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FAIRBANKS — Last week I talked about the first two steps to follow if you want to save the seeds produced by your garden this year: First, select only heirloom varieties, also known as open-pollinated types. Second, figure out if the heirlooms are self-pollinators or cross-pollinators; if they are cross-pollinators, provide some sort of isolation so that insects don’t fertilize them with unwanted pollen.

Now it is time to figure out what qualities of the plant you are trying to replicate. For example, if you are looking at tomatoes, is it early maturation? Flavor? Resistance to a disease that normally plagues your plants? Color?

The gardening book put out by The New York Times, called “1000 Gardening Questions & Answers,” has a great suggestion for how to select the best plants for seed saving. “Notice which 8 to 12 plants are the healthiest, and mark them with a twist-tie. Use another color twist-tie to mark the earliest producers. Choose a third color for tastiness, and a fourth for heavy crops. By the time of peak harvest, you should have at least one or two plants that sport multiple ties. Save the seeds from those. After a few seasons, you’ll have a custom-tailored garden no amount of money could buy off the shelf.”

As your seed plants grow, be vigilant about providing the optimum conditions. Use warm water rather than cold, feed with compost tea or an organic fertilizer, and don’t let them get crowded out by weeds or other plants. Be ruthless about this last condition, although I know it is painful. I am raising a certain variety of tomato in my greenhouse and just last week I had to saw down two vigorous plants because they were spreading out and competing for light with my pet plants. And the ones I cut down had tiny tomatoes on them, making it even more heartbreaking.

As the season progresses, you will notice that some plants offer their seeds up for easy gathering. One nudge and they are flinging themselves all over you. If possible, let them dry on the plant and then harvest them, clean them and store them. By cleaning, I mean brush off any extraneous material or shake them in a sieve until only the seeds are left at the bottom. Under no circumstances should you wet them, touch them with damp hands or a moist cloth, or lay them on a wet surface.

Other dry seeds, like beans and peas, don’t quite jump out at you but they are just as easy to harvest. Leave them on the vine and in their pods until they are dry, then remove them from their pods and let them finish drying. They should be brittle and shatter when you bite them or hit them with a hammer.

Many seeds, called wet seeds, are embedded in pulp; tomatoes and pumpkins come immediately to mind. In those cases, wait until the fruit is over-ripe — well beyond the eating stage. For all non-tomato wet seeds, do the following: Use your fingers to separate the meat and juice from the seeds, knowing the results are going to be imperfect. Then put the seeds in a jar of cool water and shake vigorously to wash off as much extraneous material as possible.

Let the jar of water and seeds sit for about 20 minutes, which will give the viable seeds time to sink to the bottom. Pour off the floating seeds and water, taking care not to lose viable seeds, too. Keep refilling the jar with water, gently shaking it to clean the seeds that sank, until it looks like the seeds are clean. Put them in a fine mesh strainer, do a final rinse and then sprinkle them onto glass or pottery plates — if you use paper plates or paper towels, you will never be able to pry them off. You want to end up with a single layer of seeds, not globs.

Air dry these seeds for two or three days, making sure the temperatures are not warmer than about 90 degrees and that there is plenty of air circulation so that water evaporates as quickly as possible. You don’t want them sitting on a sunny windowsill. I usually keep a fan, set to low, in the area. Every day you will need to stir the seeds so that mold does not form and the seeds can dry uniformly.

Although they are classified as wet seeds, tomatoes require a slightly different method, because the seeds are in individual gel sacs and those can only be pried off through a process of fermentation. Cut open the tomato, squeeze the juice and pulp into something like a thoroughly washed cottage cheese container.

Add half as much water as you have seeds and juice and stir. Set in a warm area and for the next three days, stir twice a day. Your eyes and nose will tell you when fermentation has started, so unless you are trying to be put off your feedbag, don’t keep these bowls near where you eat or cook.

When bubbles are coating the top, or you see a thick cottage cheesy white mold, add more water. This will stop the fermentation and will start the cleaning process. Stir vigorously and then let things settle for about 20 minutes so that the viable seeds have time to sink.

Pour off the gunk and dead seeds, and dump the good seeds into a fine mesh strainer so that you can wash them off more thoroughly. Then proceed as with other wet seeds: put them on plates in a single layer, air dry in a warm place but not direct sun, when they are thoroughly dry, store properly.

No matter what the seeds, wet or dry, store them properly or else all your work was for naught. Glass is better than plastic, so start saving canning or baby food jars. The best tip I ever got from another seed saver was to put the different varieties in their own plastic medicine or 35mm film canisters and then put a bunch of those in a glass jar you store in the freezer or some other cold, dry and dark area.

That’s it for seed saving. If you are serious about this and thus need to know all the peculiarities of various varieties, purchase Suzanne Ashworth’s book “Seed to Seed.”