Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Flail? Winnow?

I did a quick peruse of a new seed-saving site today after our discussion of saving seeds for next year (since we had so much fun sharing seeds today!). Well, girls, it looks like another work day:

PROCESS: Small amounts of pods can be opened by hand. Flail larger amounts. Remove large chaff by hand or fork. Winnow remaining particles.

That's a direct quotation for the section on beans. I laughed... there's another work day for us in the fall. I'm sure our kids would love a chance to flail something....
 

3 comments:

  1. LOL! My first thought was: "How can we get the kids involved?" I always thought the worst process was the drying part - just waiting and waiting... But I was much younger then.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Meant to say that is a great site!

    Okay... so I'm rereading this site, and it looks to me like you are supposed to let the stuff fully ripen on the plant before harvesting for seed - even to the point of having to pull the item up whole from the ground. So, we may need to keep that in mind when harvesting our crops - maybe save one (or however many we need) plant of each kind for seed harvesting.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yeah--I thought the same thing. Maybe let the last round just hang on the vine/plant? I know you're supposed to keep picking/harvesting to keep the plant producing, so this should be an end of summer thing--when we're too tired to harvest!

    ReplyDelete