It's always best to start with saving seeds from your healthiest plants. But what if disease is unavoidable? In this throwback to episode 62, we talk about the two best treatments for saving seeds from plants infected with disease.
Episode Resources:
Hot Water Treatment for Seeds – Louisiana State University Ep. 62 - Properly Saving Seeds in Your Garden Just Grow Something with Karin Velez (justgrowsomethingpodcast.com)
00:00:00
Welcome back, my gardening friends, to another focal point.
00:00:02
Friday Episode Let's spend just a few minutes together reviewing
00:00:06
A snippet of information from a previous episode, highlighting a
00:00:09
new topic, or quickly focusing on a current event in the Food
00:00:12
and Agriculture world. Let's get down and.
00:00:14
Dirty is talking about preventing disease.
00:00:19
OK, the adage is healthy. Seeds make healthy plants and
00:00:24
there are instances when disease.
00:00:26
Plants can actually pass on diseases within or on the seeds
00:00:33
that we say, which that can lead to of course poor quality plants
00:00:37
again the next season. It can also perpetuate disease
00:00:40
in your garden because the infection cycle in each planting
00:00:45
starts really early in the season and then you continue to
00:00:48
save those and planting infected seeds again, and that's just
00:00:52
promoting the buildup of the disease in your garden, so.
00:00:56
You know a bacteria can be attached to the outside of the
00:00:58
seed coat or it can be carried within the seed and you would
00:01:01
never know. Fortunately, you know you can
00:01:04
prevent passing on diseases by treating your seed with a bleach
00:01:08
solution or with a hot water treatment before planting.
00:01:12
You know a chlorine bleach treatment can eliminate certain
00:01:15
pathogens from the surface of the seed.
00:01:18
A hot water treatment can eliminate or reduce seed borne
00:01:21
fungi and bacteria, but not viruses.
00:01:25
In the hot water treatment, it's really important to pay
00:01:29
attention to the ratio of the solution and the temperature and
00:01:32
the recommended time in the solution when treating the seed,
00:01:36
because if you don't do it correctly you can actually
00:01:38
damage the seed, which of course is going to reduce the viability
00:01:41
of the seed being able to produce the next season.
00:01:45
The problem is, infected transplants and seeds don't
00:01:49
usually show any obvious symptoms of infection until much
00:01:52
later on SO. Really it is.
00:01:55
Start with disease free plants if you possibly can.
00:02:00
In our area it's difficult to grow a completely disease free
00:02:05
tomato in the garden just outdoors.
00:02:08
There are just so many fungal and bacterial pathogens that,
00:02:12
you know, infect our garden tomatoes out here.
00:02:14
Now I've never had a problem with passing on disease in
00:02:17
seeds, because the types of diseases that plague are
00:02:21
tomatoes, like early blight for example.
00:02:24
Are passed on through the wind or through soil contamination,
00:02:28
so it's not something that is usually passed on through the
00:02:30
seed. But in some areas things like a
00:02:34
bacterial canker are a big problem in tomatoes and that can
00:02:39
be passed on by seed. So part of the importance is
00:02:43
knowing what's a problem in your area and learn the signs and
00:02:47
then just choose healthy fruit from healthy plants whenever it
00:02:50
is possible. But.
00:02:53
What if your prized heirloom beans from your great
00:02:56
grandmother's garden are diseased and you need to save
00:03:00
those seeds? OK, like I said, you have two
00:03:02
options. The first one is a bleach
00:03:04
treatment. So once you have collected your
00:03:08
seeds and you've properly dried them down and you're ready to
00:03:11
get them ready for storage, you make a solution which is one
00:03:15
part bleach and four parts of water, and then add a few drops
00:03:19
of dish soap to this. You put the seeds into the
00:03:22
solution, and you allow it to sit for about a minute, just
00:03:25
kind of swirling it around. Occasionally there should be a
00:03:28
few enough seeds in there that they're able to kind of float
00:03:31
freely around and so that all the surfaces come in contact
00:03:35
with the bleach solution. Once they've had about a minute
00:03:38
in the solution, pour it through, you know, a mesh sieve
00:03:42
or a cheesecloth, and then rinse the seeds in cool tap water.
00:03:48
Under running water for about 5 minutes and then at this point
00:03:51
the seed can be thoroughly dried and then stored.
00:03:57
Bleach seed treatment can be used on any kind of seed,
00:04:00
including tomatoes. It will remove pathogens from
00:04:03
the surface of the seed coat, but not from within the seed and
00:04:08
unfortunately this means for bacterial canker.
00:04:11
Bleach treatment only partially reduces the risk of infection
00:04:16
from contaminated seeds, so that is where a hot water treatment
00:04:20
comes in. Like I mentioned there, the
00:04:24
difficulty with hot water treatment is that the time and
00:04:27
the temperatures of the treatment is going to vary for
00:04:30
each seed type. So I'm going to link in the show
00:04:33
notes to a table. With the information about the
00:04:37
hot water treatment from Louisiana State University, they
00:04:40
also have several how to videos available.
00:04:44
This is, you know, really to be used if you know that you have
00:04:48
certain diseases that can be passed on in diseased fruit and
00:04:52
you are really desperate to save those those seeds.
00:04:57
It is really critical with this method to precisely meet the
00:05:01
exact time and temperature requirements, and I can give you
00:05:04
an example. The example for tomatoes is
00:05:07
you're supposed to soak the tomato seeds in water that's at
00:05:10
100 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes.
00:05:13
And then you have to move the seed into water that's heated to
00:05:16
122 degrees Fahrenheit and soak them for 25 minutes.
00:05:21
And then you know it's the same routine as what you do with the
00:05:24
bleach water you pour the seed through.
00:05:27
A sieve or a cheesecloth, and then you rinse it under cool
00:05:29
water for 5 minutes and then you dry it and store it as usual.
00:05:32
But it's completely different for every single type of seed,
00:05:35
so that's just the example. For tomatoes, it's completely
00:05:38
different from everything else. If you're unsure about whether
00:05:42
or not those seeds are still viable after you treat them,
00:05:44
then you can try it out with a small batch of seeds 1st and
00:05:48
then do a germination test to make sure that they are still
00:05:51
viable. And this is going to be a sort
00:05:53
of worst case scenario situation, but I did want to
00:05:56
mention it just in case you live in an area where you really do
00:05:59
deal with a lot of diseases that can be passed on and and you
00:06:04
don't want to to save those and propagate them again the next
00:06:08
year. At that point, it really is a
00:06:09
better idea for you just to buy new seed, fresh seed every
00:06:14
single season. And that's why it's best to just
00:06:17
start with healthy plants and avoid all that nonsense.
00:06:20
Thanks for joining me on this vocal point Friday.
00:06:22
I'll be back again on Tuesday for another.
00:06:24
Regular episode of the Just Grow Something podcast, so until next
00:06:27
time, my gardening friends, keep on cultivating that dream garden
00:06:30
and we'll talk again soon.