How to save seeds - a 2016 update

I love being able to keep seeds from the vegetables I grow. Some people get upset when their plants bolt and go to seed, but I'm happy because it means I'll be able to save the seeds and sow some more.

Poor Man's Beans seeds that I've saved

I have saved seeds from beans, capsicums, lettuce, mustard greens, tomatoes, parsley, basil, broccoli and spring onions, as well as flower seeds. I keep the seeds in little jars from my Damadi moisturiser and have a cupboard full of tiny jars. I also keep the little sachets of desiccant that come with shoes and other products and drop one in each jar to keep the moisture out.

My seed cupboard is full of little jars of seeds

Drop in a sachet of desiccant to keep the moisture out

Saving seeds from most plants is easy, just let them flower and wait for the seed pods to form and dry out. A few tips for some of the seeds that I regularly save:

Beans and peas - I just leave some large beans on the plant and wait until they're yellow and dried out.
Tomatoes - best to ferment the seeds (that's why they do so well in the compost!).
Capsicums - I just scrape out the seeds, let them dry on paper towel, and tip them into the jar.
Curcubits like pumpkin and melon - also just scrape out the seeds and let them dry (only issue being that they can cross-pollinate over long distances, but that doesn't bother me).
Brassicas like broccoli and asian greens - wait until the seed pods have dried, then harvest the entire plant and pop the seeds out of each pod into a container, then pick out all the bits of pod, you will get hundreds of seeds!
Lettuce and herbs like parsley and dill - wait for the seed head to dry and then shake them into a container and store in a jar.
Silverbeet - this one takes FOREVER to grow the seeds and dry out, so just be patient, eventually you will be able to harvest the dry seeds, which are a very odd shape.

I have far too many seeds to ever use in time, so I give them away to neighbours and friends and at our local produce share. I also scatter them around my garden and they tend to sprout at the right time, this is a concept from One Straw Revolution - letting nature do the gardening. I also found a lot of good information about seed saving in Australia in the book Organic Vegetable Gardening (not an affiliate link).

Do you save seeds? Any tips?

See below for affiliate links to some of my favourite gardening books:

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here . You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!). I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months. I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Chicken tractor guest post

Sign up for my weekly email updates here , you will find out more about chickens, soap and our farmlife, straight to your inbox, never miss a post! New soap website and shop opening soon.... Tanya from Lovely Greens invited me to write a guest post on chicken tractors for her blog. I can't believe how many page views I get for chicken tractors, they seem to be a real area of interest and I hope that the information on my blog has helped people. I find that when I use something everyday, I forget the details that other people may not be aware of, so in this post for Tanya, I tried to just write everything I could think of that I haven't covered in previous posts. I tried to explain everything we do and why, so that people in other locations and situations can figure out how best to use chicken tractors with their own chickens. The dogs like to hang out behind the chicken tractors and eat chicken poo. Dogs are gross! If you want to read more about chicken tractor

How to make soap with beer (and tallow)

I may have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive! Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap. And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps. I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment. One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap. As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances). When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather. I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap. It also contributes a tan or brown colour to

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