Seed Saving Experiment

So, I decided to see if I could get some seeds out of this cress since it was so determined to produce flowers and bolt as soon as my back was turned. Naughty cress! I thought I might document the process as this is the first time I have tried to harvest seeds like this. If there are easier ways of doing this, or I did something completely dumb…let me know!

The Process

When the whole stalk was pretty much a yellowy straw colour, I chopped it off as one complete piece and let it sit outside (ok, well more like I forgot about it and accidently left it outside, but that didn’t seem to do it any harm). When it was nice and crispy dry, I cut each branch off (see pic 1) and held the branch in between my fingers whilst holding it inside a bag. I then used my fingers to strip the seed pods off – finding that it was much easier doing it in the same direction as the seed pods (i.e. going “with the grain” not against it). In retrospect, it was probably a good idea to use gloves instead of bare hands at this point as I had quite sore fingers afterwards.

I’m now left with plenty of seeds (and plenty of chaff) at the bottom of a plastic bag. It seems like a huge task to separate out the seeds completely – I started doing it but an hour later seemed to only have got a tiny amount done, so I’m not sure if I could have done something differently to make this part of the task easier? Anyway, I managed to get an absolute tonne of seeds from this exercise – plenty for next year (and any seed swaps, if anyone is interested!)