“You should grow some bitter melon” is what Aabir told me when we were catching up on the phone. I’m a strong adherent to #bitterbetter so I was easily convinced. Aabir sent me some seeds he’d kept from his own garden. The original seeds came from his mother who got them from a cousin in … More More better bitter with Bitter Melon
These days, seeds make up a bigger part of our gross sales than vegetables at Tourne-Sol co-operative farm. This is a big change from year one when we sold $600 of seeds. Let me tell you how we came to actually sell $600 of seeds. Summer 2003 I was managing La Ferme Du Fort Senneville … More My two first seed contracts
This is a shop-vac full of squash seed. The seeds got in the shop-vac because we chop-chopped some squash in half, then we vacuuscooped the seeds out of the seed cavity. This is so much easier and quicker than scooping away with a spoon. It also separates some of the pulpy fibers from the seed … More Vacuuscooping Squash Seed
You don’t need a big shaking scary machine to save pepper seeds. When I’m dealing with pretty small batches of peppers I’ll often save seed by hand. This is my hi tech technique to split open peppers. It’s all about splitting the fruit open to get to that seed I cut the pepper in half … More Saving pepper seeds can be easy
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 … More Eggplant seed has always frustrated me.
This is the Millet Wet Seed Separator. We mainly use this to crush tomatoes and peppers to extract their seeds. Here were using it for peppers. We feed the peppers into the hopper. (Make sure not to cut through the center of the fruit where the seeds are.) The Millet crushes the fruit up and … More Crushing peppers for seed
These eggplants were sitting on their plants for the last few months. And now that frost can be a thing, we clipped them from their plants and brought them to wait some more in a tunnel. These eggplants wouldn’t make for very good eating. But hopefully they will make for good seed. All that waiting … More As patient as an eggplant
There’s a special smell that comes with rotting cucumbers. When you save cucumbers for seed, you let them get big and yellow. And you might stack them in a bin for a few weeks to let them get even more yellow and mature. (And maybe because you forgot to deal with them on time.) The … More That special rotting cucumber smell
Helen Skiba gets into saving Bupleurum seed and Dahlia tubers in episode 6 of The Seed Growers Podcast. Here are some of the highlights of the bupleurum seed conversation: • Planting schedules • Plant spacing • When seed is mature • Harvesting gradually through the season • Threshing and winnowing • Farm saved bupleurum seed … More Saving bupleurum seed and dahlia tubers
Rowen White talks about corn and squash seed keeping in episode 5 of The Seed Growers Podcast. Here are some of the highlights of the corn conversation: • Isolating corn in time and space to avoid cross pollination • Differences in growing corn for stock seed vs bulk seed • Evaluating small corn lots to … More How to grow corn and squash for seed