Gardening cont.
“There are some basic rules to seed saving that I think are important for people to understand if they want to be successful,” says Jeanne DuBois, who, along with her husband Ray, owns Ron Paul Garden Centre. The couple purchased the St. Mary’s Road business from the late Paul’s wife more than 16 years ago. “When you buy a plant, it is possibly a hybrid plant. They have been cross-pollinated. If the plant is a hybrid, it’s very likely that you won’t get seeds that produce a good crop next year.” DuBois says it’s important to consider how the plant you’re trying to collect seeds from polli- nates to ensure you are saving only pure seeds instead of hybrids, which will not produce offspring with the same traits as
their parent plants. Preventing cross-pollination from winds or insects (common with cucumber and squash) might mean you have to isolate the plant with netting or clip its flower closed. Timing is everything, too, since you want to obtain your seeds at the right level of maturity. Dry fruited crops like lettuce and beans are perhaps the easiest to save seeds from: just pick the mature seed pods and bring them into the house for further cleaning and drying. Retrieving seeds from wet fruited crops such as tomatoes, peppers and melons is slightly more labour intensive, since you’ll have to extract the seeds from the flesh and pulp of the mature fruit or vegetable before cleaning and drying them out.
Dry fruited crops like lettuce and beans are perhaps the easiest to save seeds from: just pick the mature seed pods and bring them into the house for further cleaning and drying.
“Some seeds you have to use right away, but some, like tomatoes, you can save.”
– JEANNE DUBOIS, CO-OWNER, RON PAUL GARDEN CENTRE.
TOMATO PLANT FROM RON PAUL GARDEN CENTRE. PHOTO BY DARCY FINLEY
54 PARADE of HOMES FALL 2025
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