Each plant is an eternal living being that can reproduce itself indefinitely. And the easiest way to get what you need to grow your own food is to start with the food you already eat.
Everyday foods that contain easy-to-find seeds include tomatoes, pumpkins and squashes (including butternut and gemsquash), traditional cucumbers, peppers and chillies, legumes (beans, peas and lentils), mealies, whole grains (sorghum, wheat, oats, millet and barley), nuts, sunflowers and most fruits – avocado, mango, litchi, pawpaw, melons (spanspek and watermelon), guava, berries, oranges, lemons, apples, pears, granadilla, grapes and so on.
Simply scoop the seeds out of the vegetable or fruit, rinse off the flesh stuck to the seeds (easily done in a kitchen sieve) and lay the clean seeds on a paper towel or a cloth to dry. Once dry, you can store your seeds in sealable glass, paper or plastic containers for a couple of years.
Remember to label the containers clearly. Just one tomato or gem squash, for example, will provide you with hundreds of seeds to plant or exchange when the season arrives. Some store-bought food is seedless or otherwise modified to render the seeds sterile – if your seeds from store-bought food don’t germinate, look for organic or heritage seeds to try instead.
Certain vegetables such as onions, brassicas (cabbage, kale, cauliflower and broccoli), spinach, beetroot, carrots and lettuce don’t make it quite so easy to find their seeds. The trick with these plants is to leave a few plants (preferably the biggest and strongest which will come up first) in the ground instead of harvesting them.
After a while, the leaves will die back, and the plant will ‘bolt’ – that is, it will send up a tall stem with flowers. Wait for the flowers to die back and keep an eye on any seed pods that develop. Once the seeds are ready, they are easy to remove – either split the pods open, pull the seeds off the stem by hand or shake the dry flower over a box or packet to release the seeds.
Potatoes are grown directly from potatoes.
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