 so I hope to demystify that for you tonight and show you that you don't need to rush out and spend a fortune on any special equipment. You probably find most of what you need in your kitchen right now and we'll go through that. So this is a picture of Ipomir. It's a non-invasive morning glory called grandpa ox and that is one of the reasons to save your own seeds because we're so fortunate we can have access to heritage varieties of beautiful flowers, herds, vegetables that we may not otherwise necessarily be able to access otherwise and it's up to us to keep growing and saving these plants for the future. So one I got really interested in the subject of plant genetic diversity when I became an addicted gardener and when I found out I saw this graph here showing the what's happened to the diversity of let's just focus tonight on food plants mainly but a century ago at the turn of the last century commercial seed houses were offering hundreds of varieties of different types of vegetables you know 408 different varieties of peas and nearly 500 different types of lettuces so that the gardener had so many choices to to grow from and in those days that actually most people were involved in their food production there were market gardens and local farms provided produce for people and we can see at the bottom of this slide 80 years later the impact of what's happened to affect the varieties of food plants that are available to us and how much that has shrunk down because people moved away from growing their own food and saving seeds and we have an issue now that we rely on so few varieties of food plants to feed us and that are commercially available in the supermarket and that's an enormous loss. So this is what worries me as well my concern is that we're sitting in a really vulnerable place right now with climate change and climate change affects food production and agricultural crops and that means that we can't guarantee that we are going to go on be able to go on importing so much of our food from around the world and that it's more important than ever that we start growing food for ourselves which is available locally within reach and that we all around the world in fact realize with this pandemic that you know we weren't feeling so secure anymore and it's we're into an uncertain future and it's a very uncertain future because of who controls the seeds and this simply shows quite clearly that the seeds of the food plants are not in the hands of the people anymore in fact they're basically under the control 75% of the world's food seeds are in the corporate under corporate control with just four major corporations who actually have the power to decide who eats and who doesn't eat. So I became you know very motivated with all these factors at play to learn how to save seeds from my garden and there are so many benefits to saving seeds as well because you save so much money you can have a container full of fresh vigorous organically grown food seeds for free when you choose to grow open pollinated varieties of food plants and so I started focusing on the heritage or open pollinated varieties and that's what I'm talking about tonight when we talk about saving our own seeds and I recommend at the very least that people get this little handbook from our national organization called Seeds of Diversity Canada that is a grassroots seed saving organization where Canadians across the country grow out heritage varieties of food plants and then they are available to other people who join in every year a bulletin is printed and you can join and the only requirement is that you in turn save some seeds and offer them back to the organization so that way the people keep growing out the open pollinated food seeds and they're always available on a sharing system so that's available at www.seeds.ca if you go online you can also find many many sources for open pollinated seeds if you want to get started so I actually started saving seeds and I got so hooked on that that I started my own seed business called Seeds of Victoria and they were certified organic and all open pollinated varieties that grew successfully in this part on Vancouver Island and on the west coast of Canada so we ended up with you know I feel a lot more secure about food when I know that I have the ability to grow it and I've got the seeds with which to grow it and I understood that as long as I was choosing open pollinated varieties that I would always have the seeds that I would need to grow my food in my own yard in my back garden that I could save for future crops and so that's the difference between hybrid varieties and open pollinated varieties which are naturally pollinated and there are such diversity available to us just here with the pulses the beans and the peas in this mandala that we made and a beautiful thing for the children to get involved in you know as well the garden and shucking peas and beans and looking at all the different shapes and colors and right from the beginning when I very very first sowed my first garden from sea and this is a tiny little pinch of Nicotiana Silvestris seed it just amazed me the miracle that was within that tiny little speck of dust that held all that intelligence and information to grow from that little speck of dust into this enormous tobacco plant which is extremely fragrant called Nicotiana Silvestris and that in turn would every flower on that stem would then go on to producing masses of more seeds in continuity in order to preserve the continuation of the species which is really what life is all about and the function that we you know continue life by reproduction and so I say if you're going to become a seed saver then at the very least find a magnifying glass like this one I found in an antique shop and get to know what it is that you're saving so that you are in fact collecting the seed of the plant and not just the chaff by mistake and by viewing it through a magnifying glass you know you can confirm they're very small a lot of the seeds that it is that is what that you are after so a hundred years ago when people were actively growing huge gardens and providing most of the food that they put on their tables from their own backyards or procuring it locally there would have been a seed cleaning machine like this one where they would have run through many of those varieties in order to get clean seed but we don't need all that we don't need a specialized machine I discovered when I got hooked on seed saving I found that I could just improvise with using whatever was handy and available so tubs and plant sources and baking sheets and beer flat boxes whatever you know all works just fine and when I show this slide I usually accompany it by saying that one of