 I'll introduce myself. My name is Glenn Drowns and I, along with my wife, we operate Sand Hill Preservation Center in Kalamaz, Iowa. Our venture is more educate, preservation is our first goal and education is our second goal. Making money is nice, but that's not the priority of our operation. We finance it mainly out of my teaching salary. So it's my 29th year of teaching. I took a day off from work. I played hooky today. The junior high kids are probably excited about that because I got a subterrerize. But anyhow, I'm used to going for about 47 minutes, but I'm also used to, I'm one of those people who likes to get everybody involved and not knowing I hadn't been down here for about 10 years, what it would take to get people involved. I wasn't exactly sure. So what my first goal is, is if you've come all this way where I don't know where you've all come from, there's something hopefully that you're going to gain from this presentation, because I can cater this presentation just about any way you want when it comes to seeds and seed saving. So if there's a couple of you that like to volunteer and raise your hands, I'll pick on you. If there's something you want to know today, I will adjust my presentation to make sure we cover that topic. Otherwise, I'll just kind of go through some generals. My wife has handed out a little basic seed saving guide I gave and by no means is that a complete, complete documentary on how to do it. It's just to get you started, you know, kind of like to wet your interest and let you experiment a little bit. If you want to start saving seeds, there's several things and I guess I'll promote Suzanne Ashworth's book. If you really want to get into seed saving, the book called Seed to Seed is a much better, you know, more detail. I just wanted to give everybody some sort of a little handout here that they could get, get their feet wet on and learn more about seed saving and seed preservation and what you can do on a small scale in your backyard or if you have a small farm or whatever your particular goals may be. Being a biologist by training, though I teach all of the sciences because I'm at a small school, I'm, I'm big into the concern of today's society that we need to create some more sustainable type things as to keep the earth going. We have a lot of, a lot of things that are short term answers to a long term problem that I think that we can solve a lot on a back scale. If we know more where our food comes from and how it, how it, how to go about getting our food will probably make better choices about that. So is there anybody here who would like what you had come here today you would like to tell me and I will try to address that? Nobody? Okay. We'll go with, with just some basics that I thought through. I think reasons for seed saving are, are the fact that you can adapt varieties for your particular soil and your particular climate. There are micro climates. There are all kinds of diseases and pests. I was talking to somebody here earlier today if they had Japanese beetle problems this summer where I live in eastern Iowa. I had been there now for almost 30 years. I'd seen one or two, you know, nothing that you get worried about like your occasional grasshopper or whatever, but we had Japanese beetles to the point this year where they totally defoliated all the linden trees. That was their favorite. And then they went to the apples and then they went to my apricot trees, which I barely get apricots off anyhow and that was very frustrating because they actually had apricots this year, but they didn't after the Japanese beetles got through them. I mean, we had them so thick that, that you, every apple on the tree was black from the color of them and then, you know, there was very few things. So some things I learned from that where there were certain varieties that they went for and certain varieties that they didn't. And those are the types of things that as a seed saver you can, you can capture on. If you have a particular problem every year with Japanese beetles, why would you go out and plant the same varieties that they like every year? One of the, one of my former students who's now a school board member has gotten into growing his own food, he and his wife are becoming other health conscious and he planted a bunch of different kinds of beans this year and noticed that the Japanese beetles only ate the one kind. So that was, you know, so things like that that you can take notes on and maybe those varieties are going to be here in the future and maybe they're not. Some of the varieties that, that are more resistant to pests that are more regionally centered are dropping out of the mainline catalogs because today's philosophy is when you're breeding plant or plant material vegetables, we want it to do as well in Portland, Maine as it does in Portland, Oregon as it does in Columbia, Missouri as it does in Florida. So that you create this, it may do super good here in Missouri, but they want it to just be something that sort of works everywhere. And I sort of understand that, but at the same point in time, I grew up in the mountains of Idaho where my biggest problem was A, no soil and B, no season. You know, if you had the soil, you had that 20th of June frost that would take you out. I can remember as a kid going out and putting straw in my corn that was just coming up to try to keep it alive. And then if you were lucky, you didn't get that Labor Day frost. Labor Day was always to me kind of a sad time because I knew that's when the garden would die. And usually it would. It would be a killing frost. So you're dealing with short seasons. Well, when I was young, my plant breeding interests were all in creating varieties that would do what? Grow between the 20th of June and the 10th or the 5th of September. So I moved to Iowa. Is that important? No. You know, it's not anymore. All these things that I wanted to breed and thought were important for, you know, when I was a teenager and going through college are no longer things that I need to worry about. Well, this year was kind of bad. We had a frost the 20th of September that wiped us out. But I mean, normally you don't think about things. All of a sudden I had these new things to think about. Insects. I saw more insects when I first summer in Iowa. I thought, why did I move to this place? And then the next thing was I saw more diseases on things that I'd ever seen. It was like a plant pathology course. It was exciting for me as a scientist and depressing to watch all my muskmelons die. All my favorite little varieties that I'd grown up with trying to get fruit on in Idaho, I thought, now I've got it made. I moved to Iowa. I've got this long season. I'm going to be up to my armpit and melons. Well, all these neat little short season varieties that I'd focused on, guess what? They had no resistance to Fusarium. So they went out there after that first little July rain with all these melons and the cucumber beetles and nothing but dead things. So again, was I getting any fruit? No, I'd moved to the Garden of Eden and still I didn't have anything to eat as far as that. So then you start looking for, ah, there's diseases. So then I grow all these varieties out and you find this one variety called Golden Gopher that withstands all of the bugs in the pests. Is it the best? Maybe not, but you start saving and selecting and crossing the ones in with it and you can create your own specific variety that does well for you and your particular climate and what