I have saved a few seeds in my day, but this year I went at it in a big way. Well, actually a kind-of haphazard way--I started my new horticulturalist job in October, and noticed all these gorgeous plants in the Children's Garden going to seed. So I cut off some of the dried flower heads and stuffed them into labeled brown paper bags. This is NOT the most proper method of seed saving to guarantee success, but it is the quick and dirty way. When I found out I would be teaching Horticulture the following winter/spring, I set the bags aside for my class to process. That's what we've been doing for the past couple of weeks and I am totally enamored of the endeavor. In fact, I think seed saving and planting/growing is going to be the next trend in environmental education. Move over stream monitoring, recycling, and bird counting, make way for seed banking!!Saving seeds in the fall and planting them in the spring is such an easy way to restore the earth, and fits in ideally with the schedule of the school year. It's not an expensive endeavor, you don't need fancy equipment, you can use recycled and scrounged supplies. You get something (useful plants) for almost nothing, what more could you ask for?! At one time, saving seeds from the plants you were growing for your own needs, was a basic human skill, an integral part of that other basic human skill--growing food! We need to re-educate ourselves on how to do this! Talk about "Homeland Security"--it doesn't get much more fundamental than that!! And there are many science/biotechnology concepts you need to master to do it--opening up a world of educational and career opportunities. Especially for us here in the plant micro-climate powerhouse we call Michigan! So what follows is an overview of how to save seeds and process them for spring planting. Watch this space as the season continues, for more on how to plant and care for them.
To Every Thing There is a Season
The time to save seeds is in the late summer/early fall, as the flowers of the temperate-region gardens and meadows go to seed and it is still relatively warm and dry. Some seeds, (like the berry kind) need to be kept cool and damp, but many seeds can be stored dry. They're the easiest kind to save. Ideally, you want to cut off the seed-heads from the plants before the seeds all drop, blow away or get eaten by birds, and before it gets chilly and damp and your seeds get destroyed by mold. (Seed-heads are the dried-out flower part of a plant that has gone to seed.) The best time to harvest seeds in the temperate zone is the end of August and through September, depending on the flowering schedule of the plants with which you are working. Isn't that wonderful--just when school starts!! If the seeds haven't completely dried out, you can hang or lay the seed-heads out to dry. Tie the cut stems together and hang them from some type of structure like a drying rack or line, or place the seed-heads on a well ventilated surface to dry. I skipped that part and just stuck the already dried-on-the-plant seed-heads into paper bags. We'll see what my germination rate is!!
You Have to Separate the Seeds from the Chaff!
There are many ways of processing the seeds, but basically you want to separate the seeds from the chaff (the part of the seed-head that isn't a seed, so it's a capsule, wing, bit of fluff, or something like that). How you manage to do the separating depends on the type of chaff. If the seeds are heavy (they often are) and the chaff is light (it almost always is) you just close up the brown paper sack and bang the seed heads about in it to break open the pods and expose the seeds. The seeds will often sink to the bottom of the bag so you can scoop out the chaff and you'll have a pile of seeds left at the bottom. That's how it worked for milkweed, we just scooped out the fluff and were left with gads of seeds in the bottom of the bag.
In another situation, you can spread the seed/chaff mix out and fan or blow lightly over the pile and the chaff will blow away leaving the seeds behind. That's winnowing, remember that word??!! In the olden days people used special baskets to spread the seeds out and then they tossed them gently into a breeze to blow away the chaff. Or used fans. Not an easy skill to master. This only works when the seeds are heavy enough to stay in the basket and the chaff is light enough to blow away. Test this out first or you may end up blowing away your whole crop!! My student Ben actually blew gently over his pile of Cosmo seeds to get rid of the chaff. What a guy!
Sometimes the size difference between the seeds and chaff can be used to your advantage. That's how we separated the basil, lemon balm and cleome seeds. We ran the seed-chaff mix through a sieve--the seeds fell out the holes and the chaff stayed in the sieve. You can buy sieves with varying sized holes for varying sized seeds, but we just used an old kitchen sieve.
Sometimes you've got to beat up or pick apart the seed heads manually. In the case of Echinacea, we used a dissecting probe, after we read online that a darning needle could be used. Next best thing!
Below is a photo of our whole seed-saving operation. You can see the brown paper bags, the sieve, and white paper plates, which we used to spread the seeds out on. Use white so that you can easily see the seed and chaff because of the high contrast.
Store in a Cool Dry Place The last part of the process is to store the seeds in a dark, cool, dry place. We sealed them in little white envelopes, the kind used for herbaria. Be sure to label the seeds with the name of the plant and the date collected. We then stored the little envelopes in larger pint-sized canning jars to make sure no moisture or animals/insects could get to the seeds. We stored them in the cupboards in our cool educational facility. We used some jars I had with holes punched in the top for ventilation. You don't want to seal the seeds up with any type of moisture because that will mean mold!
Take Notes There are tons of excellent Web sites on seed saving for various types of plants. You should create a notebook with notes on all your seed saving techniques and pictures of how the seed heads and seeds look, as well as notes for later on how to sow and grow, and what the seedlings will look like. We were able to do this easily by cutting and pasting (with citations!) of information we found online. Again, great projects for students to learn a whole plethora of research skills. Another thing we have is a spreadsheet with the names of the plants and the dates they need to be sown to get them ready to plant when spring comes around, and we can record our results and see how well we did in shepherding these little babies to full-grown plant adulthood!
Take Notes There are tons of excellent Web sites on seed saving for various types of plants. You should create a notebook with notes on all your seed saving techniques and pictures of how the seed heads and seeds look, as well as notes for later on how to sow and grow, and what the seedlings will look like. We were able to do this easily by cutting and pasting (with citations!) of information we found online. Again, great projects for students to learn a whole plethora of research skills. Another thing we have is a spreadsheet with the names of the plants and the dates they need to be sown to get them ready to plant when spring comes around, and we can record our results and see how well we did in shepherding these little babies to full-grown plant adulthood!