the biggest problems that people have when they're seed saving is that they don't allow the seeds to dry out properly before they store them and often they'll go moldy in that case because it takes a while for them to dry and so you know this is a very important process of seed collection there's nothing worse than going into your container of safe seeds and finding well I'm going to have a quick drink here and that they've gone moldy now I usually just spread them out in the warmth of the greenhouse or if you have a warm living room it for example not in blasting full sun but just for a week or so and also to let the bugs crawl out from during the cleaning process there's a lot of chaff and plant debris will attract bugs and you don't want them crawling out all over your living room perhaps use a porch or a greenhouse or somewhere in the garage and basically what we need you know the most technical thing we need which can be improvised with other things is a set of screens with different size mesh so starting with a very fine mesh to a medium to a large and so the cleaning of the seeds actually is done using screens like this and the screens can also be used to lay them out in order to dry the seeds they're very useful for that purpose as well as screening when I started out at the beginning I would literally clean my seeds on a windy day I would wait for the perfect day and I would this is what's called winnowing I would winnow the seeds by pouring them from one basin to a larger basin with a light breeze blowing that would blow all the chaff off the seeds and I just keep on pouring them back and forth and back and forth until all I was left with was a bowl of clean seeds and all the dust and chaff and debris was blown away now the other way to do that is simply to blow on the seeds when you get down to the end maybe there's just a few little bits left so just simply and carefully just blow off the last of the chaff so that your seeds are ready for storing and they're perfectly clean but over the years and I got busier and I started growing more and more things for my seed business and I realized I couldn't always wait until the perfect day with the perfect breeze and so I resorted to using a handy hairdryer on a cold setting and I would just screen the seeds and then the last and final cleaning is always done using the hairdryer and you have to be careful holding the bowl in one hand and moving slightly closer just starting from a distance until you get just the right distance that you're actually blowing the lighter material out of the bowl and the seeds that are heavier will stay in the bowl and you just continue doing that until all that's left in the bowl are the clean seeds and obviously you know a reason to grow an open pollinated plants for value and for food security is you know the fact that this is a row of kale that was planted in like five minutes and left to go to seed and out of this 15 foot row of kale leaving it to go to seed I get a bucket full of kale seeds and so that kale will go through the winter and then go to seed the following spring and it's a brassica and it has a pod so the seeds are actually contained in the pods and every plant puts out hundreds of pods and inside every pod there are 10 15 seeds so again continuation of the species here with the kale and you know that way you've got so many kale seeds which have a viability of five years they will actually last in storage and grow beautiful kale for you for the following five years and this is all available from a short row of kale just to show you again with something like Tulsi basil holy basil or sacred basil which makes a wonderful tea just we grow these in a warm place in a one gallon pot so one plant in a one gallon pot and harvest the leaves but then finishing them off when they actually go to seed this is a row of Tulsi basil plants on my sun deck just maturing the seed and you can again I'm showing you this because I want to show you how much seed is like a bush of a bushel here of Tulsi basil seeds are available from a few pots of basil plants so you know very economic and we don't all have to save all the seeds of everything if we just chose to save seeds of the best healthiest plants that produce the most highest yields and were disease resistant that's the selection that we have as a seed saver so my garden again is there's a little bit of thinking to do there's not much to know about seed saving it's pretty basic I'm going to tell you the basic things tonight but one thing you do need to do is practice crop rotation so this is my 50 by 50 food garden in its beginning stages and simply dividing it into four quadrants and moving plants from different families around making sure that you never grow the same plant in the same place in following years that prevents the buildup of pests and diseases and as a seed saver you are actually selecting for the seeds from the healthiest most vibrant examples of the plants from the romaine lettuces that have the biggest hearts on them that are you know of the best flavor and represent the variety so that the strain is true and so in this garden I was able to grow enough food amazing amount of year-round food production and also to collect seeds from the food as I was growing it and admittedly a seed saving garden doesn't always look the tidiest but this actually is the part of the life cycle of the plant that most gardeners miss out on when they don't allow their plants to go to seed then you don't see the final stage of the plant and the color of the flowers and you know the fantastic shapes and forms of the plant when it's finished it's going from seed back to seed and it's amazing you know how many different types of seeds you can save from a relatively small space as long as you understand about what crosses and what doesn't cross and what you can grow close together and what needs separation so for example in one quadrant of my food garden I would plant rows and rows of salad greens and all the different lettuces because lettuce is a good place to start as a seed saver because lettuce is self pollinating and self pollinating basically means that the male and female are in the same flower that the plants have what's called perfect flowers with male and female in the same flower they don't need an agent like a bee or a pollinating insect to or wind to conduct pollination because they basically are self pollinating and because of that there is less chance of them mixing up their genes with other varieties so when it comes to lettuces and salad greens you can actually grow plants relatively close together and be sure that you are going to have purity of strain with the resulting seeds so that's what it looks like later on in