Gardening: How to save vegetable seeds for next year

Many of the vegetables we grow in our gardens produce seeds, which, if harvested and stored correctly, have the potential to grace us with free plants. And late summer is the perfect time to start collecting them.

A few notes: Make sure the plants from which you’re collecting seeds are heirloom, or open-pollinated, varieties. These are plants in their original forms whose seeds will produce plants with the same qualities as their parent.

Hybridized varieties, on the other hand, are created by breeding two or more different types to capture the best qualities of each. Attempting to grow seeds collected from hybrids will yield a harvest of disappointment, as the resulting plants will not have the expected attributes but rather carry the traits of only one of the parents — and there’s no way to know what that will be. For this reason, it’s best not to grow seeds from