Thinking about saving seed this year?
Garden crops can be classified as either dry fruited or wet fruited.
Collecting seeds from dry fruited crops like sunflowers (other grains), lettuce and beans, is usually simple. It entails a trip to the garden and handpicking mature seedpods and processing them by cleaning and shelling the seed for further drying.
Fruits from wet fruited crops (melons, cucumbers, squash etc) must be picked when their seeds are mature. The hard part is knowing when the seeds are mature in a wet seeded crop.
Tomato seeds can be collected from fruits that are fully ripe, from mid-summer to fall.
Cucumber on the other hand should be allowed to languish on the vine past the time it is good to eat– near the end of the growing season. Fruit will be orange or yellow when fully ripe, and ready to be plucked for seed.
Harvest the fruits by either crushing or cutting them open. Extract the seed with as little pulp as possible. Add the seed/pulp combination to a jar, add water and allow to sit for a couple of days to ferment. The fermentation process will help loosen the pulp from the seed. Pour out liquid/pulp and spread seed on newspaper or coffee filters to dry.
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