Lifestyle
How Much Work Does It Actually Take to Save Seed? - Gardening Beyond Basics E38
In this episode of Gardening Beyond Basics, host Diego Di Ego discusses the intricacies of seed saving with expert Dan. They explore the balance between the perceived workload of saving seeds versus t...
How Much Work Does It Actually Take to Save Seed? - Gardening Beyond Basics E38
Lifestyle •
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Interactive Transcript
Speaker A
Welcome to Gardening Beyond Basics. I'm your host, Diego Di Ego, bringing you podcasts since 2013. If you're new here, welcome. Gardening Beyond Basics is a deep dive into the topics that you thought were simple. When it comes to gardening, from vegetable varieties to soil to pests to seeds. We'll talk to knowledge experts to go way beyond the basics and dive deep into the nitty gritty about subjects that you thought were simple but in reality are much more complex than you can even imagine. In every episode, we'll dive deep into one specific topic to make you a better grower. I hope you enjoy it. It's Gardening Beyond Basics. I'm a market gardener. Hearing this, I, I, I'm think I'm going along with you. Like, yeah, Dan, I love what you're saying. I'm, I'm really interested. I should be doing this. And you're saying, I guess what I'm thinking though is, but man, it's gotta be a lot of work to save the seed. Then you drop that. It's probably less work than harvest and wash pack for greens. So that I know that thought is floating around in a lot of people's heads. Yeah, but it's a lot of work. It's easier just to buy it. Refute that or put truth.
Speaker B
I'm not going to refute it because it's true. If you are a overworked market gardener and you already working day and night, day and evening to kind of get all your stuff together and then I come and say, why don't you grow some seeds on your farm? That's like, like, how are you going to make that happen? And so I'm not like, I think it's, this is, so this is really, the first section of the book is really about how to get into seed without burning out. And I think it is the most important thing because I'll start off by talking about the end game. And this is not where you start when you get into seed, but in the end game. And you kind of alluded to it like, well, but it's less work to clean the seed than it is to the salad greens, like when you know how to thresh seed, screen seed, winnow seed, and you know the right time to harvest it. Seed is fairly easy, like once you know what to do. But the challenge is most people don't know what to do. And like, I've always resisted telling people this is a get rich quick scheme. Like, this is not like the secret way to make a million dollars off of a quarter acre this is not, please. Well, on a spreadsheet you can make it work. But. So this is really where I always go back to start small. And if you start with a couple crops, then you don't burn yourself out and it becomes a fun part of the growing season. And especially if I like, if you have a team on your farm, if you tell your team we're going to grow three crops and maybe even put one or two people in charge of them, so they're worrying about the seed, not even the head farmers worrying about it. These are ways to make it fun. And it's a learning experience. And you're seeing because, you know, like most market garden, all market gardeners know the value of seed. Like, you all know the value of seed, and you've all had a variety that was out of stock or during the pandemic, things weren't, weren't shipping on time. Like, you've experienced that you understand the importance of seed. And, and most market gardeners also love just seeing the natural world, interacting with it. And when you watch a seed crop go to flower and you see, like, if you see carrots going to flower that you haven't seen before, or spinach, this is something that, like, you see how it all works and it gives you a better understanding of how the world works, and it puts you more in touch with the universe, you know, and. And I think that most people really love that. There's like a spiritual side to it, there's a physical side. Like when you're dealing with buckets of seed, it just feels so fun and you're getting in contact with traditions that people have been doing forever. So I think that, like. But what you're fighting against is the potential of burnout. And that's something that I don't want to burn any farmers out. And so by starting with a couple varieties, you can learn how those varieties or a couple crops, you can learn how those crops work. And you can