Winnowing Out the Chaff

The Lemon Queen Sunflowers we planted were nice.  They had multiple flowering seed heads and filled the garden with yellow flowers.  Check out a photo of them FROM THIS POST BACK IN JUNE.  The flowers faded from their once glorious state and I clipped them from the stalks and let them dry on the patio.  The seeds were open-pollinated and I wanted to save some seeds for planting even more next year.  

Dried Lemon Queen Sunflower Heads

Observing the patterns of nature is, to me, evidence of God.  He is a God of order and He created things of beauty and was intentional in His design.  You can praise Him by singing, or in prayer, or by admiring His creation.

Genesis 1:12 The earth produced vegetation - seed bearing plants...

I pulled the dried seeds from the sunflower heads, but immediately found that I had a problem.  Intermixed with the sunflower seeds, was chaff - a lot of it.  "Well, this is no good, I thought."

Chaff mixed with sunflower seeds

In the past, with other type seeds, I've run them through a sieve and the smaller seeds fall through the sieve, leaving behind the chaff in the sieve.  It wasn't a perfect process, but the resulting seeds were relatively clean.  That process does not work with larger seeds like sunflower seeds.  What could I do?

And then I had a brainstorm of sorts.  In the Bible, there is the following verse:

Matthew 3:12 King James Version (KJV)

Whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.

And there was my answer!  I positioned a pan in front of a fan and began dropping handfuls of chaff-seed mix down into the pan with the fan blowing on the high setting:

Separating the "wheat" from the chaff

The fan blew away the lighter chaff, along with seeds that had nothing inside.  It made a real mess on the cement floor of the garage...

But the winnowing process yielded clean seed.  I was impressed with the finished product!:

Clean Seed

The old fan was in the barn to cool us off during the hot summer milking.  Recently, however, the mosquitoes have been thick by the back door.  Every time we open the door, those boogers fly in and bite us all night.  Tricia has positioned the fan to blow mosquitoes away from the door.  That fan played double duty - blowing away mosquitoes and blowing away the chaff.

I'm a fan of our old fan

These seeds will be stored away for next year's crop.

I labeled the container and dated it and will store them in a dark, dry spot.  If anyone wants some, just let me know.

So while the winnowing process learned from the Bible worked remarkably well to clean my seeds, I didn't want to miss out on the spiritual concept contained in the verse.  Do you see this farmer in Jean-Francois Millet's painting below?:

Image Credit

He is doing (manually) what I was doing with my Lasko fan.  The heavy seeds fall into the basket while the lighter chaff blows away.  In Matthew 3 John the Baptist was telling that the Kingdom of God was at hand.  He was preparing the people for the Messiah and telling them to repent.  He was likening the winnowing of grain the the coming judgment.  He was contrasting the truly repentant (the heavier wheat) against the Pharisees and Sadducees (the chaff).  The wheat would be brought into His barn, while the chaff would be burned in a fire.

He wishes that no man should perish.  I desire to be like the wheat and not the chaff.

A Little Room To Stretch Out

Winter time is a time where we eat a lot of gumbo with white rice.  It is warming and soothing.  And filling.  It is usually too wet and muddy and nasty to get outside and do any gardening or manual labor that I normally do for the sheer love of it.  Working outside provides another benefit - it keeps me in shape.  In winter, though, the weather isn't conducive to that and as a result, I eat too much gumbo and do too little work and thus, come early February, I always notice that my Wrangler jeans have shrunk for some reason.  It is the oddest occurrence.  Because as soon as the weather gets nicer, my jeans expand and are comfortable again.  Go figure.

I say all that because that is what I thought about when looking at our tomatoes.  They are growing and running out of room to grow in their seed pots.  Their roots have filled every centimeter of space.  Many simply clip the smaller plant and let the dominant one survive, but I look at that as a waste.  These tomato plants - all of them - are going to produce fruit.  I'm not thinning out a single one.

Running out of room to grow

This weekend, in a job that took a couple of hours, I carefully and tediously, used a plastic knife and spoon to dig the root ball of the tomato seedlings out of the seed pot.  Then I painstakingly separated the conjoined plants and placed them in their very own cup where they have room to stretch out and grow. 

I used some of the soil that we made IN THIS BLOG POST to put in the very bottom of the cup.  The composted chicken manure that makes up 1/3 of the mix ought to give the tomatoes some 'get up and go' and make them turn a healthy green.  They had run out of nutrients and had an unhealthy color to them.  I re-potted them in Community Coffee cups.  Perhaps there's some residual caffeine in the cup that will wake them up and rejuvenate them as well.

This is just one of our varieties of heirloom tomatoes called Black from Tula.  They formerly occupied a little four-pack and were root bound.  Now they have room to grow.  It's almost as if they loosened their belts a notch after eating too much gumbo and now can expand freely.

Here is the finished product after separating all the tomatoes and putting them back underneath the grow light.

This weekend I'll need to do the same with the pepper plants.