you have to deal with. That's just one example. I think in today's society, also we kind of want a lot of uniformity, which is fine, but a diversified garden will withstand a lot of different things. If you have one tomato variety out there, you better hope that it's resistant to all of the pests and all of the insects that you have because if it isn't, what are you going to get at the end of the season if that particular disease comes through? Absolutely nothing. So I try to encourage people to experiment a little bit and maybe find that that grows best for you. I have lived on my sand hill now for almost 30 years and so I'm used to things that are used to digging in soil that I can dig with my hands. So when I go to dig carrots out or dig onions out, I don't, you know, that's probably my hands look as grubby as they are, but I still can just use my hands. Where I teach seven miles to the west of me is where it's rather clay. This year we had a school garden as part of the new health, you know, try to get kids to eat something other than energy drinks and Mountain Dew. And we had this garden and I thought, oh, this'll be a cinch. And the first day I go to just make a fur with my finger to plant the lettuce to show the kids how to do it. And I about broke my finger because it was clay soil. And I thought, what the heck is going on here? Well, it's just, well, we'll till it up some more. You know what? I'd gotten out of that mindset that there's something other than my loose sand to deal with and so everybody has different things that you have to kind of adapt to. Certain varieties of sweet potatoes that I raise don't do well for me on sand because they're heirlooms that were grown in very heavy clay soils over the years. So when I plant them in my sand, you know what I get? They just keep growing. You plant them in my friend who lives again seven, eight miles away in the clay and you get these beautiful shaped roots, same plants, same source, everything. It's just the type of conditions. So you can do those things on a minor scale and that's why I gave you this little handout of how to save certain seeds that will work well for you so that you can be more successful because sometimes I think the things that are coming across in the market, excuse me, on as far as vegetable seeds, I don't think modern tomatoes have any flavor at all and maybe some of you'll disagree with me but you just, if you go to the grocery store and you accidentally drop one on the floor, you don't have to worry about being embarrassed about it breaking, what can you do? And it's plating. You can just reach down, pick it up and put it back on the shelf because it didn't break. Should a real tomato, if it falls from waist high to the ground and it's ripe, it should make a kush plot. There should be a mess that you're trying to figure out how you're going to either clean up or be embarrassed as the clerk comes over. That doesn't happen with grocery store tomatoes. Is that what we want? I don't know. A few years ago I gave a program at a small college where they were talking about all the kids were from inner city Chicago. They had never seen a tomato plant. They'd never had a tomato other than something on a fast food burger and just thought it was supposed to be stiff, firm, tasteless, just added color to your McDonald's burger or whatever. So the teacher had grown some stuff and had me bring in some things for the kids to try. Well, kids, they were 18, 20 year old college students. They didn't like those. That wasn't right to them. A tomato isn't supposed to have flavor, it's supposed to just be there on your burger that you can pick off. So that's part of the things that, you know, society has changed somewhat in what our expectation levels are. So I think what the biggest thing I hope you'll leave here from on seed saving is to thinking about saving food crops that are better for you and what you want for particular needs. And some of that you can do through just finding the varieties and saving your own seeds. And some of it you can do with a little tinkering with plant breeding and stuff that can make your own variety that adapts to your location. You can see my little handout. I've divided things into pollination methods. And that's probably the biggest thing when it comes to saving seeds is understanding how things pollinate. Your when pollinated things are your most challenging perhaps. And they can be if you live in the Midwest where somebody, a gentleman asked me earlier how do I keep the corn's pure. Living in Iowa where I do, there's not a lot of trees anymore that's been declared something that Iowans want to get rid of I think because they've cut them all down. So there's really nothing to stop the flow of the pollen. So there's a lot of pollen flowing around. So you have to watch and trigger your planting time so that you have them planted when the wind is not blowing your neighbor's corn pollen. Other crops that are when pollinated that I mentioned in there are like spinach. Spinach is a real challenge. If any of you are starting out saving seeds and you really like spinach, that's not the crop to start with. There's a lot of issues there and it's really difficult in the Midwest but it's something if a few plants go to seed you'll have to understand that there's both male and female flowers and some plants will have seed on them and some won't. Also in that group is the beets and the chard. And I don't know if this far down in Missouri you can end up leaving beets in the ground and that they'll winter over without digging them up or not, I can't where I live in Iowa but things like that get to be a lot of work and some people again I don't recommend you start out with those. If you're wanting to start out seed saving and just figuring out how to do it on a micro-cosmic scale, I'd say start with beans or peas depending on how well you grow with those things and kind of get a feel for it and then the next thing that's really easy to do is tomatoes. And I'm gonna show you a couple little tips here in a few minutes on how to do tomatoes. Normally at this presentation I would bring tomatoes and so you could see the whole process but as I said our killing frost was the 24th of September and we've had about 15 frosts since which we normally have maybe one or two by now. So I don't have any tomatoes left to show you but I will show you kind of a simple way of going through doing that whole process to get you started because tomatoes are something that most everybody grows even in Iowa where we don't grow a lot of vegetable gardens anymore most everybody still has a few tomato plants and I'm not a big lover of the hybrid tomatoes as you probably already can tell but some of the open pollinated old fashioned heirlooms I think have a lot more flavor and character and a lot of disease resistance. So I'm gonna show you just briefly how you can do a couple of things here and I'm gonna have to play with the microphone so give me just a second. If you're growing a large number of tomatoes a couple of things that you may want to try to think about doing is you can go on most garden supply stores anymore sell this stuff and I'm gonna pass this around I just ripped it off of a thing. Is this stuff called row cover that you may have seen before? It works really great. Now this is not a professionally cut piece or whatever but if you're afraid that your tomatoes are gonna cross or maybe you don't have as large a space to separate them out you can go out and find