see that there's some, like, tomatoes, which really don't require any work. Like, they require work. There's nothing that's no work, but barely any work. There's a couple little steps and it could be as easy as half an hour more over the whole growing season to get enough tomato seeds. And then there's some that require more work. But you'll see that some of that work is timely and some of it isn't. Like, when a seed crop is ready to harvest, you have to bring it in. If you're in a dry, dry area, you have more Flexibility. But if you're in an area like us, where there's chances of rain, you, you gotta bring it in. Once it's brought in. So you, if you cut the seed crop and you bring it into a greenhouse and it's protected from rain, well, then you've got a long time that you can work on. You can work on it. So you could, you could, as long as you harvest it at the right time, I could then come in at the end of October or November to finish cleaning it, the seed crop. So, and that's part of the learning is figuring out what's timely and what's not timely. And it's like, it's like if you add garlic, like not how about seed, but like just garlic to your, to your, to your season. If you like, you suddenly have a peak of work that you had to do at two or three times that you didn't have otherwise. And if you don't expect those peaks of work, they can, they can be the straw that breaks the camel's back. But once you know how garlic works, you know, oh, we're getting into garlic season, we're going to have to have extra labor. We're going to have to like reduce something so we can do these steps. And that's the same thing with seed. I mean, if you're just growing a couple tomato plants, that's, you don't have to worry about that extra labor. But you just, as you start to learn the cycle of the crop, you start to figure out where the place where the peaks are that you'll need to think about. And then you just about highlighting what is that task that has to happen then and making sure it happens then. And, and that's also where I think if you have multiple people on your operation, there's going to be somebody on your operation who loves seed. And if there, it's their job to make sure that comes in at the right time, it'll come in at the right time. So I am very cognizant of how easy it is to buy seed from another source and not worry about that. And it is nice to have that system in place right now. There are some phenomenal seed companies out there and they are more than happy to provide seed to you. But this is where we get into the doomsday stuff. But, but like when you're relying on other, on other actors, you lose a little bit of self sufficiency, a little bit of resilience. You also lose the possibility for adapting seeds in your area. And you know, a Couple generations ago, farmers knew how seed worked and even if they were buying seed, they knew and they probably had some of the skills to keep it. But the current generation of market growers, and this is not, it's not a blanket statement, but I think a majority don't know how seed grows and they think it's more complicated than it is. And because they don't have the skills, because it seems complicated, it just isn't a possibility or reality. And that's really what I, I want the option to be there for people and that's what I'm pushing for.
Speaker A
Yeah, I think that's well summarized, well said. A few years ago I started baking bread and I never realized how easy it was. And people are like, oh, I must spend a lot of time on that. I'm like, it takes 10 minutes in the morning before I bake it. Probably add it up all the time, there's no time at all. I think that's a lot of human things. When you have never done it and you don't have much knowledge and you don't have any equipment, it seems like it's insanely hard. Like the scale would be up hard. You get a little bit of knowledge and a few simple tools and suddenly that knowledge barrier that was way up here is, is much, much lower. You do it a few times and you're like, what was I missing? This is not hard at all. Just to try and put a number to it. If you had some experience, tools, you're not a newbie, you haven't done it for 20 years, but you're not a newbie. You have a hundred foot bed of arugula that's gone to seed, it's ready to be processed, so it's in the field ready to go. How long would it take somebody if you just, if you did it A to Z, cut it off, thresh it, winnow it till you're ready to go. So it's, it's in prem primal condition. You don't have to do anything. How, what's the time estimate you think it'd take for one 100 foot bed?
