Activity: Seed saving

Teacher preparation

Overarching learning goal: Saving seeds with your students is a fun and rewarding activity that will enable your vegetable garden to be established, re-planted or maintained relatively cheaply and will allow students to explore the role of seeds in plant life cycles. Students will be asked to follow the life-cycle of seeds from initial observation to propagation. 

Teacher content information

In this activity students will undertake six tasks:

• observing plants 
• selecting seeds to harvest 
• harvesting seeds 
• drying, cleaning and storing seeds 
• propagating seeds 
• reporting.

Seeds can be saved for use in the following year or shared with others. Seeds from annual plants are ideal to collect as they complete their life cycle (from seed to seed) in one year. 
The best time to collect seed from most plants is late autumn (depending on the plant and its lifecycle), and the best time to plant is in spring or 
late term 3 and early term 4 after the most sev

Thought starters: What does a seed need to grow?

You will undertake six tasks:

• observing plants 
• selecting seeds to harvest 
• harvesting seeds 
• drying, cleaning and storing seeds 
• propagating seeds 
• reporting.

Step 1. Observing plants

Long before they appear, plants provide clues about the coming seeds through their flower development. Carefully observe flowers in the garden. This is best done in spring and early summer when the most number of plants will be flowering.

Answer the following questions:
- Where do you think seeds will be produced on each plant? 

- What clues or signs of potential seed development do you notice?

Step 2. Selecting seeds to harvest

Identify plants that you think are ready to be harvested for their seeds. Discuss as a class how you will decide from which plants to collect seeds.

Think like gardeners do! Discuss which plants have qualities you value and which will have their seeds chosen for replanting. For example, does one tomat