What Do I Do With Them: Seeds Edition

    I love seeds. The many sizes and shapes of them. The smooth or ridged or wrinkled or rough. The way they sit so quiet and contained - life in stasis. Stored correctly, they can keep this way for years, holding all the possibilities of growth. 

   I am a bit of a seed hoarder. The last couple of years I have gotten better at buying less seed packets but it hasn't made that much of a difference because I love gathering seeds from the garden. I often do this just for the joy of it without thinking about what I am going to do with them later. This is where I get in trouble. Leave just one coriander plant to go to seed and you will end up with thousands of seeds. And what does one backyard gardener do with that many seeds? Well, here are a few ideas.

 

A tidy stash of black mini popcorn

  Grow Them (obviously?)

  Yes, by all means, grow those homegrown seeds. There is something special about growing your own hand-harvested seeds. Put them into little envelopes or empty pill bottles or something and stash them away for your use next season.

 This works beautifully for a lot of plants but some plants cannot be grown successfully year after year from your own seeds without a careful breeding program, often involving growing at a scale that is impractical for a backyard gardener. On top of that, pollinators could be bringing in pollen from different varieties your neighbors are growing; the results of this can be wildly variable.

   This has not stopped me from trying to grow all kinds of seeds, which has only occasionally gone badly. Planting my own runner beans produced warped, stunted plants in just one generation. This year I grew second-generation homegrown butternut pumpkin seeds. The results were stunted plants with weird flowers that didn't open enough to let pollinators in. And occasionally seeds just fail to grow. 

  But mostly it has gone well. Some homegrown seeds I have grown happily for many years include brassicas of all kinds, coriander, parsley, beans (not runner beans), sunflowers. 

 

Painted Lady runner bean seeds from the garden which I will not be growing. But aren't they pretty?

 

 Microgreens

  If I leave one rocket plant to go to seed, I get over a thousand seeds. Grown traditionally, there is no way you're getting use out of a thousand rocket seeds. Microgreens are one way around this and they don't have to be as complicated as fancy microgreen kits may make it seem.  You can grow them in some soil in an old plastic tomato crate on your windowsill. You can grow them in a regular plant pot on your deck. You just need to do things a bit differently.

  Step one, sew way too many seeds. No, more than that. Just pick up some seeds and scatter them all around, like, way too close together. Rake them in a bit with your hands or a garden fork or something. I took a gardening course once and I remember the teacher using the phrase "extravagant use of seed" when we covered microgreens.

  Now, water as normal, but once they are growing you are going to give them some liquid feed once a week. You have not given these plants enough room to get all their nutrients from the soil. You are going to need to feed them. 

  The third step is harvest them when they are still very small. I guess some people harvest them just once when they have like 2-4 true leaves. But what I do is let them grow up a bit more than that - maybe 15 or 20 cm - then given them a 'haircut.' Cut the greens back about 3-4 cm above the soil then leave them to grow up again. You can do this a few times before the plants go to seed or die back.

  Since you're eating the leaves you can grow anything you'd normally grow for leaves and some other things besides. Some things that produce a heap of seeds that can be grown as microgreens: herbs in the parsley family (parsley, fennel, dill, coriander etc.), pretty much any brassica (including ones not normally eaten for leaves such as radish, broccoli, etc), and any type of lettuce.

 

Rocket seed pods

  Eat Them

   I'm not talking about the obvious ones like corn or beans. A lot of plants not grown primarily for their seeds actually make tasty seeds that can be used as spices. A lot of seeds have a taste similar to the part of the plant we eat. A brassica with spicy leaves - mustard, rocket, etc. - will have spicy seeds. Parsley, dill, and fennel seeds taste similar to the herb's leaves. Celery seeds are like a concentrated version of celery stalks. One exception I know of is coriander - the seeds have a pleasant lemony taste that isn't at all like the leaves.

  You will want to take a little more care with harvesting if you're going to eat them. Try to pick the perfect time when they have just gone dry on the plant but haven't sat out dry in the sun for too long or they start to loose some flavour. Or pick them early; once they start to brown you can pick them and leave them in a good place to finish drying if it's looking like rain. I also take more care picking out the little stems and other dry plant bits that get into the seeds in the picking process.

  I have a method that works for some seeds where I place them in a large bowl. Tilt the bowl towards youurself and gently blow over the top. The lighter plant bits blow up to the other end of the bowl; the heavier seeds roll back down. Remove the bits, stir the seeds around a bit, and repeat as needed.

 

Processing coriander seeds for culinary use

 

  Give Them Away

  Okay so you tried all this and you still have too many seeds? Share! Share with your friends or your local seed swapping group or community garden. Stick them out next to your foot path with a sign. I promise you there is someone out there who would love some free seeds for their own garden.

 

coriander seeds