Seed Saving Adventures

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!

A Big Tree Is Down

"Who will hold the sky up now the big trees are down?"  from the song The Big Trees Are Down by Doug Wood, honoring John Muir and Rachel Carson.

Just this week a friend and former colleague alerted me to the passing of Tom Fegley, former outdoor editor for the Morning Call newspaper in the Lehigh Valley.  I had the pleasure of meeting the man once when he came out to do some photography at the Graver Arboretum, and I enjoyed reading his articles for many years.  There is an excellent obituary for him in the online version of the Morning Call, which I am linking here, "Former Call Outdoors Editor Tom Fegley Dies at 72."

Something not mentioned in the article was that Tom was a teacher of ecology and environmental education before he became a newspaper writer, something he relayed to me when I met him.  He also wrote several books.  Tom was definitely a man to be looked up to as a role model.  He embodied much of the best in what it means to be a human being.  Here is what one of his colleagues, fellow writer Jim Casada, had to say about him: 

"I haven't known a lot of outdoor communicators in my 30 years or so in the business whom I considered truly iconic figures. However, Tom Fegely was one of them. Soft-spoken, deeply intellectual without being in any way obtrusive or overbearing with his knowledge and insight, he was a truly gifted writer and first-rate photographer. Beyond that, he was a delightful individual, someone who made you feel at ease almost immediately whether the setting was a backwoods hunting camp or a fancy dress banquet"

I tried to find some examples of his writing online. There are a bunch in the archives of the Morning Call, but unfortunately my skills at searching their database are not up to the task. It seems that articles are indexed solely by key words of topic, not by writers. I also tried conventional Googling and did find some additional examples. There was nothing fancy about his writing, it was just clear, thorough, well researched and informative. It wasn't this article or that article that made him great, it was the cumulative affect of his presence in the community.  He got up and brought his A game every single day, for 30+ years!  He lived his avocation for his entire life.

Here's a fun one with some current relevance, "Who's At the Feeders" by Tom Fegley for the Morning Call, 2000.  However, this one post simply cannot do justice to the body of work of this man.  

Organizing Resolutions

I'm working my way through a book called, One Year to an Organized Work Life by Regina Leeds, Da Capo Press, 2009.  I highly recommend this book, because it is a whole system already set up and designed, and you can jump right in and implement as much as you like without having to think too much about what you should or should not be doing.  So far I have been tackling my calendar, address book and contacts.

Here's a link to an article I have been using to help me weed through all my business cards and cryptic notes, "23 Ways to Organize Business Cards for Effective Follow-up"  It's an article by Stephanie Calahan from her blog which is about being "productive and organized."

My home office is in a state of transition, to say the least.  I had a "puffback" event with my furnace which covered a lot of things in my basement with oily soot, and I am in the process of transitioning to a life that is more on-the-road than ever.  So I am experimenting with taking some of my work "into the cloud" so to speak, and using Google as an easy starting point.  According to a NY Times article I read, "Meet the Life Hackers," productive people don't have any one common organizing system they all use (paper vs. electronic systems, for example) but they do have one common organizing trick--they find one flexible system and use that to organize all their stuff.  Which makes sense from an efficiency standpoint, since that way you're not wasting time shifting back and forth among media.  I've always been a paper gal, but I'm experimenting with cloud-based applications.  (The "cloud" means a Web-based, login system where somebody else stores all your data and software interface on their server computer somewhere in a "mystical cloud," and you can access it anywhere and anytime as long as you have an Internet connection and a device to display it.)  Don't kid yourself, the cloud isn't up there with Avalon, it is an office building somewhere and somebody is maintaining those computers and the data they store, and making money off of it one way or the other.  A "cloud" can go out of business, loose all your data, or get hacked, so we'll see what the future holds for this way of delivering data.  Always have plan B is my motto as far as that goes!)  And for my choice of Google--what can I say, it's free.  Yes, I know, they are spying on me.  I pity the poor guy or gal at Google who has that job!  I won't completely give up paper, because I don't want to be chained to a plug, but the new electronic management tools do have their perks-- such as potentially being "all in one" delivery systems.

I've been reading through the research I did in 1999 for my masters thesis, "Using the Internet in Environmental Education" while simultaneously trying to upgrade my technical skills to incorporate some new "best practices."  Two areas I've carved out to master are understanding news feeds and online video.  This is my first shot at the news feed part.  I'm going to blog, and I'm going to follow blogs.  I'm not sure how to follow them, because there are a variety of ways--e-mail, facebook, RSS feeds, Twitter, etc.  I'd be interested in hearing from fellow teachers out there on how you manage your interactions with the world of media.