the year when the lettuces have been allowed to go to seed so in a in a row like that what we're doing is we're harvesting lettuces as leaves leaving the plants to grow on some of them we're thinning out to leave some of them to get larger then we are selecting out our best lettuces and eating the rest and then we've got the seed of the best lettuces which is going to be grown for the following year and so you know you want to be able to select for the the best traits that the plant offers and in this case the plants are just growing side by side and are keeping them upright so they don't touch each other and that way when the lettuces go to seed which looks like this and they're in the asteraceae family used to be called composite they are have these little parachutes little feathery attachments to every seed because their wind pollinated the daisy family is wind pollinated and so waiting for dispersal waiting for the wind to come along pick up the parachute of feathery parts and blow the seed away from the mother plant to disperse it and at this point as a seed saving you can say that seed is ready and cut it off and put it in brown paper bags and so brown paper bags when you go to the grocery store I'll have paper please and during seed saving season and in they go you write on the bag the variety the date collected any pertinent notes that you want to make and you just leave it in the bag for it to dry and the seeds to drop in the bag so they don't actually mature and drop in the garden this with the lettuce when it's ready when it's dried then lay it out and then the separation occurs which is a banging it's just actually taking bundles like a bouquet of flowers of the lettuce and bashing it against the slope of a wheelbarrow a cleaned out wheelbarrow and the seeds will fall off the plant into the bottom of the wheelbarrow and then the next thing is to take your screens and actually look at your seeds decide which screen that the seeds will go through and that the chaff and debris will not go through so you can start your first screening into a clean dry bowl and at the end of that screening when you finally you've got only a little bit of maybe sand or just a mostly removed large chaff debris plant material and you've just got the seeds and you just need to give it the final cleaning you gear up with your hairdryer and blow off that last remaining debris from the seeds and ready to package and store away and seeds store best at five degrees centigrade they just need to be in a cool dark place in airtight tubs and so something like yogurt tubs works perfectly for that there's the chaff just blowing off the seed there and there is the clean lettuce seed ready to store away seeds are never actually dormant they're always breathing and exchanging gases and so what happens over time is that the seed loses its what's called viability its life force and the vigor and so that means that the older your seed is the less vigor it will display when it's some sown for germination and so sometimes it's a good idea to do a germination test and just putting 10 seeds on some paper towel and seeing how many out of the 10 germinate to show you whether you need to sow extras for poor germination or not or even whether to determine whether there is any germination left or whether the seed has succeeded its viability with pea seeds you know it's a really good trick the gutter trick works like magic for me every year and I just put potting medium in the gutter and so the pea seeds one inch deep one inch apart you know throughout the gutter and another thing for a seed saver to start saving which is very easy are peas because peas and beans the same as lettuces are self pollinating and so you can grow different varieties relatively close together without worrying about them cross pollinating so we take these variety of peas in the gutter we'd hoe a row we would just put the supports in place hoe a furrow slide the peas out of the gutter put them in the furrow and let them grow up the supports and that way you get a hundred percent germination you avoid birds pulling them out you avoid slugs eating them you don't have to reseed you just put them in when they're about four to six inches tall in the gutters they're ready and the roots are ready to go into the furrow in the garden and this is the most successful way to get the largest yield and success out of your peas and at this point we're actually in this picture we've got sweet peas and edible pod peas growing together so they won't cross with each other and at some point the more you pick them the more they produce and at some point you can just stop picking them and let the rest go to seed and this picture shows like okay we're they're maturing now and the pods are going crispy and the seeds inside are ready for saving and you can do the squish test if you're not sure whether the seeds are ready or not by just seeing if they're soft or they're still green or if they're hard and if they resist when you press them then they're ready for collection with the peas there is something to consider and that is pea weevils and if you look closely when you save your pea seeds you can pull out any that have been infested by weevils they will have eggs laid inside them and you can see them quite clearly because they're cracked open and the egg masses are showing and you want to discard those and then in case we missed any we always put the pea seeds in the freezer just overnight to kill any other insects that might still be lurking in the seed and to guarantee that we've got bug free seed with the rest of the seeds the only other seed that I usually freeze is hollyhock seeds hollyhock seeds have weevils and they love living in the seed case of the hollyhocks and so if you save hollyhock seeds and you just spread them out on a plate you'll see that there are a lot of weevils are going to show up so I let the weevils crawl off the seeds by leaving them out spreading them out on a tray and then just to be sure I'll put them in the freezer for 24 hours to destroy any other weevils but that's the only time that I actually would freeze seeds so that's the mammoth melting seed you know very generous also makes a good soup pea mammoth melting and you can get really high yields using the gutter the pea gutter trick and so here in a small space in my 50 by 50 garden I've got crimson flowered broad beans and kale going to seed there and actually some perpetual spinach there's a lot of things going to seed in a small space and the crimson flower broad beans are a wonderful example of a woman called miss cut bush from kent in england had been saving these crimson flower very fragrant fava beans in her garden for years and now she was in her 90s and