baby and gets the full mesh-and-frame treatment; this group are a breeding playground of hand pollinations; over time one narrows focus on a selection of favorites, reducing all logistics; etc.
For myself, this is my first serious season and I’m growing small amounts of lots of varieties to sample the waters. I haven’t fully decided what to do… likely a mix of things, as in the last option listed. I think with as much compatible stuff crammed together as I have this year, it will be best not to worry about it too much. Next year or soon after, I’ll have standby varieties that I can focus on more seriously maintaining starting from a fresh pool of seed from multiple quality sources.
Did I miss anything? Any thoughts?
I’ll start by saying: if you don’t feel the need to guarantee you’re growing what you intend to, you enjoy a felicitous hybrid every now and then, or you just prefer keeping things simple, there is no need to worry about this at all. Anyone growing from seed, let alone saving it, is already way ahead of the class.
But for those who want to accurately maintain a variety, whether a recent creation like NuMex Trick-or-Treat or a timeless landrace like Jalapeño Zapotec, and be confident that it will remain vigorous and true to type generation after generation, things get a little more complicated.
I think we tend to focus too much on whether seeds were isolated or not. This is insufficient on its own: perfectly isolated seeds from just a few plants will have a genetic bottleneck which is difficult to correct without outside seed sources, whereas open pollinated seeds gathered from the center of a large group would represent healthier diversity and still minimize undesired crosses.
Of course, most of us don’t have space for large groups of one variety. If we want to enjoy peppers widely and also save seed which is reliably true to type, we must rely on some amount of population mitigation and variety isolation. I’ll try to highlight the primary difficulties and their possible remedies.
Population Mitigation
There is no sample population large enough to perfectly represent the full diversity of a variety. In a sense, this is freeing. It also means the big lists you’ll see of minimum populations to maintain a type, such as from the Seed Savers Exchange, are ultimately arbitrary and represent social best practices rather than objective facts. Thus, we should grow as many individuals as possible within the constraints of our garden. If that is fewer than 50 (as a rough guideline, per the SSE above), extra precautions should be taken, such as…
- Extending your population by regularly introducing new seed sources. For instance, you might save and use your own Scotch Bonnet MOA every year, but since you only grow 4 individuals, every so often you plant half your own seeds and half seeds from a friend, seed train, exchange, or vendor. Each time you do that, you’re injecting the genetic diversity of the external population into your own. If you switch up your external sources from time to time, you add even more to your effective population. Yet, you’re still not reliant on anyone for seed in any given year; if sources of a niche cultivar start to dry up, you can take steps to maintain a larger personal population.
- Delaying negative genetic effects by skipping generations. If care is taken in their storage, most pepper seeds are quite viable after 5 years, down to maybe 50% germination after 10 years. (This is from book learning, not experience; take it with a grain of salt.) As such, you needn’t save seeds every generation. If the genetic quality of the population is likely on the decline for any reason (like lack of population), you might regenerate the seed stock only once every 5 years. At that pace, your children and grandchildren could likely enjoy your seed legacy and never notice much genetic decline.
(Seed storage is opinionated, even among experts. In my opinion, one example of good seed storage would be: seed packets kept in an airtight container with self-indicating desiccant which is refreshed when needed, the airtight container then placed within an insulated container (like a styrofoam cooler) which is stored in a refrigerator. The airtight container and desiccant keep things dry, the refrigerator keeps things cool, and the insulated container minimizes temperature variation overall.)
Variety Isolation
“Blessed are those who love one variety, for their seed saving is effortless.”
For the rest of us, maintaining a variety will usually require isolating it from the other sexually compatible varieties we grow. The main problem is that most home isolation methods don’t just isolate varieties, they also isolate the individuals within the varieties.
We want a family tree which looks like lots of Ys and ⅄s, diverging and recombining in myriad ways. Isolating the individuals results in a family tree of parallel lines: a population of non-interbreeding, mostly unchanging clones. This doesn’t allow for the active, recombinant variety and resulting adaptation which provides a properly maintained variety with its broad resilience. A few remedies include…
- Using mesh enclosure over a capacious frame, covering the whole population. I would love to see cheap, collapsible plastic frames with fitted mesh covers sold at ridiculous markup by gardening companies. If they lasted a few years, I bet they’d sell like hotcakes and everyone would be happy. Until then, we’ll have to get handy with bamboo and mosquito netting, or something. For this method, if your area isn’t windy, you will need to schedule sexually compatible varieties to be unmeshed on alternating days (changing before dawn or well after dusk), so every variety you’re maintaining gets rotating access to pollinators. Or, if your population is large enough for it to make sense, you can buy in pollinating insects to release in the enclosures.
- Hand pollinating. This is really only feasible for maintaining a personal seed supply; even producing enough to share in a seed train would become pretty annoying. This would involve carefully pollinating and marking the specific flowers which you will later gather seeds from. The choice of the control freak or the retiree. You could, if desired, ensure a “perfectly diverse” seed population representing every combination of parents, every generation. Time and labor intensive.
- A combination of a lot of common sense measures. I think this is what most casual seed savers arrive at. It looks something like this: these early varieties flowered weeks before anything compatible with them, so selecting their first fruits for seed saving is effective isolation; these few do flower together, but are grouped with incompatible varieties at opposite ends of the garden; this group is my baby and gets the full mesh-and-frame treatment; this group are a breeding playground of hand pollinations; over time one narrows focus on a selection of favorites, reducing all logistics; etc.
For myself, this is my first serious season and I’m growing small amounts of lots of varieties to sample the waters. I haven’t fully decided what to do… likely a mix of things, as in the last option listed. I think with as much compatible stuff crammed together as I have this year, it will be best not to worry about it too much. Next year or soon after, I’ll have standby varieties that I can focus on more seriously maintaining starting from a fresh pool of seed from multiple quality sources.
Did I miss anything? Any thoughts?
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