that ideal plant that you think has the best typical fruit that you want and you can put this row cover take yourself a piece of garden twine and just put a piece of row cover around a whole cluster of flowers and then just tie it there. Come back about a week or 10 days later and see that you should have fruit because tomatoes will basically self pollinate and then at that point in time if it looks like you've got fruit you can either make the row cover big enough that it'll still stay around them or you can just take the row cover off and I use what's called plastic flagging tape that you can go into a hardware store or you might even be able to find it like an office supply store it's just multicolored very fluorescent looking tape and I just tie a little string of that around that cluster of fruit and then you know that those fruit have self pollinated and that they're going to be pure. At that point in time you just let them develop and then I brought along a milk jug. Your next step in the process is once those fruit are nice and ripe just the milk jug works great for fermenting tomato seeds and I could demonstrate this but it's gonna be hard with the microphone. I just take behind with a knife I cut back so that I still have the handle cut around that top part big enough so I can get my hand down in it and then I take that fruit stick it down inside the jug and you just squeeze the content so that you've got the pulp basically with the seeds inside this milk jug container. Do as many fruits as you want or as many will fit in that. Don't add water unless they're really dry like you've got paste tomatoes or tiny current or cherry tomatoes and then I let these set I actually have a whole shed because I use about 700 or 800 of these a year I have people save me milk jugs and let them ferment for two days if it's really hot outside you know like if it's a summer day you leave them set in there for maybe two to three days they'll get this nice thick white scummy grayish mold growing across the top of them which is ideal you wait and then like between again it depends on the temperature if I'm doing it in July or August you about three days later your seeds ready to process if I'm doing it in the cooler fall time of the year like September, October when I do a lot of mine then I can do it from one weekend to the next and it can set in there for about seven days. You'll know it's ready if you take it out and then you kind of shake it up and you see the stuff separating into the clear liquid the seeds will start falling and then I take a garden hose with a spray nozzle on the end and I just gently spray that in there a little bit that knocks all of the seed to the bottom of that container and then I just dump the junk out the top and all that junk is all that tissue and stuff that was that gelatinous coating around that tomato seed and that dumps off and then in the bottom you've got your seed then as it gets low on the water I take one of two types of screens you can see these have been well used I go to kitchen supply stores to find their higher quality material for seed saving this one works good because you can set it over another container dump the seeds in there and then rinse them off with water and then dry them on a paper plate if you're afraid you're gonna be messy or you're gonna spill them it works just as well these are the neatest thing I found at some fancy kitchen store that these sieves that just set flat on the container then you can dump it in there and then it's not gonna tip over and you can use both hands to kinda slosh it around a little bit once you've got your seed in that particular location then I dump it out on a paper plate not a wax coated paper plate you want the cheapest ones that you can find and not styrofoam and then I just dry them either I have a cabinet incubator type thing that I built for the purpose or you can just put them in a window sill or with a light fan on them you don't want a heavy breeze on them just to dry them as rather fast do not dry them in the oven don't dry them in the microwave but you know like in a window sill or if you can put them out on a table and just have a light fan breeze going over them they'll dry rather fast the faster they dry the better the seed well to a point the faster they dry you kinda want most of that moisture off within 24 hours or so the better off you're gonna be and then once your seed is dry and you'll know when it's dry it'll just be nice and crumbly it'll look really good then you can process it for later for later storage for the following year you can do the same type of process as far as saving seed from peppers I like to take peppers and take a tub like this one put water in that tub put my screen in there and have the water up and then I just like to seed out the peppers because what you're gonna have in that particular situation with the pepper seed is as you seed out the peppers you can wash them off in the water and if you keep your water clean and your peppers clean you can still use the peppers and all your bad seed on peppers will then be that light stuff that's floating at the top and your good seed is gonna go to the bottom peppers is probably another thing that's fairly easy to save seed from but a lot of people make mistakes in that they don't let the peppers mature enough your best bet if you're trying to save pepper seed is to when the peppers change to it's ripe color like if it's a green one that turns red it gets red pick it let it set in a cool place like a garage or a basement for maybe a week or 10 days or even two weeks and then that just really pumps all of that nutrition into that seed and you'll get better germinating seed the temptation is to think oh, not to waste anything and you kinda have to compromise depending on how much seed you need three or four peppers will give you way more seed than what you know what to do with anyhow and for most purposes but remember that the plant is producing that pepper or that tomato to feed that seed it's not to feed you that's the plant's purpose is to feed its seed into future generation so the longer you can, not longer but that limit of time that you can put that in there and leave that seed inside that fruit the more nutrition is gonna go into the seed and the better your seed's gonna be okay, yes you wanna leave it on the plant if you're an organized gardener and you get your peppers out there early then yes, I would say doing that what usually happens with me is the peppers get planted late and then I end up picking the peppers and I bring them in and then they just kinda ripen and I go to the dollar stores and buy the cheap plastic laundry baskets and I put them in that and then I let them set in my cool shed for maybe a week it ends up being about three weeks and then you end up getting your best seed that way so yeah, if you want them to get overripe you know that's the one that there's a few things that you can eat not waste any of the edible product and still save the seeds squash is probably the best example for winter squash or pumpkin summer squash obviously the zucchinis long past its prime okay, musk melon you're gonna get seed that germinates about 70 to 80% from that musk melon that it's at its peak eating ability if you can leave it and let it get nasty another four or five days your seed germination's gonna go up even more okay and I brought some watermelons here my wife warned me I'm gonna make a mess and I will make a mess just to kinda show you the best time