so she donated a handful of these seeds to the Henry double day research association seed library that then went on to have the seed exchange as we do with the seeds of diversity canada in england it's called Henry double day research association and I was able to apply to their program and get a small packet of these crimson flowered broad beans and we've been growing these every year ever since and they make wonderful fava which can be dried or can be frozen and also beautiful plants in the garden with the benefit of lovely color and fragrance and in fact a lot of people don't know this but originally these crimson fava's date back to 1778 and that sort of is an illustration of how our ancestors have been passing seeds on from generation to generation for you know food security and knowing that they will grow well and produce lots of high protein beans uh so if that bean was not saved by miss cut bush over all those years and then donated that would probably be an extinct bean now but that bean actually it came to canada and it went to the cd saturday seed exchange shows that travel across canada there was 150 cd saturday seed exchanges in canada um where people who save seeds go every year and exchange their seeds because of that it's in circulation and you'll always be able to find somebody that is growing out the crimson fava beans and um so beans and peas as i said before are self pollinating you can grow many different varieties you don't have to worry about cross pollination um usually 30 feet for the pole beans is plenty to guarantee that there's no accidental pollination and you can enjoy saving um these blue jay heritage beans so many different wonderful snap beans and also dried beans and the tomatoes fortunately um are also self pollinating so that means that we can grow lots of different varieties of tomatoes available there are hundreds from all around the world and if you go to www.seeds.ca you'll be able to find people who are growing them and supplying them these are the heritage tomatoes and often with colorful histories and stories behind them that hail from all over the world and everyone is bound to find their favorite tomato amongst such a selection as this and i certainly got carried away because at one point i was actually growing over 50 varieties at my nursery and people just loved the choices and the diversity amongst the heritage tomatoes but um again only six feet spacing between tomato plants and the same with peppers you know the um solanaceae that is eggplant pepper and tomatoes are all able to be grown uh within close distance to each other and um it's very easy to save seeds of the peppers um you just have to cut them in half and scrape out the seeds um if you are collecting seeds of hot peppers like habanero scotch bonnet or cayenne you probably want to wear a pair of gloves and uh not to rub your eyes until you take your gloves off because um the extremely hot seeds is where the heat is you take the placenta out of the pepper um and then you can either freeze the peppers freeze really well or make um some hot sauce with it or some maybe red pepper jelly of their sweet peppers and um save the seeds to grow out the following year and this is just one week's worth of collecting from our pepper plants um just to show the diversity that's available and their heat lovers peppers but um you can grow them in two gallon pots one pepper per plant per pot and put them inside um the greenhouse or um put them up against a up on a sun deck or something like that to get them extra heat eggplants the same um and that you can grow wonderful eggplants surprisingly these rosa bianca white eggplants are quite prolific in two gallon pots and again um with minimal separation between plants and how do you save tomato seeds actually so the thing about saving seeds is you always want to be able to be identifying what it is you're saving so you want to have a label that's uh going uh with the seeds as you're saving them when you cut the tomato in half you'll see the seeds there and the pulp and if you look closely at the seeds you'll see that actually there's a gelatinous coat around every seed like uh there is egg white around egg yolk and that gelatinous coating is there to inhibit germination and so the idea is that we actually want to ferment the tomato seeds which at the same time is dissolving that gelatinous coating it also destroys any seed-borne pathogens at the same time and so um you want to squeeze that out um with the liquid of the tomato um and the label handy and literally leave it for four days to ferment at which point you'll get this kind of scum forming on the top um and on the fifth day no more than um five days because the seeds will actually germinate if left any longer um you want to take um that and put it into a big bowl um the good seeds are going to sink down to the bottom of the bowl and the um scum and the seeds that are no good will float up to the top of the bowl and you just pour that off and you repeat that you keep on filling it up with water let the good seeds sink to the bottom and all the scum to the top pour it off and finally at the very end you get a sieve out from the kitchen and you pour the seeds into the sieve and rinse them and then you tap them out um get them off the sieve onto a plate spread them out with the label and leave them to dry in a warm place for about a week or so and then crumble them with your fingers because they are kind of clumped together and let them dry another day or two and then store them in an airtight yogurt container with a label on top so this is one week's worth of um tomato collection for seed saving and um we've got them picked at the peak of ripeness when they're red and um you know they are definitely it's important not to pick them too early when the seeds are still green and immature because then they won't um grow for you the following year and that is the preferred way to um save tomato seeds and so this is what it looks like when you're growing lots of different types of tomatoes I just used to squeeze them into yogurt tubs and then this is actually an interesting photo because it shows you all the different types of bacteria and microbes that are come um and work at the fermentation process uh it's really interesting everyone is different so they all get eventually rinsed off and sieved and tapped and dried and so you end up with plates full of seeds like this which are labeled and ready to be stored and a tomato seed will actually be good for up to 10 years if stored in a cool dry place um and the germination at the 10th year isn't the best of course but you still can get that seed to germinate which gives you an opportunity to um get the seed back if you think that