Quality seeds can get expensive, but if you purchase heirloom seeds you can save seeds from year to year and never buy that variety again.  Imagine how much money this saves for just a little effort!  If you’d like to save seeds from your garden vegetables, look for seed varieties that say open-pollinated or heirloom.  Avoid seeds labeled as hybrid as the seeds from these plants won’t be true to the parent plant.  When in doubt, ask before buying.

Some types of plants, squash for example,  require another plant for fertilization.   If you have more than one type of plant (say zucchinni and yellow squash), they will cross pollinate to create an unknown seed.  You can prevent this by only growing one type of these plants (there are 4 different families of squash that generally don’t cross-pollinate), building a fine net shelter for them to prevent insects from cross-pollinating, or by hand pollinating them to reduce the chance that the wrong plant will pollinate it.  If neither of these options sounds appealing, you can plan to just buy the seeds for these types of plants and save the seeds from the easier savers.

Here’s a list of seeds that are self-pollinating for easy seed saving: beans, peas, lettuce, most tomatoes, eggplant, some peppers

Seeds that might cross-contaminate if another variety is nearby:  corn, squash

You can also prevent crossing by checking out the scientific names of the plants.  Plants with the same name will cross.

You should select your most beautiful, healthiest, tastiest plant to save seeds from.  Tie a little ribbon around it, or the piece of fruit that you want to save seeds from.  Allow that fruit to become fully ripe (or a little past) before picking to make sure the seeds are mature.  There are 3 methods to saving seeds: 

1.  Allowing seeds to dry on the plant

2.  Removing seeds to dry in the air

3.  Fermentation

Want to know more?

http://www.virtualseeds.com/seedsaving.html

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/clay56.html

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/clay51.html

http://www.northerngardening.com/LSseedsavg.htm

http://www.kidsgardening.com/growingideas/projects/aug04/pg1.html