Growing guides & stories

A practical, start-to-finish guide to saving seed from your own garden. It opens with why it's worth doing — free seed, varieties that adapt to your specific soil and climate over a few seasons, independence from seed shortages — then walks through the seven steps: confirming your variety is open-pollinated rather than F1 hybrid, understanding self- vs. cross-pollination (with an isolation-distance table and the squash species exception), harvesting at seed maturity instead of eating maturity, wet processing including tomato fermentation, dry processing and winnowing, thorough air-drying, and cold sealed storage. It closes with a viability chart, a ten-seed germination test, notes on biennials and hand pollination, and a week-by-week action list for late summer through late winter.

Whether you're assembling a pre-cut kit or building from raw lumber, the process shares the same core steps — and most mistakes happen before the first board goes down. This guide walks through site prep, both build methods, squaring the frame, and how to fill your bed properly, so it performs well from the first season on.