you've lost it that's um you know a wet process and this is also a wet process of seed saving where mostly um saving seeds involves drying um in some cases the seeds actually are part of the flesh of the fruit as this is with um ground cherries and cake gooseberries and tomatillos and so in this case I put them in a food processor or add some water and just mash them with a potato masher but the idea is that you want to macerate them so these are purple tomatillos and again you can't pick the seeds or squeeze the seeds out of these you have to macerate the flesh to release the seed that's embedded in the flesh and so a processor with a pulse and you put the seeds in and you just give it three or four pulses very little because you don't want to you know destroy the small seeds and that breaks up the flesh and releases the seed and then you can put it into a bowl of water and have um the seeds again will sink to the bottom and then strain out all the um pulp same with cucumbers really important if you're saving seeds of cucumbers um they need to be mature within the plant and left to yellow um almost go yellow so um they're going to get large and you want to leave them for as long as you can on the plant because um if you pick them too soon the seeds won't be mature inside the cucumber and when they're ready you can just scrape the seeds out of the cucumber into water and again the good seeds will sink to the bottom and the empty seeds um or the no good seeds will float to the top with the pulp and again rinse out so that you end up just with um good quality plump cucumber seeds and it's amazing how many seeds a cucumber makes um we grew Armenian cucumbers this year and they were just phenomenal and that was an interesting um uh vegetable to try so um I just went over the self-pollinating food plants like the lettuces the peas the beans the tomatoes the peppers and the egg plants and those things can all be grown in relative um close proximity to each other but then now we're going to be talking about cross pollinating plants our out crossing plants that actually have the male and female on different plants and that's all the squash family and the squash family have flowers that are either male and this is a male flower with a long stalk and pollen on the amphors and also has a female flower with a short stalk and and there's an ovary and a stigma and the female and um what has to happen is that the pollen has to be transferred from the male flower to the female flower in order to enact pollination and when that happens then the flower withers as the fruit develops um and the fruit comes out of the dying flower from the ovary of the of the flower so um the problem is you actually have to make sure that you don't have more um the one variety from every species there are four different species of squash plants which is why I recommend you getting that handbook that I talked about it costs $15 from seeds of diversity they'll mail them out um you can order on their website at seeds.ca because it explains about hand pollinating controlled hand pollination um and also um about isolation so um if you're growing uh two different types of curcubita peepo then they're going to cross with each other and you won't get uh the purity of strain when you sow the seeds that result in the following year so that's important to make sure that you have isolation and you choose maybe only one variety from each of the four species and that is possible to do that so you don't have to worry about out crossing with the genetic material and often you know people are so excited because they get volunteer squash in their garden and they're on their compost pile or wherever and they grow them out and they look and they go what is that and um that usually is an unedible inedible squash that is the result of a cross between um two different varieties um and you get neither this nor that and something which isn't really worth eating so um yes isolation and selection when you're choosing to do save squash seeds or practice hand pollination and taping after you've actually done the hand pollination um the other ones which are trickier to save seed from are um biennial root crops like this celeriac um not so much for us here on the west coast because we have such mild temperate winters and things like beets and carrots and celeriac and rutabagas will actually over winter and then we'll go to seed the following year because they're biennial root crops and so getting them through the winter in other parts of the country people would have to dig them up because they probably freeze and then they have to store them and then replant them the following year in order for them to complete their life cycle but for us we're lucky we can actually leave them all winter in the garden and um and that goes for onions so all the alliums are biennial root crops too and alliums will easily cross with each other so you have to be careful again when you're choosing to save onion seed they need a quarter of a mile isolation between varieties to maintain the purity of the strain these are chives and um they are easier to collect seeds of the flowers blossoms are edible and they produce lots of seeds within their seed heads which are easy to collect and shake out the leeks are also very easy to collect seeds of they is a bit of an investment they take time if you're choosing leeks to save seeds of you want to choose winter overwintering varieties that come through the winter because then they will go to seed in the following spring and this is actually something which even if you don't eat the leeks you know you can just you don't like leeks you can grow them just for the seed because they're like ornamental they are so showy and um I just love them when they come up and start going to seed the following year and they've got these huge purpley pink seed heads on them and within every seed head there are hundreds of little inflorescences and they attract lots of bees and pollinators to the garden because every single one of those has to be uh germinated uh not germinated pollinated um fertilized um by a bee in order for a seed to result and the thing about allium seed is that they are very short-lived allium seeds and they need to be fresh and you need to save them every year for the best results so um I enjoy this spectacle in my garden I enjoy the bees and the pollinators that they attract to the garden and I certainly appreciate the buckets full of black leek seeds that I get as a result of allowing them to set seed like this but it is a slow process for the seed to mature and usually you wouldn't be collecting them till maybe July or no maybe somewhere between July to August uh no not August um sorry September yeah