Urban Seed Saving: Best Practices for City and Suburbs

By Joanne Poyourow

Plant. Harvest. Collect. Repeat.

How would you like to enjoy your favorite variety of garden vegetables year after year?

You can. Even if you live in the city. Or the suburbs.

This comprehensive guide will show you how to collect the seeds in your garden this year, so you can reap the mouth-watering benefits next year, too.

Urban Seed Saving is a part of the ABUNDANT HARVESTS SERIES. It shows you the possibilities based on the assets of your current garden.

This guide will help you discover the science and art of saving the seeds you need. You will get practical, workable answers so you can join the seed revolution.

Some experts believe that the future of preserving heirloom varieties lies in city gardens. Why not design your garden today?

Why should you believe this author?
Joanne Poyourow has grown vegetables for more than two decades and loves figuring out yummy ways to cook them.

She distilled the recommendations of Seed Savers Exchange, the Organic Seed Alliance, and others, to create a guide that is specifically for seed saving in the city.

Joanne is the co-founder of Cityscape Seeds, a micro-scale seed enterprise in Los Angeles. Urban Seed Saving is part of the Abundant Harvests series, which is devoted to the question:

How can you achieve abundant harvests of rich, nourishing vegetables within a tight city footprint without a lot of gardener time and without having to buy a lot of stuff?

What you will learn in this easy-to-read and tastefully formatted guide:

• Why urban seed saving is different
• Which seeds are worth saving
• How to recognize the seed saving assets of your garden
• How to select the appropriate species
• How to keep accurate records
• Which seed cleaning tools are favored and why
• How to preserve varietal purity
• How to store seeds
• Which locations are safe for specific plants
• What to do about population and diversity issues
• And much more ...

Buy a copy of this straightforward instructional book and find delicious and nutritious success tomorrow. Gift a copy to a friend.

Get it now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joanne Poyourow
• Release date: Sep 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463125687

Joanne Poyourow

Joanne Poyourow explores sustainable solutions. Her home garden is an edible landscape and an urban wildlife habitat. In 2004 she co-founded the Environmental Change-Makers community group in Los Angeles.With the change-makers she has built two community gardens and a community-scale, wood-fired bread oven. And since 2008 she has managed the plantings at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, which grows vegetables for the local food pantry.Joanne finds delicious ways to cook those abundant vegetables. She is a passionate seed-saver, and for relaxation she knits insanely complex lace patterns.She is on Instagram @ecmJoanne

Book preview

Urban Seed Saving

Best Practices for City and Suburbs

JOANNE POYOUROW

Part of the Abundant Harvests series:

High-Yield Vegetable Gardening for City Spaces

Change-Making Publications

URBAN SEED SAVING

Second edition CC 2018 by Joanne Poyourow

ISBN 9780463125687

This ebook is published under the Creative Commons license: Non-commercial, attribution, share-alike.

Additional copies are available via www.change-making.com

Contents

Easy seed saving

|1| Urban seed saving

Cityscape seeds - my story

Why urban seed saving is different

Three kinds of urban gardens

|2| Seed saving objectives

Which seeds are worth saving?

Why are we concerned about GMOs?

Save the story with the seeds

|3| Pollination basics

Selfers versus Crossers

Botanic names

Varieties

Saving for variety vs. saving for species

Plant families

|4| Preserving varietal purity

The Species Method

Isolation distances

Get to know your neighbors

Timing methods

Alternate year grow-outs

Early and Late

Physical barrier methods

Solid barriers

Permeable barriers

Caging

Alternate-day caging

Blossom bagging or blossom taping

Population size

Selection and Roguing

Eat your mistakes

|5| Urban Safe Harbors for specific plants

Brassicas

Chard and beets

Corn

|6| Storage

Grow-outs

Recordkeeping

What goes on a label?

Filing systems

Garden Journal

Joanne’s favorite (affordable) urban seed cleaning tools

Have fun!

An excerpt from The Secrets of Soil Building

Soil Building

How to Build Great Soil

Take Care of Your Soil Critters

Appendices

Appendix 1: Urban Seed Saving Safe Harbors

Appendix 2: Joanne’s favorite seed books and resources

Appendix 3: Sources

Appendix 4: Index of terminology

About the author

Easy seed saving

Start with good seed.

Grow one variety from each species. (Grow many species.)

Meet your neighbors and know what they grow.

Let your plants grow TALL and complete their lifecycles.

Label everything - in duplicate or triplicate.

Save the story with the seeds.

|1|

Urban seed saving

There are many reasons that people save seeds.

In the beginning, farmers saved seeds to create the harvest, to guarantee a food supply.

You might save for flavor, to get great tasting tomatoes that you really like. You might save for diversity because you want to grow a lot of different tomatoes that look really cool.

People save seeds from plants which do well under certain conditions - that tomato produced well in a hot summer. It put up with a drought. It set fruit even when it was really cold. Some people get into traditional plant breeding.

You might get into seedsaving because it connects you to history, or to the country your ancestors came from. Lots of heirloom seeds come with a really cool story, and people keep the stories going.

People save seeds for self-sufficiency or homesteading reasons. Some save seeds for budget reasons, to save money and get access to really good vegetables for free.

Some people see seedsaving as a political statement, a way to reclaim power from the gigantic corporations which are slowly and steadily taking over the world’s food supply. Others realize that we must preserve our open-pollinated heirlooms outside of corporate patents.

Localized seed saving is very important to long-term sustainability, especially as humanity copes with climate change. Each time you save seeds, each new generation in nature adapts slightly. As a seedsaver, you learn to save from your healthiest and best plants. So that means you’re - perhaps unconsciously - helping create a local strain which is adapted to your local circumstances.

But a lot of people save seeds simply because it’s fun. It’s an activity you can share with your kids. It’s a natural extension of vegetable gardening, allowing the plants to complete their entire life cycle right there in front of you. Maybe it brings back memories of gardens you grew up in, or family stories about a great grandpa who grew awesome tomatoes.

When you participate in seedsaving, you help keep precious old stories alive ... and you help create new ones.

Cityscape seeds - my story

I run Cityscape Seeds, a micro-sized seed company that grows on urban properties in Los Angeles. In 2014, Matt Van Diepen and I took a week-long seed course and realized how urgent humanity’s seed issues have become. We decided to take action, working with what we had.

Because we live in the midst of the city and we were already connected with the urban agriculture scene, that’s where we started.

The mission of Cityscape Seeds is to develop localized