Saving Cucurbit Seeds
Okay,
now that you've planned your cucurbit garden with seed-saving in
mind, how do you actually save the seeds? With melons and winter
squashes, all you do is wait until your fruits are mature, scoop out
the seeds, rinse them, and dry them. You don't even have to waste
the
flesh since it's at just the right stage to go on your plate!
With summer squashes,
just leave a few fruits on the vine the way you
do with pea pods. Surely at least one zucchini will miss the
knife and
get too big to be tasty. Wait until the summer squash has
developed a
hard rind, like a winter squash, then cut it open and harvest the
seeds. Again, rinse and dry the seeds before storing them.
Cucumbers are the only
relatively difficult cucurbit seed to save.
Like summer squashes, they need to be allowed to mature on the vine
beyond the point at which you would usually pick them. Then the
seeds
and surrounding liquid should be scraped out of the flesh and allowed
to ferment in a jar for three or four days. Stir the mess every
day, and when the seeds sink to the
bottom, pour off the goop, rinse the seeds, and save them. The
fermentation is necessary in order to break down a covering over the
seeds that inhibits germination.
| This post is part of our Seed Saving lunchtime series.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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