I've had to wait till September um maybe it depends on the weather how quickly you know seed sets and matures but in an average year probably you're going to be waiting until September before you're going to be cutting down um the heads with all the seeds in of your leeks and then you want to to um dry them I just leave them on the bench in the greenhouse to let them thoroughly dry and then I take a pair of scissors and I cut um the seeds off the top of their stalks and into a stainless steel bowl and then I just take um a pair of gloves and I rub uh the seeds out of the chaff to separate it and then use the hairdryer to blow all the bits off all the debris are leaving me just with pure black leek seed and same with the um sunflowers will cross up as well you know for years we just grew this one sunflower um it's the tarahumara sunflower which is an edible um sunflower seed and they're huge they're the size of dinner plates and you only get one it's like the russian mammoth sunflower you only get one flower per stalk and the stalks are gigantic um and so we wanted to have edible sunflower seeds so we made sure we didn't grow any other sunflowers because they would cross pollinate you need about a quarter of a mile um so it's bit difficult in the city to collect sunflower seeds but then maybe we don't care and we let them mix up and we just have a mix of sunflowers the following year and we let the birds have some too but um when the head drops usually the head follows the sun round during the day and um when the seeds are ready um the head will bow and um that tells you that now it's ready that the seeds are actually um the petals will have the first indication it's the petals fall off the flowers and then in the center the seeds are formed so there'll be different sizes and um it's like a spiral of seeds inside each head so then we'll cut a foot of stalk off the sunflower and we'll just line them up in the greenhouse facing the sun again to dry them out before we actually just pick out the seeds from the head of the sunflower into a onto a screen and um thoroughly dry them window screens are worth collecting if you're a seed saver for drying purposes and um yeah there's some wonderful sunflower seeds there for eating but also for growing more sunflowers the following year just warn you as a seed saver that um some things you have to watch out for because there's seed all over the garden like this good king Henry is an example and they produce millions of seeds as does um a regular silvetta the wild species of a regular and um you want to make sure as a seed saver that you're on it and you're actually not allowing them to seed around the garden because it can be a real nuisance to get rid of these plants everywhere and um when you dry them out the um they've been dried in a brown paper bag and now we're going to strip them off the stalk um this is a good king Henry it's a perennial spinach plant and um we're going to actually screen it so the next thing is we're screening the seed through a very fine screen because it's tiny tiny seed and we're separating all the um chaff from the seed and um at the end of the cleaning process um when we've used the hairdryer we should just have a bowl full of clean seeds to sow for the following year and coriander is another one um that um is um easy to let go to seed um it's a half hardy annual it will produce seed in the first year in the garden and um it's a wonderful plant to let go to seed because the simple flowers of the coriander plant attract pollinators and beneficials to the garden because of the simple flower structure and then after that they are so generous in their seed production and uh when the seeds change color from green to this sort of pinky brown it tells you that it's time to collect them and again just to cut them off and put them in um you know totes or into buckets or into brown paper bags and um then later on to um shake them off and separate them from the plant um a small row of this um celebration swiss chard which is multicolored is fun to save seeds of this um this will go right through the winter it's pretty winter hardy fantastic food and um easy to save seeds of and it's the fun because you can uh get to select the colors of the stalks the most vibrant colors so you can get your own mix going there and this is what it looks like a short row of celebration swiss chard produces masses of um charred seeds and it's in the chenapode aca family which is the beet family and swiss chard um and um the seeds look like this um they're hard when you press them um they're sort of shifting color they've gone from green to yellow and from yellow they will go to brown and with some plants you can actually take the seed um off the plant um before it's fully mature as long as it's reached a certain point of maturity um and you get to know this through experience it will continue to ripen off the plant and so this seed will um over time we've laid it out on tops because we've got such a large quantity here um when it's brown and dry and ready we'll then strip the stalks and release the seed um and screen it um and it that is a close-up of the chard um so you can see that it's brown there and it's a little multiple seed um composite seed and uh there's lots of seeds available for future chard harvest and with something like radishes um they produce pods and also really pretty flowers either white or pink and um the pods are also edible and they're very ornamental so in many cases I say just plant some radishes in your flower beds or some leeks even or some of that colorful chard and then eat your garden you know like don't separate it out like you can plunk food in all over the place so um this is radish seed like we've laid it out just shows you um how much seed is fantastic quantities of seed from a relatively short row of radishes and um so some of the ways to release the seeds from the um plant is um just a tapping in a tote simple light tapping um crushes the plants this is flax and so tap tap tap and out the the seeds um will come and fall to the bottom of the tote and then you just take off the plant um chaff and um start with the screening and finish with the hair drying and um in some cases um it's a little bit so you've got to get a bit more violent than that it takes um a sledgehammer um with the artichokes or the cardoons they're related um you have to wait until they ripen and um this is what you get as a result these beautiful huge um purple fissile flowers very ornamental and the bees love them and uh when they are mature um it looks like this you cut them off the plant and then you know you want to put them in a stainless steel bowl and take a hammer or some kind of crushing implement and um