Things You'll Need:
- Knife
- Spoon
- Baking sheet
- Envelope
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Step 1
Harvest seeds from only heirloom plants. Most garden vegetable seeds and starter plants are hybrids. These are created to produce large, tasty fruit and are generally fairly successful in personal gardens. The problem is that when hybrids reproduce with one another, their seeds are inferior and incapable of producing large, tasty fruit, or sometimes any fruit at all. Therefore, harvest seeds from heirloom or open-pollinated plants and avoid those from "hybrid" or "cultivated" plants. Avoid harvesting seeds from vegetables in a supermarket or grocery store because these most certainly come from hybrid seeds.
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Step 2
Allow the vegetable to become fully ripe before attempting to harvest seeds. Underripe vegetables contain seeds that are not fully formed and will not germinate or produce healthy plants the next year. When harvesting squash (and other plants such as cucumbers and eggplant), allow the vegetable to become overripe before harvesting the seeds because these seeds take longer to develop. Once the skin on the squashes is hard, pick the fruit and let it cure another three weeks before harvesting the seeds. (This is true even for summer squashes and zucchini, which generally are harvested when the skin is soft.)
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Step 3
Cut the vegetable in half.
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Step 4
Scoop out the seeds.
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Step 5
Wash the seeds free from pulp and strings that hold the seeds together.
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Step 6
Spread the seeds on a flat surface, making sure they do not clump together or overlap one another. Placing them on a hard surface such as a baking sheet or ceramic plate is better than newsprint, which can stick to the seeds as they begin to lose moisture.
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Step 7
Set the seeds in a cool spot away from direct light.
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Step 8
Agitate or stir the seeds every day or two to assure they dry evenly. Once the seeds are brittle, they are dry and ready to be stored.
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Step 9
Place dried seeds in a labeled envelope and store them in a cool dark spot. Seeds stored in this manner will be good for a year. If you wish to keep seeds longer than a year, store them with a desiccator packet inside a jar.