to say watermelon if you go out and pick that watermelon in your garden at its prime eating point when it's just crisp and just juicy sweet your seed will germinate if you wash it off good that's the problem you know you've gotta wash it is gonna germinate about 70% if you take that watermelon and let it set for a month or two months you're gonna increase that germination to closer to 100% on the seeds so it's just kinda you kinda have to lose the goods with that one okay any other questions before we yes I'm glad you brought that up that's an excellent question was if it's hit from a frost is it still okay to save seed from if you do the fermentation method on tomatoes if it sinks it's gonna be good and that way you can tell okay to be honest with you most years because of my work schedule I'm seeding out tomatoes after they've been hit with a frost okay the second round through is usually after that and you know if you didn't do the fermentation method and you just kinda squeeze them out on a paper plate or something you would not know that but any of the seed that was damaged by the frost that wasn't mature enough is gonna float up and you're gonna dump it off and so that's a good way at the end of the year to go out there, you know, light frost now our first frost this year was 24 degrees so that kinda cinched a lot of things then it was followed up a week later with like 21 so that took care of the rest of the foliage and everything so I didn't get as much, you know, that way but if it gets a light frost on it and it's not edible you know what tomatoes taste like when they get that you can probably still save the seed and you'll know by if you go through that fermentation method very easily peppers the same way with peppers that seed will float if it's not mature enough and as far as melons and I guarantee you these melons were all hit with frost and that's why there's gonna be, you know I've been saying I need them for this program and I didn't know I was gonna get that cold so quickly they'll still go on and develop somewhat after frost, okay yes Will successfully self pollinate if you gauge them Yes, oh yes eons ago I used to grow seeds for seeds bloom and I had rows as long as this room 15, 20 I'm under row cover that's when row cover was really expensive and not out there so much and yeah they'll self pollinate just beautifully and do wonderfully well that way because as you see in there I have peppers are self pollinated with insect crossing farther I've gone down to Missouri the more you have some of these bigger bees and it's your bigger bees that cause the problems and I didn't wasn't here long enough to figure out what some of them are but bumblebees are a pain in the butt when it comes to, you know they cross more beans, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants than anything else because they like those big flowers and they're the big bullies and they can open those flowers up and cause you problems so if you've got a lot of bumblebees you're gonna have to do something like this and for the home gardener you can buy a 50 foot roll of this and do those little bundles around your individual fruits and it'll last you a lifetime because the stuff can be reused I'm a cheap person and I get as many years as I can out of some stuff like this so you know that's not a big investment and it still will save you a lot of grief otherwise you just grow one variety or two and stagger them a little bit so okay any other questions before we move on probably some of the questions that I run into the most is how to cure seeds and I don't get much time to get on the internet and I did one day just was looking up something and I saw somebody on there saying never ever ever freeze your seeds, it ruins them it was some seed person that was trying a survival seed type thing that was trying to tell people to buy all these seeds if your seeds, yes you can ruin seeds if you freeze them when they're not a dry or mature enough and then they will not grow but if you dry your seeds down properly and not terribly overdry but just like I was explaining with the fan on them and you just can get that feel that they're not sticky and that they're nice and dry and you properly put them in either a jar or a sealed envelope and put them in your freezer a lot of the easiest way perhaps is to put them in a coin envelope and put them in a nice cream pill in your freezer and your freezer doesn't go on and off for different reasons I mean under normal care they'll keep for years, okay if you pick them and they're not mature enough or they're not dry enough then they won't keep and of course the seed will not germinate but drying and curing your seed you can keep seed like if you wanna have a fairly good size collection of corns and you know you can't grow them all every year you can freeze that seed and it'll germinate just fine you know don't get it in and out of the freezer continuously if you understand what I'm saying get it out to look at it and put it back get it out, put it back because every time you freeze in thought you're shortening the lifespan something but as long as you properly cure it and keep it in the freezer until you bring it out again it's gonna be just fine Did you put desiccant in? He asked if you should put desiccant in with it I'll say yes and no because if you do the desiccant properly you'll be okay but if you overkill and it gets too dry then the seed will crack and break open and you'll have nothing and that primarily comes up with people saving bean and corn seed especially bean and pea seed because they'll get it too dry and then it'll crack and so then when you thought out that protective seed coat is broken and you have problems so I don't see again I grew up in the deserts out west and so it's taken me a while to adjust but if you dry your seed in the fall of the year in the Midwest and I'm assuming most of you are from the Midwest and we're not having those super sticky hot days anymore it's probably gonna be dry enough that you can freeze it without using desiccant unless your house is really really humid you know or where you're drying it is really humid I just can't see if you're doing it in the middle of a July hot day you know and we're all just dripping with sweat you may have some wet wetness issues there that you may wanna dry it down a little bit more but normally you can overdry can be just as bad as not dry enough okay, yes this question was you get a huge price break if you buy seeds in quantities and that's true because packaging is a big part of seeds I can tell you that from experience seed packets cost us about nine cents a piece just on a small scale so that starts adding up so yeah and also the labor to fill them all if some seeds will not last as long this is true parsnip seeds, lettuce seeds, onion seeds just to name the top few will go bad the quickest okay, things like radishes, musk melon seed, most eggplant seed and tomato seed will last for a long long time now again, I'm probably telling trade secrets here but you have to understand something when you buy seeds from a major outlet in many cases the seeds you're already getting are several years old there's no guarantee that you're getting fresh seed okay, it says it's packed for the year 2012 that does not mean it was grown in 2011 all right, you're required to do germ tests but that doesn't mean it's fresh that isn't the same that's why I'm encouraging people to do their own you know, when you come to our farm every seed jar is