Vegetable seed viability charts

I went looking for this info, and found that there was a lot more of it than I had expected to find.  Still, this chart seems to give a good summary:


That chart I found on Away to garden.com. I found also some on  Virginia Tech's website , and also Iowa state university.

So it seems tomatoes, cucumbers and maybe lettuce are good fo maybe 5 years, but not so good with old allium and umbellifer seed.

I would say that I have certainly had sucess with peppers older than 2-3 years.  And some sucess with very old tomato seeds, but in some cases they germinated, but lacked the vigour of newer seed.  I must remember to save fresh seed more often; it is especially easy with peppers and chillies.  I lost a rather treasured strain of Habanero chilli, which was bright red, really fruity in flavour and numbingly hot.  I saved the seeds from a chilli bought in a Carribean grocery store in Oxford, and maintained it for 13 years before I took a break from growing it whist C-H Jnr was little and my pain threshold dropped off.  The seed were too old to grow when I got back into practice