Save Our Seeds

Jane has emailed me with a question about seed saving:

I understand that you are not supposed to dry your own courgette seeds to replant (something about them turning ever more poisonous?), but can I save the seeds from my last squash and replant them this year?  Also from any squash I buy in the supermarket.

If by "your own" Jane means homegrown courgettes, then the answer is yes: I've never heard anything about them being poisonous. The one thing you must do is make sure that your courgette plant hasn't crossbred with another member of the cucurbit family - pumpkins, squash, cucumbers etc; so it stays "true" - ie it looks like the previous generation of squash. You can do this by hand pollination; details here and here (bottom of the page).

You can save seeds from any squash, bought or otherwise, but unless the plant hasn't been allowed to crossbreed, you'll get a strange selection of fruits. This can be fun but it can also mean you get some inedible squash! If anyone can chip in here and suggest why seeds in shop-bought courgettes (zucchini to American readers) might be poisonous when planted, please do.

As far as I know there are no veg plants whose seeds you can't save, apart from F1 hybrids, but the level of difficulty varies depending on how they naturally pollinate. Tomato seeds are pretty easy, so that might be a place to start; there are good instructions on this FAQ at GardenWeb.

Seed saving's a really big topic, with lots to learn for the beginner, so I suggest if you're interested, try to lay your hands on a good book. Or, if you happen to order your seeds from the Real Seed Company, who are really big on seed saving, you'll find all their packets come with instructions on how to save seed of that particular plant.

Comments

[Kyle]

Seeds from F1 hybrids can be saved as easily as any other plant. All a hybrid is is a cross between 2 inbreed varities of the same species. Example, a inbreed tall corn and small corn are crossed to create a medium-sized corn. This is done as many plants have something called "hybrid vigor" which results from having great variation within the genome. The problem with saving seeds from F1 hybrids is the second generation (F2) looses some of the hybrid vigor and is also not very uniform (ie. there is now tall corn, short corn, and medium corn all in the same patch. Here's a good explanation - http://www.humeseeds.com/hybrdlvr.htm

[jannyb]

This year I was given some squash plants by a friend. Three of them grew into butternut squashes. Two others had rounder fruit which my son mistook from the spherical Italian courgettes that I was growing in the same bed. When we cooked them the had an appallingly bitter taste, which they imparted to all the other veg we were barbecuing together. They were completely inedible.
Thinking that they were merely unripe, we let them ripen on the plant. They were bright yellow, not quite rugby ball shaped ( a bit more spherical than this). I roasted them in the oven - and discovered after the first mouthful that they were as inedible as the first - and that single mouthful upset my stomach the next day.

Were they just decorative squashes? I find it extraordinary that they were SO vile to taste.

[Martha]

A MN farmer gave me some squashes that she seemed unsure about, that gew by her corn field. I put them in the oven, they smelled good, but had extremely hard shells. Someone suggested that they might have just been decorative squash and might even be poisonous. Is that possible? How could I find out? One was yellow,long and knobbly, and the other looked like an over grown orange butternut.