marked with the year it was grown on it so I know, hey that's 2011, that's 2010 whatever when you buy seed commercially it just has to be guaranteed germination so if it's been held for a long time like let's say I have 50 pounds of golden acre cabbage seed in a freezer, I'm a wholesaler it's gonna germinate really well when I take it out of that freezer it's been in there 10 years and so I sell it to you back there and you buy all 50 pounds of it that doesn't mean it's gonna last if you take it out for a long period of time because the seed life does go down once it's out of the freezer so you have to be really careful on issues like that yes, yeah, you'd have to specifically ask you know, most of them would do that not all of them will I mean, in today's internet society there's just, I can't believe I was looking there to how many pop-up seed places there are it's phenomenal I guess I've sort of lived in still about 1990 somewhere on pre-internet days I forget that societies change but yeah yeah, yeah, yeah and a lot of them won't tell you that that's for sure and a lot of the wholesale places that sell them that won't tell you that information they just have a product that they know they can grow so much and it is a very competitive industry so that's again one of the reasons I say if you find some particular variety that does well for you you may want to try to learn how to save seed from it so okay, no other questions I thought I would show a few different things up here yes, go ahead you ask I'm also from Iowa and am I affiliated with Seed Savers Exchange I'll answer that as diplomatically as I can I moved to Iowa to help Seed Savers Exchange in 1984 that was my main impetus of moving to Iowa other than I wanted to start my teaching career and my growing career once I got out of college and what I thought would be the Garden of Eden and I still dearly love Iowa, I love the Midwest I think it's a great place to live I'll give you a sort of a statement after 31 years with the Seed Savers I dropped out last December for reasons we're just gonna call irreconcilable differences I was on the board for a year and I did not agree with the way that things were going and the way money was being spent I can talk to you about that later I'm still dedicated to seed saving I'm still dedicated to the cause I just don't agree with the way the direction it's going so yeah, I'm still a die-hard Seed Saver I've been saving seeds since before I knew how to save seeds when I was little my mother told me when I was two I would find seeds I would put them in every pot that we had in the house or every place and so that's my life it's just that I had to separate myself from a group that I just did not feel that was going the right direction so, okay? I brought a few things here to try to show to people and I'll pass them around at first and then probably would work best toward the end on some of them if we had people come up closer toward the end so I can show you different ways of things there's a lot of, I just kind of thought of the things that I get asked the most about how to tell things apart one of the things is squash species because if you're going to save seed from squash you either have to hand pollinate it which would be a whole nother hour seminar that I could give you on or you have to, you can grow one each of the four different species of squash most people, I say that hesitantly because I'm down farther south do not grow the one species of squash the mixtures but you see a lot more of them than today's society, the Cushaw pumpkins a lot of people like to grow zucchini but what will zucchini also cross with most of your orange pumpkins that people think of in Halloween, spaghetti squash, acorn squash so if you're growing in your garden an acorn squash and a zucchini squash and you decide to save seeds you're not gonna see it in that fruit when you go out there and pick that acorn squash you're gonna, oh this is the best acorn squash I've ever had and you haven't done anything other than you've got acorns and zucchinis in your garden and you plant, you say I'm gonna save the seeds, I just love this squash the next year you plant that acorn squash seed from that best tasting squash you ever had and what's it gonna look like it's gonna, you're gonna get an F1 hybrid between your zucchini and your acorn squash because most likely unless your garden's huge and you just, the bees are gonna fly from one to the other and so you're gonna plant this and you're gonna get it or worse yet you've grown some little ornamental gourds that everybody likes at the holidays and you plant those in your garden with your favorite acorn squash and the next year you're just so impressed I don't know how many people have sent me over the years this beautiful colored acorn squash because it's striped and it's pretty and guess what? Those little gourds are extremely bitter they have cucurbitacin in them and that's a dominant gene and so when it gets somewhere else man does it express itself in the greatest thing so you open up that acorn squash you bake it in the oven and you might, if you're lucky you're not gonna get it to your face in most cases because the bitterness is gonna be so strong it's gonna overpower you but if you get it in your mouth you're gonna be gagging and spitting for the next two weeks and wondering what happened so you've gotta do a couple things you've gotta learn your species and the Seed Savers does a good job usually of listing that in their catalog of which is which species and most catalogs a lot of them are starting to do that because there are a few people that will save their own but there's some tips and I brought these and I'm not gonna cut them open now to make a mess like I promised my wife so you can look at the stem in some cases and tell. I didn't have room in my truck to bring the full Tennessee sweet potato Q-Shaw squash but this is a typical Mixta stem great big fleshy thing and remember they've been picked for over a month that's a pretty much dead giveaway and if they've got these big rampant vines you probably gotta Mixta as farther south you go the more those people are gonna grow because they stand bugs and they withstand drought they're perfect for Missouri where you get those sporadic rains because they like that type of a climate and they withstand squash bugs with greatest of ease other one that does well in this part of the world is the moshada species but it has kind of a five-sided stem and most of the fruits will either ripen tan or they'll be greenish spotted this is your butternut squash your cheese pumpkins I'm forgetting something most of your pumpkin if you buy canned pumpkin in the store it's one called Dickinson or a special variety that Libby's has that they grow up by Morton, Illinois that's just a big old cheese pumpkin those are those big pretty that golden tan color they just look fallish I don't know when you see them if you get into your regular pie pumpkins that is the easy one to tell when you go into pie pumpkins if you're walking and you wanna know what species it is they've got a five-sided stem but this is the one with the little prickles on it you know when you get in there it's like your little edible gorges or zucchinis when you go to pick them you feel the prickles on the leaves and on everything that's a dead giveaway to look for that species if you find that and then the ones that I'm sure I won't say I'm sure but I'll bet they don't grow real well in Missouri are the most shot or