Luckily for us and the planet, these days there is a lot of talk about sustainability, and the implication of growing food at home, on a small-scale, is on the rise. Useless lawns are being converted into lush vegetable patches and food forests. ………

However, there are practicalities to planting and moving towards sustainability, and seeds are amongst the many mundane, simple elements that must be addressed. While it’s possible to buy new seeds each season, a fiscally fit gardener knows that cultivating his or her own seeds is nearly as relevant as cultivating the food in their kitchen. …………

Reasons to Do It

• It’s free. Why would we want to continue paying for seeds when, with minimal effort, we could create more than we could ever use ourselves? A few organic seed packets can add up pretty quickly.
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• It’s environmentally friendly. Many heirloom varieties of seeds, the long-standing and proven successes of natural selection, have suffered at the hands of Big Ag. Saving seeds helps maintain these varieties.
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Where to Get Your Seeds?

Obviously, to begin a seed collection, seeds have to come from somewhere. For this, it’s useful to contact local seed exchanges and see what they recommend, as well as what they might be able to contribute to the effort.  ………..

Cultivating seeds is how the heart of most agricultural seed collections form, and that makes sense: We want to eat certain fruits and vegetables, so we cultivate those but make the effort to use some for seed rather than fodder. ……….

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Store, Use, Repeat

Most seeds we deal with in the garden can be dried and stored for quite some time, often years, without loosing much of their fertility. The rule of thumb for doing this is that seeds are not meant to be dried completely but, more so, to about 30 percent humidity.  ………..

Planting saved seeds regularly also makes for more adaptive crops. Once again, it’s a matter of natural selection, as opposed to genetic modification. The healthiest fruits survive and thrive, and so the seeds from them are more likely to do equally well. Then, the seeds from the next generation will do even better. And, so it goes. Fruits, vegetables and other plants have the ability to adapt to their surroundings and produce strains that are more and more suitable.

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Article source: One Green Planet
Image source: Activist Post