release break it up and release all the feathers from the um artichoke and at the bottom of every feather is a seed attached and so again this is in the family where a fissile family where the wind is the dispersal agent and it picks up the feathers and blows the seeds away from the mother plant and so with this sort of um preparation of this seed it's advisable not to breathe in the dust and to wear gloves because it's prickly and um also to um not do it outside on a windy day um and to screen off all this stuff because the seeds are rather small and they are to sprout through a screen it's quite easy to clean and when you clean you actually end up with um a tray of plants that look like seeds that look like this so when i wrote my book the zero mile diet um i wasn't just writing a book about growing food um i was writing a book about um um ongoing food harvest and year-round food production winter vegetables um and also um for every single plant that i talk about and um i actually give directions from the A to Z of vegetables and the A to Z of culinary herbs um i explain how to grow them their cultivation requirements and little things i've learned over 35 years of growing my own food but for every single plant i also talk about how to save seeds because to my mind they belong together you can't have sustainable food production without having the seeds with which to grow the food um i started out saying that and i'm extremely concerned um about the fact that you know we've moved so far away from gardens from growing our own food um from uh the incredible rewarding experience of doing that but also the empowerment of choosing to grow open pollinated heritage varieties which thanks to our ancestors and networks of seed savers across the country are still available to us um more and more of us now have gone back to the food garden and i know that next year it'll be the same as last year there'll be a mass panic of um trying to get food seeds with which to grow food and uh one has to remember that this is not just happening here around us this is happening concurrently around the entire globe in every country people are concerned just as we are um about food security and what's going to happen because of the impacts of climate change and what's going to happen to the distribution and availability of food that we sort of take for granted because of covid impacts um and you know now is as good a time as any and you probably did this year go back to your food garden to um learn how to save seeds because then the people will have control of the seeds they'll be back in their hands and we will be actively growing out the seeds that we save which is really the only way to ensure their continuity because um even with that seed vault in the tundra which is now melted um in norway uh where they whole world sent seed collections for storage for future generations um i just don't think that that's the solution to our problems because in a hundred years you know if we access those seed collections what kind of environment and what kind of world um the changes are so fast we need the seeds grown out in our gardens and adapting to change as change happens as the weather shifts so do the characteristics and traits within the plants and we need access to seeds of those feed plants that can survive the impacts of climate change and are completely adapted to our micro climate and also actually your own unique micro climate in your own backyard and so once again i say that the best seeds you can possibly grow from are the seeds that you save yourself they're the freshest um they're the purest because you know you probably tended them lovingly and grew them organically and um they are going to yield amazing results for you and in the past i've compared our own seeds with some commercial varieties um most seed companies don't actually grow their own seeds they just package them and we found that our seeds are 30 percent bigger larger the endosperm is more vigorous and we get amazing results so i'm going to finish now and encourage you to become a seed saver uh thank you what a beautiful that's a beautiful message thank you very inspiring um caroline there are a few questions in the q&a so um i will um open that up and go to those so um jillian is asking is it too late to put the peas in the freezer after being dried in other words you know she's put them in the freezer to kill the weevils and is it too late too late to do what to put the peas in the freezer um okay dried okay so she's collected the pea seeds she's dried the pea seeds and now the next thing is to select any that have got any cracks or egg mouses and get rid of any done that and now to take your airtight container and put it in the freezer and then take it out and store them in a cold dark place no it's not too late at any point you can freeze those seeds yeah right that's great good um and amber is asking can i put the seeds in the fridge i she has sort of two or she has a two-part question she says can i put the seeds in the fridge and the second part is my lettuces are still in its yellow flower it's been like that for quite a long time and no fluffy cotton things forming why is that thanks okay all right so probably at this stage of the game you're not going to get mature seed from your lettuces they're still in flower and the suns disappeared it's cold and it's wet and they probably are not going to um they're not ready yet to be saved so the timing on that unfortunately is just you've just missed it another example on our farm is that we've got italian parsley which is beautiful seed but it's all green seed and i'm going to trust that it'll over winter and hope that it'll go on to mature its seed next spring if it makes it through the winter i don't think you can if you don't need the space leave your lettuce probably it's going to rot with all the wet those so i think at that point i can't be too encouraging and what was the other question there was a two-part question um so she just wonders if she can put her seeds in the fridge oh yes okay yes you can put your seeds in the fridge um you don't actually need to put your seeds in the fridge the best temperature for storage is five degrees centigrade um the thing about putting them in the fridge is that um you want to make sure they've got silica crystals in with them to absorb any moisture and that you um the most interesting about freezing or refrigerating seeds is that when you open the container that the warm air rushes in cold seeds condensation moisture reintroduced to the seeds really important to how you open the container and how you allow make sure that those seeds are not damp at all when they're restored um the only reason really to store seeds in the