Eggplant seed is one of the seeds that gave me the biggest headache for the longest time.
It’s one of the few cases, where if we didn’t have seed extracting equipment, I might not try to grow bulk amounts of the seed.
This is how we get the seeds out of the eggplant
the Millet Wet Vegetable Seed Separator! Feed the eggplants into the hopper, crush them up, and then separate the seed into one bin and all the chunky flesh into another bin.
Whereas peppers and tomatoes are pretty easy to feed to the Millet, eggplants require a few extra steps because they are so big and dense.
We cut off the top of the eggplant where there is no seed
We then cut two lines at the top of the eggplant
Not too deep because we don’t want to cut any seed.
Using those cut marks as starting points
We tear the eggplant into chunks that can fit into Millet without jamming it.
Here are the buckets of eggplant pieces.
We cut these greens down to the root.
Millet time
We cut these greens down to the root.
The bin filled with water and seed gets pretty frothy
We pour the forth and water and any floating bits off and leave the seed at the bottom. All that froth means you have to be careful to not pour out the good seed.
We pour the bottom of the bin into a bucket
We fill up the bucket with water and pour it off again. We decant a few times to clean the seed. Then into a colander to blast the seed clean.
And there we go, not so frustrating after all!