I’m starting to practice seed saving with tomatoes, chillis, pumpkins and beans to start with. There’s alot to learn and as with most things its the mistakes that you learn the most from. Last year I threw some moist pumpkin and tomato seeds in sealed jars and when I returned to them they had rotted and were unusable. So this year I have dried the seeds out carefully before storing them.
Another mistake is forgetting to label your seeds. This year I saved the seeds from 4 different varieties of tomatoes and now I’m not sure which is which. There is one cherry, one roma, one standard red and one yellow. I want to grow all 4 types so its not a huge problem but it does mean I will need to plant the same number of each.
Cross pollination maybe another issue, especially for the pumpkins. If you grow more than one variety of pumpkin within 1km then cross pollination means the results will be unpredictable. So I will plant a few of these saved pumpkin seeds along with some packet seeds to ensure I get a crop. Going forward I thought about concentrating on just one type of pumpkin but I think one of the main benefits of growing your own is getting a variety so I’ll treat the saved pumpkins as a novelty to see what comes up.