One of the questions we occasionally field is whether we practice seed saving or not. It is something we’ve explored, and even practiced over the years. But, it looks quite different at subarctic latitudes than it does in more southern latitudes.
As we’ve tried to demonstrate the practicality of saving seeds in subarctic growing, we’ve come to the conclusion that it is absolutely not universally possible. Some types of plants, and even varieties of various plants, simply will not flower or fully produce seeds for us. Whether it’s our cooler temperatures suppressing the flowering process or just not enough time in our season, a reality is that it’s not possible across all plants.
This nuance is not straight forward, at all. Let’s take lettuce as our example. Right now, we’ve got one lettuce plant that hasn’t flowered, one that has only partially flowered and one that’s fully gone to seed. All were started and transplanted at the same time and have experienced the same growing conditions. That definitely makes things difficult for people like us to offer advice about the subject! We can’t even say, “Oh yeah, you can produce your own lettuce seeds!”
If this is something you’re interested in pursuing, one of the best practices we’d recommend is allowing at least some of your plants the opportunity to flower. We’ve been doing this for years now, some purposefully and others because we’re lazy. But, in either case, it provides us valuable information whether we use the seeds or not. Ultimately, each gardener has to determine not just what types of plants, but also the varieties of those plants, that may provide the opportunity for saving seeds.
Some plants are a bit more reliable, though. For example, we’ve been able to consistently get bok choy to flower and fully seed. There’s also a lot of seed bearing fruit where you can harvest seed from. Examples of these include tomatoes, cucumbers and squash.
Then, there’s plants where we absolutely rely on the production of seeds to perpetuate our garden. We demonstrate this with our potatoes every season, using our harvest as the basis for each successive season’s crop. If this weren’t possible with potatoes, it’d be unlikely that we’d grow them at all!
Which brings us to the final category, which are plants that we absolutely cannot get to flower or fully seed in our climate. Sadly, this is our experience with the overwhelming bulk of our plants, we simply don’t have enough warmth or season to make seed production possible. Whether it’s artichokes, onions, carrots, broccoli, cabbage and so on. Establishing self-sufficiency for seed at subarctic latitudes is simply not in the cards for these, and many other, plants.
So, the answer is unfortunately complicated, nuanced and difficult to teach or explain in a simple way. It requires self experimentation. This is one of the ways where subarctic gardening radically differs from growing at lower latitudes. There are always tradeoffs in climates and for us, this is definitely one of them. We don’t blame anyone for not wanting to mess with it up north, it’s challenging and less than reliable!
