| |  | | Non-hybrid Seeds
Answered by: Inge Poot
Question from: Juana Veters
Posted on: December 15, 1998
I am interested in saving seeds from plants in my garden, and so I was wondering if your seeds are non-hybrid.
Most of our herbs are just as nature made them and will come true from seed. There will be variation, less of it for plants that were selected and inbred for certain traits. There may be a problem with some very well known herbs such as basils, where your own seed may produce much more variation than the original seed, because that original seed had been heavily selected for certain traits and unless that is the only variety you and your neighbours grow, your seedlings will be be intermediate between all the varieties that may have cross polinated each other. Even commercial growers have trouble with this. We occasionally get purple basils that are more green than anything else, all due to busy bees in the fields grown for seed!
Don’t try to grow most of our scented geraniums from seed, because most of them are hybrids - many of them even sterile hybrids- and they will not come true from seed even if the seed do germinate. A few of them are species, such as apple scented geranium, coconut scented geranium and peppermint scented geranium and these will come true from seed as well as setting not only many, but fertile seeds.
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