Can't afford to buy them, so gotta save them wherever I can. I think I spend just as much time harvesting and processing seeds as I do the actual garden produce.
I let three of the Parris Island Cos lettuce bolt so I could stock up on seed. I've decided that if I want to eat raw leathery leaves, I'll eat baby spinach. I want lettuce to be crunchy, so I'll grow Romaines and crispheads exclusively. I need to get seed for a small crisphead (maybe grapefruit-sized?), but this is my go-to for Romaine. That amount of seedheads will produce that amount of cleaned seed. I could stop here, but I'll probably keep collecting until the flowers stop. I can always give the extra away. I hand-clean these by pinching the fluff and pulling. The seeds should mostly come free of the base then you can just flick a finger over them to dislodge them from the fluff (still pinched and held). You can also wait for the whole flower cluster to dry and thresh/window normally but I like to ensure I get enough seed early so harvest the flowers individually.
Some of the volunteer snapdragons (from scavenged spent potting soil) have set seed. I love how you know the seed pod is ready for harvest once it develops that hole in it. Just have to catch it before the seeds all fall out of it. The seeds mostly just pour out with a little shake, but you can split/crush the pod if you need every last seed.
Volunteer sidewalk crack dill plant has heads ready for harvest.
I've found that it's best to take the seed heads off the plant before they're fully dry, let them dry in a bowl or bag, then just crunch the seeds off with your hands. Unless you want volunteers in the garden. Then by all means let them dry on the plant.
I let my sole surviving Chinese broccoli bolt, spent an agonizingly long time letting the pods develop fully (so many things will eat them!), then as soon as one of the pods showed the slightest sign of drying down I harvested the pods to finish drying protected in the shed. The pods have two sides separated by a membrane which tends to stay attached to the stem if you remove each casing. And the seeds just fall out of the casing. Again, you can thresh/winnow traditionally, but this represents about 4 years of broccoli for me so I was extra careful.
I don't have a pic of the petunia seed heads because I used it in a different post (they look a little like Audrey II minus the teeth), but the seeds are so tiny that it's inevitable that some end up with the chaff. So I sprinkle the chaff over moist soil and voila! Replacement petunias growing in a deck railing planter—should be flowering by early fall I think.
I scavenged a dozen of these nice glass jars from the alley earlier in the year. I think they held fancy yogurt or baby food or something. I got them because they're the perfect size for tea lights, but...
Gotta ferment those tomato guts before you save the seed to remove the jelly coat from the seed. I use glass jars for this topped with a paper towel piece held in place by a rubber band (to exclude fruit flies). Just add a bit of water to the tomato guts, cover, and wait 1-2 weeks giving the jar a little swirl once or twice daily to help things along. Then decant the smelly juice (viable seeds should have sunk to the bottom) and do several rinses/decantings with clean water to wash all the gunk out. Then dump the seeds onto a coffee filter or paper towel, spread them out, and let them dry.
I like the coffee filters because the seeds stick less to them (also because I only have one roll of paper towels atm). I just loosen them by scraping with the back of a butter knife.
I had a lot of tomato varieties to save seed from this year. And let me tell you it was a whole juggling act to keep the varieties separated by location or blooming time or snipping the blooms off one while one set fruit then switching to let the other plant have a turn. Still can't be 100% certain things won't be mixed up genetically, but I did my best and it's only for me so it will be fine.
I was pretty excited about these seeds. They're geranium seeds from one of my scavenged overwintered geraniums. The few seed pods that have developed from the flower clusters at all have tended to rot before they're mature. These seeds are from the single pod that didn't. So I get to try growing geraniums from seed for the first time. Have to look that one up...
This isn't all the seeds I've collected so far, but it's a good chunk of them. I have one pepper variety to grab seeds from (Shepherd's Ramshorn), but with those you just cut them open and take out the seeds to dry. I've got zucchini still sizing up on the plant that I really need to grab seeds from or no zucchini next year. I'm letting two of the French filet bush bean plants go unharvested to produce replacement seed (I have enough for an August sowing but I can't count on those early fall bearing plants to produce seed). And I just sowed the few seeds of an unnamed pickling variety of cucumber in hopes of growing some plants purely for the purpose of saving seed from them because I liked the fruit I was getting from the impossible-to-isolate plant I have growing now. Plus any seeds I manage to scavenge on my walks...I have my eye on some cleome right now for example.