excuse me the Maximus the big pretty soft juicy stemmed ones and they'll have a big stem but the nice thing about the Maximus is their stem just rots away rather quickly after they're picked that's kinda how you can tell them from the Mixta because the Mixta stem stays on for a long time but the Maximus stem is very big and corky but it goes away rather fast the Maximus species I think has the best flavor of all the squash but it does not do well in hot dry climates it likes it cool and that's why it does better Minnesota, Wisconsin your northern states the other thing I brought along and it's been hard keeping them this long is cucumbers this is a cucumber this was picked the 24th of September so it's probably got some good keeping genes in it if your cucumbers are like this you're not gonna be able to save seed from them because it's not mature enough okay you want them to look and get old and icky looking and when they get yellow they're either gonna be yellow if they're black spined or white if they're cream colored if they're white spined and that depends on whether it's a good for a pickling cucumber or good for a slicing cucumber is the color of the little spines on the little cucumber but when they turn dark and they get soft like this again in order to get good seed you've got to ferment it because otherwise if you try and dry that it's just like this big ugly mess of slime it's got all those little gelatinous coats and I usually do these in like five gallon buckets but the average home gardener could do two or three cucumbers easily in a ice or in a milk jug again slice the cucumber scoop the seeds out let them ferment for three or four days run the water off and then you've got this nice good seed that comes out as a result I'm gonna cut these watermelon toward the end because I know they'll make a mess so that you can see what a watermelon when you want to have good seed from it comes and of course they're probably gonna let me down and not have been mature but I tried finding small enough ones that I could bring here and yet still prove the point I brought an assortment of corns because this question comes up all the time in today's society if you start looking I'm also a poultry person and it concerns me greatly that our feed has become the feed that I'm able to get has become increasingly GMO corn that seems to have less and less nutritive value in it but more and more yield and I don't necessarily think yield is all as important as food value and some things so I brought some different types of corn to give you an example of what you can do no matter whether you're here from northern Minnesota or whether you're here from Texas you can get some ideas these were all grown in our patches in Iowa but you can adapt corns to a particular environment to where you can grow your own corn for your own feed we have a lot of customers that maybe only one of a dozen chickens and that's one of the things I encourage you to do is to grow some of your own feed so if you're that person in northern Wisconsin excuse me this is the perfect dent corn for you it's a nice little easy early dent doesn't get very big though does it but you don't have a lot of time when you live in northern Wisconsin as you move a little farther south here's another variety called golden glow that gets a little bit bigger ears and takes just a few more days and then you get to this one that came from Nebraska that has a unique ability to it's a bigger ear it's the same maturity as these two these other ones excuse me I couldn't pick them all three up Nebraska has this unique characteristic at least I've observed that it has tight husks to keep the bugs out as you see there's no bug damage on it until it gets close to maturing and then the husk just pop open so it dries down really fast so it's a pretty unique characteristic as far as speeding up the process when you get a little farther south there's all kinds of corns that you can grow that have big ears these are not hybrid corns these are all open pollinated this one is trucker's favorite yellow it's about 16 feet tall and the ears are about 10 feet off the ground so yeah I usually employ students to help me on the farm that I have in class that have some sort of interest and it was rather comical to watch when they were trying to harvest trucker's favorite when it was about 16 the ears actually were about nine feet on it and this Boone County white corn there wasn't an ear that was less than 10 feet off the ground so it helps a little bit if you have raccoon problems too the raccoons sometimes become discouraged because the stalks on it if you plant it far apart are very large now the advantage of a corn like that is wonderful if you have livestock to feed it to but because the amount of biomass there is terrific you know if you can turn your cows out on that I mean for one thing it keeps them busy just trying to get to the corn maybe makes them a little tough too but you know those are some things that you can adapt you're not gonna grow this corn in northern Minnesota is the point yes sir sure I talk about not the book I wrote for story publishing I'm supposed to push that book yeah you don't wanna do corn or soybeans you can do a number of things if you have just a few chickens you know what we have over about 5,000 birds so it's impossible for me to do that and do everything else too so I have to buy my feed but if you're talking about a backyard flock one of the first things I tell people to look at is grain sorghums you know depending upon your water requirement the other thing you can look at is sunflowers amaranth is good but it takes a lot of it the best way to grow amaranth is to use that for a seasonal pasture for the poultry and let them harvest it themselves because the amount of work you've got into it to get it is pretty intense at least the way amaranth grows for me you know there's other things that you can grow for backyard poultry like this particular variety of squash that I show here has high, great big seeds in it that are very very high in fats and oils like they're about 30 some percent fats and oils and very large seeded you don't grow that squash for the flesh they grow up for the seeds in the poor parts of Mexico that's what they use for food source for humans but it makes wonderful poultry feed as well so yeah if you want to stay away from corn and soy you can grow wheat is a little hard to harvest but sunflowers is probably one of the easiest things that you can grow and harvest and store through the winter to keep your flock going what's up? it'll make the publisher happy I get very minimal it's stories guide to raising poultry the fourth edition and I have a whole chapter in there devoted to how you can raise your own food crops and also in the catalog that my wife handed out to you next year I'm gonna have a whole section in there of things just so people can to try to encourage more people I kind of lost my focus I guess over the years and thought well nobody can raise their own food when you're trying to feed 5,000 birds but most of you don't have 5,000 birds so if you've got a dozen chickens or a half a dozen hens it's very easy for a person on a small piece of ground to raise all their chicken feed and not be dependent upon somebody else if you're looking for self-sufficiency so yeah that's one of the plans I'm gonna have some things in our own catalog this year that will and it'll be on our website as well to give people a chance to think of ways of thinking like