Have you been thinking about growing seeds on your farm?
I’ve put together a little New Year’s Seed Resolution to get you inspired.
(This can be done alone or with your farm team. With family members or with friends. Heck, if you want to record yourself and broadcast your resolution to the world on social media, go for it! And if you do do that, please tag me, I would love to witness it.)
Put your hand over your heart and say the following out loud …
I , NAME, resolve to keep the seeds from one crop variety this growing season.
I do not need to worry about isolation distances or population sizes or even selecting the best plants.
My goal is to simply
• let the variety go to flower then seed ,
• extract the seeds from the crop,
• get the seeds clean enough,
• dry the seeds for 2 to 3 weeks,
• and then store the seeds in a container.
(I will not forget to label the container with a variety name and the year.)
Once the seed is in a container, I will place it with the rest of my seeds so that I will see it next year when I check my seed inventory and get ready to crop plan.
Now there is one last step ..
Choose a variety!
The one seed I save every year is Painted Mountain Corn.
I don’t worry about Isolation Distance because I’m using Isolation Time. I seed and harvest the fast growing, frost resistant PMC a lot sooner so regular corn won’t contaminate it – PMC might contaminate the other corn but that’s not my problem.
Nor do I worry about population size even though I normally should, because I always mix last year’s seed with the seed from two years ago.
Happy growing!