Saving Seeds

Today ended up being a dreary, rainy gray Saturday.  We couldn't really do much outdoors.  Honestly, I always have to be doing something.  I find it hard to sit still.  I remembered that we have some "crack" peas drying in the laundry room that we'll put away for seed for next year.  Once you do this for a few years in a row, you don't spend much, if anything, on seeds or plants for your garden.  There was some college football on TV, so I parked myself in front of the tube with my supplies: the compost bucket, a bowl of peas I've been drying, and a casserole dish to catch the peas as I shell them.  Dried peas tend to fly around the room when you shell them, so it's good to have something sort of wide to help contain them. 


Compost bucket, dried peas, Pyrex casserole dish

Shelling dried peas for seed is much easier than shelling peas to eat.  The dried pod cracks easily and you simply run your finger down the opened pod to release all the peas into the dish.  If you enlist a little help, it goes even faster. 


Here is the dried pea-shellin' process

 Here are all of the peas I have shelled.  Doesn't look like much, but this is actually a bunch of seed and will last me several years.  You can see some darker colored peas in the Pyrex casserole dish.  Those are actually some Holstein Peas and you can see how they got their name as they are black and white mottled.  I will separate those seeds out before I plant and plant them elsewhere in order to maintain seed integrity.


Dried cow peas for next year's garden

Once they were all shelled, Benjamin helped me pour them through a funnel and into a dark-colored glass vitamin jar that we recycled and saved specifically for this purpose.  In saving seed, it is important that the seed stays dry and protected from light.

Of course we save all the dried pea pods to add to the compost pile.  We try to put everything we can back into the land.  One thing we really try to do is to put more into the land than we take out of it.  If you think about it, all the plants you grow and crops you harvest pull minerals and nutrients out out of the soil.  You really need to be amending organic matter, composted manure and other materials back into your soil so you don't deplete it.  Healthy soil produces healthy crops.  


The compost bucket

And here we have almost a full bottle full of seeds that we will save for next year.  I make sure to label the jar with the type of seeds and the month and year I saved them.  This little practice of saving seeds is a great investment that pays dividends.  Actually its like compound interest since it will produce more peas to eat and more seeds to save in order to ensure the cycle continues for years to come.