You pay them off. You wait to harvest until the last possible moment. You dry it, pack it, and then maybe worry all winter that it will survive until spring. Won’t they be too cold? “The frost itself doesn’t bother the seeds,” says Jana Bucharová in the podcast. But it can reliably destroy something else.
You can find the podcast advice in the audio version here:
Of course, storage is essential for success. But especially for the ones you put so much work into yourself. Because you don’t want it all to go to waste. Not to mention losing your own rare variety of peppers or tomatoes.
The frost does no harm
So you really don’t have to worry about the cold. Whether it’s in the attic or in the freezer. After all, that’s where seeds are stored, for example, in a special genetic bank. “Even in nature, seeds survive the frost, some of them don’t even germinate without it,” says Jana Bucharová, an expert of the magazine Recipe on garden topics, in the podcast iReceptář do úch.
The cold weather actually protects the future vegetation. “The frost is sometimes a kind of insurance so that the seeds that lie in the soil do not start germinating already in autumn and then the plants do not freeze over the winter,” adds the expert.
Beware of humidity
What will almost certainly damage the seeds is moisture. “These are harmful to the seeds at any temperature,” points out Jana Bucharová. According to her, they can still germinate in the following season, but such seeds will certainly not last for several years in storage.
So if you suspect that moisture has reached your treasures, try planting them this season. And the next time you store the harvested ones, be very careful. “In a bag, in a glass, you can also use bags with silica gel as a fuse,” recommends the expert.
