Conscious Plant Selection

Lorna T. posts on consciously selecting your plant material for growing out, in order to improve the most desired traits from your garden produce.

It is the time of year when you look at your garlic and realise that a lot of it is sprouting. Many people are tempted to plant the first bulbs that sprout, to save wasting them, but from a long term seed saving perspective this can be a bad thing. If the cloves from those early sprouting bulbs are planted, you are selecting for a garlic that does not store too well, so will end up with a whole crop of garlic selected for early sprouting. If you want to extend your season for using fresh home grown garlic, you are far better to plant the cloves from bulbs that are late to shoot and store well for long periods of time.

This philosophy for seed saving can also be applied to crops like lettuce. If you save seeds from lettuce that are the first to bolt, you will be selecting for that characteristic, and will end up with lettuce that go to seed early and give you a very short season of picking.

If you do have seed saving in mind for your vegies, use this type of lateral thinking to all of your crops and ask if early bolting or shooting is a good or bad thing for that crop. Some crops need the opposite selection to that of the garlic and lettuce, such as broccoli. Generally it would be desirable for a broccoli plant to produce flower heads in a reasonably short space of time, as those are the bits that you grow the crop for and eat, so it would be fairly pointless if you selected seed from a plant that took 2 years to produce heads.

There are obviously more selection criteria involved when saving seed than these few points. Disease resistance, yield, flavour, suitability to local climate and resistance to insect attack are some others that are all important, but the main thing is to use that lateral thinking and ask a few questions about the plants that you plan on saving seed from, and if their characteristics are going to be useful to you in future generations.