freezer is you know if you wanted to extend their shelf life uh because it stops their the breathing i talked about the seeds you know gas in gas out all the time very slow never fully dormant um but um if you freeze them that helps that process so it does extend the um the viability rate of the seeds but again you have to be really careful about how you um making sure that they stay dry yeah okay um so apparently there's a seed library in South Surrey and they're wondering about crimson fava beans yeah if they can get some for their library oh yes i'd love to well we have some we saved lots of seeds this year and we grew them out so um yeah if you want to connect them to my address i can mail them some okay okay i can send that out sure and the only other thing is if they can find them online that you can go to seeds dot ca and see if somebody um is um listing them in their seed catalog so seeds dot ca has a certain like it's like a seed swap spot yes it's the website for seeds of diversity and actually all the seed savers who are contributing seeds back they get listed in their yearly booklet um which if you're a member you can join and then you can request all these different seeds from them um so um you know that's one way of getting the crimson fava beans i'm sure somebody's growing them out in canada um the other thing is they have a wonderful resource list of all the seed companies the little small the few that are remaining that actually have open pollinated seeds and so you can actually then get hold of their listings and catalogs and you can order all sorts of interesting things to start out with yeah that's great that's a great resource to know about um so linda is first of all she says fabulous information so she's obviously enjoying the talk and she wondered about my first year collecting seeds from my deck container garden how can one be assured of getting seeds that are non gmo or do we just have to rely on the packaging yes oh well most seeds are not gmo there are certain things that you should be aware of like corn for example um and it should be listed in the catalog if it if they're gm mostly um like west coast seeds for example they don't have any uh gm seeds listed and they'll say that right there on the catalog so um yeah they um most it's not a big concern about that for the home grower it's more of the um things like the soy um and the corn um and canola it's more uh a commercial application for the farmer which is where the seeds are genetically modified um to assist in the application of herbicides mostly round up they go together um or the corn is bacillus thuringensis resistant so that they can use those chemicals in production but that is something that is not really of concern to the home gardener so it'll be hybrids like basically you look out in the listings for op which stands for open pollinated um if it's described as heritage that generally means it's open pollinated if it has f1 written by it and most seeds are f1 nowadays hybrid you can't save seeds from them um but it will tell you in the catalog that it's a hybrid and f1 yeah okay huh um i'm just going to move over to the chat because there were some questions in there um judy's asking how long are sunflower seeds viable for oh yeah yes i guess they've got quite a bit of oil in them again um probably good for about five years if they're stored in cool dark place okay yeah and you can easily easily do a germination test with sunflower seeds too because you just have to literally soak them in water overnight and lay them on a paper towel because they germinate really fast and you just take 10 seeds actually and do that and it'll tell you straight away how many out of 10 you know what the germination looks like 10 out of 10 bingo you know every single one is good um three out of 10 only 30 percent germination not so good you know you're you're gonna have to sew a lot more than you want in order to get the number that you want yeah okay and then final question from sally where can you get silica crystals oh um any pharmacist or a hardware store you can probably get silica crystals um you remind us what those were used for i forget that you put that with your seeds in order to stop them getting wet to keep them dry right right a reassurance um you know when you get like if you buy a new purse or something it often it has a little sash oh yes of course it's okay great wow wow so i was curious um when you obviously you're not saving everything for seed because you need to eat some of your produce so approximately what percentage of your crop is did you save and let go to seed yes and you know that's a very good question because in my book i actually outline um the required number of plants in order to um have the pollination um and get seeds from the plant you have to grow a certain number so it could be like a minimum of six kale plants for genetic diversity or you know you've got it like a lot more plants um for other varieties of food um so yeah that is actually listed you can get that information um in a seed saving book okay okay the seed how to save your own seeds hand book i showed you and also i actually list that in my book as well i tell you you know that you have to have a minimum of 30 plants or whatever in order to have um optimal genetic diversity yeah okay okay good wow lots of information it's fantastic thank you so much um i mentioned the zero mile i know you have two books which is zero mile diet one is a cookbook but the other one is the gardening one which starts with is that still in print yes oh it is it's some available on well i hate to send people to amazon but it's it's a hard republishing right it's harbour yes that's right and yes it's still in fact it sold very well this year you know for obvious reasons because people don't know okay okay well and i suppose you know we you might be able to order it from your local bookstore 30 you didn't want to go to amazon we do have a copy at the library if if people want to check okay that's great to know it's still available for people that's great well gosh thank you so much carolina this has been really really interesting and actually kind of a perfect um talk to end our series about seed saving and it's just the right time of year there's been lots of lovely uh comments in the chat which i don't know yeah that's really good thank you so much and um yeah enjoy the rest of fall um i hope that you um save lots of seeds yes to everybody yeah okay thanks everybody for coming um it's been really fun to do this this gardening series and send me an email if you have some other ideas for for um webinars you'd like great okay thanks a lot carolin thank you for inviting me very welcome bye bye good night everyone night