raising mango beets even specific types of watermelons for certain seasons so you can almost carry yourself through along with the sunflowers and the sorghum and amaranth is one of the things I mentioned as well as long as the number of green crops this one is called Campeche if any of you've been world travelers I've never been there but it's the peninsula that's out on the Yucatan in Mexico and it's not that it's not edible don't get me wrong I don't want you to think and compare it to like an ornamental gourd it's just that I get spoiled at usually most years I have about 200 types of squash so I pick the ones that I think taste the best and eat and the rest I don't this one is just will produce from an average plant you'll get if you take care of it you know you gotta have all those considerations you'll get 35 to 50 fruits per plant of this I mean and it's just full of these big seeds that are oh it keeps very well I mean this will keep for a long time you know if it's a mixed up so most people aren't growing those if you grow that one you pretty much have got your you know you don't have to worry about you can get enough seeds out of one of them to plant out quite a bit of an area so yes what spacing do you plant your corn on? I know I know what you're saying what yes what spacing do you plant your corn on? um well that's the reason I'm having difficulty is because I don't have a particular spacing what I use to plant my corn is a I believe it's an earth way garden planter and depending you know you just push it by hand and the spacing between the rows is however far apart I step before I start the next row which is why I do most all my work by hand and the kids who work for me are bound to determine if we're going to have some system so we can use more mechanized equipment because most of today's youth doesn't like a lot of hand work but yeah I use an earth way cedar and on some of them like these bigger varieties you go through and if the birds don't get them or the gophers don't get them you thin them out so they're a little farther apart than that okay on a variety like this to get its full potential some of these bigger ones you want foot or so between plants and then you'll get these massive stocks that won't drop over you know the hybrid corn people I'll do my little pitch got their momentum because they always compare things to Reed's yellow dent in 2010 I was I grew I just set out on a project I got about I think there's maybe a dozen open pollinated corns left I ordered some samples and this is most of them here planted them all along with all the heirloom material I'd gather through seed savers and thought wow guess which one lodged and looked the worst at the end of the season Reed's yellow dent you know no offense to the Reed's family it had good yields but as far as 50 to 75% of the plants were every which direction by the end of the season I went through truckers favorite yellow you know I maybe had one or two that you know when you get 16 feet tall and you're in Iowa and there's nothing to stop but the wind's gonna knock a few over now and then but most of those stood their ground Boone County White we was hoping it would fall over because we had to chop it down to get to the ears at the end of the season but it did not do that you know and and that's some of them that you just have to look at that as the what will happen to him so yeah I have a friend that I learned some of that gardening from that was in Ohio that planted his pole beans on his corn and so he spaced him a good foot apart and then he plant beans after the corn came up and used you know that was the way things were done in the early 1900s his grandmother taught him that way and that's kind of the old fashioned you know the Indian Three Sisters method of corn beans and then you plant your squash ladders kind of a neat concept we don't think of it much but there's some from a biological perspective there's some companion planting things that go on there that are pretty neat that can happen when you do things that way so yeah it's a great one for planting pole beans on you know if you've got the time so on a small scale people can do more things like that okay I have about five minutes left so if there's any other questions otherwise we'll just yes sir if I'm not sure I heard all your question you said you noticed our catalog you have to order 25 chicks but you only want a half a dozen or a dozen is that what you asked um there are your best bet there is you've got a couple of options one you can either go to a feed store and buy commercial type chicks um which is becoming harder and harder to do because most of them don't do that anymore at least in Iowa um there are a few hatcheries that will sell fewer than 25 chicks um they cost more because there's all the things that they have to do to keep them alive to get them to you uh it's not that I'm trying to sell chicks uh the reason we have 25 is because that's been the longest established rule of what it takes to keep them warm shipping in the mail okay if you do less than that then you have to do some things differently that um I'm not comfortable with doing you have to add heat packs and then you take the risk of the fact that maybe 40 degrees when they leave Iowa but they may be going to Texas where it's 90 so the chicks are fine until they get to Texas and then they bake and it's it's caused a lot of problems in the US Postal Service because people get dead chicks and they're upset and why wouldn't you be upset you spend an extra forty dollars so you know for just postage just to get those six chicks to you and they all came dead and then you know it works for some and it doesn't work for others and I'm kind of an old fashioned person that says well you need to keep 25 and a lot of times we tell people to go together with someone else and then if you order them during the summer we can ship fewer because it's hotter during the summer so we get by with maybe 18 to 20 and then they'll do fine in the box but it's mainly for the welfare of the animal is what we do that for and why it's done that way and I'm not criticizing those who managed to successfully do it another way I just where we have to ship from in Iowa I don't think it's very successful I've experimented with those hot packs by just leaving chicks in my incubator shed or taking them for a ride in my truck etc just to see how it works and and I'm not comfortable with doing it I guess so that's that's kind of why it's that way Kansas small black yard flock in Kansas um well there's it depends on what your interests are you know if you want brown eggs and there's one breed you know if you want flighty it depends on what you're looking for dual purpose Kansas gets hot in the summer and you get cold in the winter depending on what part of Kansas you're in so that probably choose one with a rose comb one of the wine dots would probably be one of your choices or the dorkings would probably do okay for you they don't like heat as well though it depends on how hot you get in what you can provide form in the summer yeah I don't I'm not a white chicken lover but the hawks that live in my neighborhood love white chickens which is why why we don't have as many white uh white wine you know any of the colors of wine dots are probably good I think white wine dots are harder to find that are of good quality these days the first three chickens I had that were purebred were white wine dots when I was eight years old but those white wine dots of 1969 and 