Speaker B
So I think like one 100 foot bed would take you probably about an hour to harvest it once you know what you're doing and then you, so you're cutting it, putting on some tarps, moving it into a dry area to finish maturing. So that's, that's one task is about an hour, then to thresh it like that hundred foot bed, you could thresh probably in 25 minutes and that's just stomping on it. Like, you don't have to have a machine. You just put your tarps out and you step on it and you pull the shattered plants off and then you wind up with a bunch of chaff. And then you'd collect that into Rubbermaid bins or harvest bins, and then you could take off the lightest stuff and then screen the rest to take out the bigger things. So that's maybe another half hour. And then. And then you'd winnow it and that's like maybe 15 minutes. And I probably do it being in front of a box fan rather than outside, but you could do it outside, depending how gusty it is. And so we're talking about like two and a half hours to process that whole arugula bed. And so let's say you're getting like 40 grams. We're talking about like maybe 10, 11. Is my math right. 40 grams times 100ft would be 4,000 grams. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, 4,000 grams. So four kilograms, which is about nine or 10 pounds. So you get about 10 pounds out of that, out of two and a half hours. And you know, what's the price of arugula? Is it 30 pounds, 40 pounds, 50 pounds, $50 a pound. So let's say it was $40 a pound. Then you're talking about like $400 of. Of crop off of there off two and a half hours. That's about, I don't know, let's say $150 an hour. And I think that that's not overly ambitious. Like this is knowing what you're doing, but not like being amazingly efficient. It's just being decently efficient. And it's the same work. If you were going to be doing something like Tokyo Bacana or Yukina Savoy, which might be closer to $80 or $90 a pound. So you might be talking about a thousand dollars of seeds off of that case, which is. If you're still talking about two and a half hours, then you're talking about $400 an hour of that work, which is not nothing. That. That's. That really starts to make a difference on your operation.
Speaker A
Yeah, I think. I think that's the other way. If somebody's curious about this and they're like, should I, shouldn't I? I think a couple things you've hit on in this segment. One, you could potentially do it at a different time of year. I can get it out of the field and then put it somewhere where it can just sit dry Protect it from rodents, that type of thing. Come back to it later at a less busy time. And the math, I mean you got to want to do this. If you, if you just like I, this sounds awful. Well, I don't care. There's probably some limit of money where you would do it, but you're not going to be into it anyway. But if you're, if you're on the fence and you're like, I like the idea of it, I see the other non monetary benefits. Maybe the money side is what pushes you over. Oh, how much would I spend on this seed? And huh, okay, yeah, this, this does make sense. If I do it, I get this much money, I'm not buying that seed. One worry I could have off of that, can you mess it up? And here would be the, the worry. I, I save all this seed, I'm dependent upon it and it's got crappy germ rates. Is that in the possibility if you do this right?
Speaker B
I think so. If you do it right, I think that you'll find the germ rates are better. And like that's something that I've definitely seen is that for a lot of stuff the germ rates are better than what we can buy from seed companies of certain things. Like, you know, seed companies, they, it's not always fresh seed that they're selling to you. You know, they're selling seed that might be 1, 2, 3, 4 years old, depending on how popular it is, how big it is, how big a lot they have. And then also the suppliers they're buying from may also have stuff that's sitting around for a bit. So by the time it gets to you now, they've all done germ tests. Right. Like, so it's not like they're not selling you bad seed, but there's a range of germination rates that you could be getting. And I have found that for some of the seed that we've had, the germ is just better than what we've gotten from seed companies. And if you do your own germ test, you also know what, what you have. So if your germ is a little bit lower, you sow a little bit thicker. But for a lot of crops, like if you're talking about brassica greens, which I think is a phenomenal, like brassica greens I think pencil out really well as an easy way to harvest from crops you've already harvested the salad greens from, and it has usually a decent dollar value and a decent yield and it germinates very well. So I think that pencils out on all those situations. Something like carrots. It's harder to get a high, a good germination rate and so you could probably still make the math work, but you might have more variability in germination rate. Or like I've had challenges with like beets and chard. There's more chance of having lighter seed in there than if you don't know how to winnow it out, you might wind up with a lower germ rate. So there's a little. It's a little bit trickier. Those are all things that can be like, with skill and experience, you get over. But something like Brassica greens, I think it's an easy win. And that's how I got into them. Right. Like it's brassica green crops that escaped and that I harvested for seed is where I started. Like falling in love with C was that. And so I think it's something that I think. I think it's a gateway for. For other people.
Speaker A
I love it. Yeah. And if in doubt, run the numbers. You have a lot of numbers in your book, the Seed Farmer. People can check that out for resources, but it's. It sounds lucrative, it sounds promising. If you have that draw, this is one to lean into.
Speaker B
But start small is what I still recommend.
Speaker A
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out Dan's brand new book, the Seed A complete guide to growing, using and selling your own seeds. Available on Amazon and anywhere books are found.