What is Seed Saving?
Seed saving is the practices and culture of selecting, harvesting, cleaning and storing seed for planting in future seasons. It is a millenia-old partnership between people and plants which is an essential part of agriculture. By selecting, harvesting and replanting seeds from plants with desirable characteristics (true to variety, taste,…
Botany for Seed Savers
To be successful seed savers it can be helpful to know some basics of plant botany. In order to ensure that the collected seed will produce true-to-type offspring we first need to make sure we know what plant we are dealing with and then understand the reproductive mechanism used by…
How to contribute to these guides
We are keen for lots of people to contribute their expertise and experience to these quides. We’re intending to cover a lot of ground – species, geographical locations, climate differences. Australia is a big country and we have a very wide variety of foods that we grow as well as…
Genetics for seed savers
Concepts to cover here… Inbreeding depression recessive & dominant genes genetic diversity vigour vs viability how plants evolved – conditions of wide genetic recombination of limited populations genetic integrity population size mutations selection off-types
Why save seeds?
Before the relatively recent advent of commercial seed production and distribution, farmers and growers freely saved and then shared or traded seeds from their crops with each other from season to season. These practices help to ensure the viability of seed stocks by promoting biodiversity, to preserve landrace varieties and…
How to use these guides
These seed saving guides are written by and for Australian seed savers. The creation of these guides is a long term process. If you can’t find the information you are looking for it may not have been written yet. Please ask on the forum and the other members of the…