2012 aren't the same thing anymore so I will cut these watermelons open now and we'll see how big of a mess oh one thing I forgot to mention was the other thing that the non-vegeta or the vegetative will be propagated are sweet potatoes if you're going to go into saving your own sweet potatoes that's why I brought that big lots dish pan that's the best thing to start out with put a layer of soil in the bottom put the sweet potatoes on top of it and then put peat moss on top of that why peat moss two reasons one it kills most of the fungi that like to grow on sweet potatoes because it's acidic and so it'll give you a healthier slip it's also nice and fine and the slips come through it very easily and water started sweet potatoes usually spread some problems and not saying that it doesn't work for everybody but or for some it does not work for everyone but the best thing you can do on a sweet potato is to choose one about this size if you're going to sprout it you know that great big one is not going to sprout very well and you're going to be disappointed and some varieties you'd be surprised this is a purple variety this is probably going to be the best one and it's not like Irish potatoes or some of the myths around them where it affects what you're going to get as a final outcome you're looking for kind of the number of spots that the slips can form on the side of the sweet potato this is about as big a sweet potato as I like to use to start slips from if you get much bigger than that you're going to have problems with them rotting in the slipping process everybody always makes the big mistake they think they need to be cold they need to be hot if you've got an up I don't want to say upstairs if you've got a main room part of your house that stays about 65 degrees that's perfect when I first came to Iowa and I was running this gigantic old farmhouse I stored them in the upstairs bathroom in the south window they didn't they did beautiful in that because the heat vent came right up there and it was always about 65 degrees I never lost a sweet potato in the winter and the spring they produced the best slips so now we've added extra heater actually to our basement to keep it 60 to 65 and they store much better if you try and store them with your regular potatoes where it should be about 35 to 40 they're going to rot on you because sweet potatoes are sweet and fungi like it when it's a little cool and they take advantage of that and they go rampant on you and they'll eat them all or destroy them all so she asked if they don't need to be in the dark if you keep them in the dark that's fine they won't produce slips okay until they've gone through a period of light sensitivity so if you want them for eating keep them dark and warm if you want the ones you want to make your next year's plants off of keep them warm and in the light okay and then they will they will produce slips quicker my best slips come from the ones that I take out and put in my incubator shed one shed when I start in the spring and they sit out there for about three to four weeks in the light and then they just they just kind of get these little nubs all over and then they just slip real real fast so if you're wanting eating sweet potatoes keep them dark and don't handle them much and then they'll be fine I'm sorry slip is you put this in that container you know or you can do it outside too but that's easy for a person to go buy one of those keep the critters from eating them and then you just lay it there and cover it up and in a few about two weeks later these little plants will stick up they'll all of a sudden the ground looks like it's going to explode and all these little plants so you just go along the edge you reach your fingers down in there go along the edge and you just kind of pull up on one of those little plants and it'll be this little straight little stick of a plant with maybe two or three leaves on top and maybe one or two roots on the bottom and that's a slip and that's what you plant in your garden try not to stick them in the water okay you're gonna get better because when you stick them in the water every okay and I'm not saying I that there are other ways to do it but the every time you fiddle with the sweet potato once you once it's slipped if you pot it up you get people think oh they gotta have more roots they gotta have more roots every time you do that you decrease your yield about 25 percent okay if it's you pull that up and it's even got one little hair root on it shoving the ground keep it wet for a week to 10 days and you're gonna get twice the sweet potatoes as if you try to baby it along and make it look really rooted I just was in shock a year or so ago and the first part of July I went into a Lowe's and it's not Lowe's fault here they were all these sweet potato plants in six packs that had been there since probably the middle of May because this was an Iowa and everything and they're sitting there in six packs and then that fall you know I guess they did that all over the country all the garden stores I get all these calls I got all these sweet potatoes but they're all malformed roots or I got lots of vines and no roots and that's the more you tinker with it or the more they're stunted the more they're going to just say forget it and just produce foliage so yeah just it's hard for some people understand that but the smaller the slip and just water it good in the garden and it'll take right off if you get these great big slips they don't do as well it takes them a long time to recover just uh I use my whatever you call that finger is that your pointer finger index finger that's about the right size for most of them they've got two or three leaves on the top and just keep them wet yep just bury it down about halfway and it'll come right up you really can't screw up with them unless you don't water them at first week to 10 days just keep them good and wet and then they take off yes do you mound them at all you mean when you're planting them okay you have clay soil don't you there's no such thing as a mound on my farm because the first time either the wind blows or it rains the mound becomes a flat surface so no I don't mound them if you have real heavy soil it will make it easier if you go along and I've seen people do this to make that sort of amount and put them in the top of that mound and that will work well for you if you do that if you've got that heavy dirt there's no way I can make a mound I mean you could try all day you could die trying to make a mound in my sand you know it's just it isn't going to happen so no I plant mine flat but uh and that's that's the key there so yes that's exactly right um he said if you get through with your slips and you plant the potato you get a gnarly good for nothing thing and that's that's very true I remember the first year I moved to Iowa I thought well why can't I just do them like Irish potatoes so at the end of the time I dug the ones out of the starting bed and cut them into chunks so that there'd be well what's if you got one plant there right if you have four or five you're going to have four to five times the amount of sweet potatoes you know what you get you get 10 to 20 times the amount of foliage and you know how many sweet potatoes you get none because they just go to all the foliage so you can't plant them in chunks like that and a lot of people think you should just cut them into chunks and drop them in the ground it does not work that way they just will not yield very well at all