 Can you save seed from year to year? Plants like okra, peas and beans are easy to save and ensure supply from year to year. It is best to set aside a short section of a row specifically for growing seed. This is going to be an area where you leave the pods on these plants until they mature and dry for harvesting. Select only well-filled disease-free pods at harvest and spread them out to dry for two to three weeks before storing. This will ensure that plants, the seeds do not germinate and also they do not begin to mold. Here's a link at the bottom of your screen that will give you more information on saving seeds. Purchase good quality seeds from a reputable source and try to purchase only enough seed for one year. If you do have seed that you have from years past, you can easily run a germination test. Take a paper towel, moisten it and lay ten seeds across the paper towel, roll it up and stick it in a ziplock bag and wait seven to ten days. Then remove the paper towel and see how many seeds have germinated. If you have five out of ten, then you know you have only a fifty percent germination rate and so you will need to sow twice as many seeds in the garden to make sure you have a good stand. Seeds purchased are ready to germinate. Seeds harvested from nature though sometimes require treatment such as scarification or stratification. So make sure that if you harvest seeds from nature or from your plants from year to year that you make sure the requirements that those seeds need have been met. Read the package label. Also resistance will be listed. If it's a hybrid plant, it will list letters indicating which resistance that plant has to things such as fungus or nematodes, viruses and more. Days to maturity is also listed on the seed packet. Some plants mature faster than others so especially if you plan to succession plant, you want to make sure that you plant seeds that will have time to mature so that you get a harvest before a frost would kill them back. Planting depth is also important and the general rule of thumb is two to three times the diameter of the seed. So should you grow from seed or transplant, some plants are easy to transplant and are fine to grow ahead of time and place out in the garden where others you will benefit much greater if you plant directly from seed. I want to draw your attention to the graph on the far right where it says difficult to transplant. All of these are cucurbits, cucumber, mussel, squash, watermelon, cantaloupe, even zucchini all are in the cucurbit family and so these plants do not respond well when their roots are disturbed if you grow in a transplant container and then take to the garden so it is best to grow them directly from seed. Now that you have an idea if you want to grow from seed or from transplant, now choosing which you want to grow such as a hybrid or an open pollinated or heirloom. A hybrid is created when pollen of a known variety is carefully pollinated with another known variety and the seeds are collected. The parent plants are chosen for characteristics such as fruit size, plant vigor or disease resistance especially. For a hybrid these are available to consumers and have gone through rigorous field tests and trials and these are generally going to be more expensive. Hybrids possess wider adaptability to environmental stress and are more uniform from plant to plant than non-hybrids. If you are new to vegetable gardening I highly recommend selecting hybrid varieties as the disease resistance will really give you a step ahead in the game with the common problems that can easily affect your vegetable crops. Other benefits of hybrids may be earlier flowers, higher yields and again disease resistance. A negative to hybrids is that you cannot save the seed. The seed collected from hybrids would have genetic variations so you will need to purchase new hybrid seeds from year to year. Open pollinated vegetable varieties are those that are pollinated in the field by insects, wind or other natural pollinators and these can be saved from year to year but you still must ensure that no cross pollination of a different variety happens in the garden. So if you plan to select and harvest the seeds from an open pollinated variety I recommend you only plant the one variety and not multiple varieties to ensure that the cross pollination does not occur and that the seeds will come back true the next year. Crops such as tomatoes and beans tend to self pollinate as they have perfect flowers so saving seed is less difficult. Some well known open pollinated varieties I have listed here such as the Kentucky Wonder pole bean or black beauty eggplant. So brandy wine and Roma tomatoes are open pollinated varieties. Air loom is the term that is given to plants that are open pollinated. These are just varieties that have been around for over 50 years in the commercial trade. Here are those helpful links to check out for more information and more variety selections and check out our free garden apps. These will also help you make wise choices in the varieties and even types of plants that you put in your garden. And if you have further questions call our master gardener helpline 1-877-252-4769.