Your own seed, step by step

1. Why your own seed

Our grandmothers didn't buy bean seed: they kept it from last year.

1. Seed from the cupboard — A bag of last year's beans, a jar of tomato seed dried on paper and maize cobs kept for sowing. That is how seed was kept for generations.
2. Adapted to your holding — Every year you choose the plants that best coped with your drought, frosts and diseases. In 3–5 years the variety clearly suits your holding better.
3. Security and rare varieties — When the shop has no seed or prices jump, you keep sowing. You also have varieties you can't buy, like the village's own beans.
4. Quality you choose — Taste, keeping quality, earliness, skin thickness: you choose what matters to you, not what matters for transport and retail.

Why: A variety that has grown for decades in the same area suits that soil and those frosts. Saving money is the smallest reason. The real value is adaptation, security and varieties you can't buy.

• A £2 packet of seed gives you enough tomatoes for a year.
• Saving your own seed doesn't mean you never buy again. Hybrids and certified seed have their place in the garden.

2. Variety, landrace and hybrid

To save seed you need to tell apart the terms on the packet and at the market.

1. Open pollination — The plants are pollinated naturally and the offspring look like the parents. Save seed only from such varieties: heirloom, local and long-adapted ones.
2. Heirloom and landrace — An heirloom variety is less uniform, so the harvest is spread out. A local landrace is more diverse and the most valuable: take seed from many plants.
3. The F1 label — An F1 hybrid is a cross of two pure lines, made anew every year. The label “F1” or the word “hybrid” is on the packet.
4. Seed of a hybrid (F2) — Plants grown from hybrid seed split apart: roughly one in four looks like the first parent, one in four like the second, and half are a mixture.

Why: With open-pollinated varieties the offspring look like the parents. Seed from the fruit of an F1 hybrid carries a mixture of both parents' traits, so it splits apart in the next generation.

• A hybrid is not the same as a GMO. A hybrid is an ordinary cross, like the one a bee makes.
• You may grow protected varieties for your own garden, but multiplying them for sale or sharing outside your household can be prohibited. Rules differ by country.

3. What pollinates the flower · Locked

Buy the Why save your own seed: heirlooms and hybrids module and you get the PDF to download and print, plus lifetime access to this interactive lesson: all 6 chapters, 24 steps.

4. Diversity · Locked

Buy the Why save your own seed: heirlooms and hybrids module and you get the PDF to download and print, plus lifetime access to this interactive lesson: all 6 chapters, 24 steps.

5. Selection on your holding · Locked

Buy the Why save your own seed: heirlooms and hybrids module and you get the PDF to download and print, plus lifetime access to this interactive lesson: all 6 chapters, 24 steps.

6. Start small · Locked

Buy the Why save your own seed: heirlooms and hybrids module and you get the PDF to download and print, plus lifetime access to this interactive lesson: all 6 chapters, 24 steps.