After we harvested the broccoli main head and picked the florets every day for weeks, it was time to let the broccoli go. It went to flower and cascades of yellow flowers filled the broccoli row. The honeybees buzzed around the broccoli, moving from flower to flower. Soon the plant filled with pods that were at first green, but dried out and turned brown over several weeks. Since we grow open-pollinated, non-hybrid, heirloom plants, we can save the seeds from year to year. For most plants, its pretty easy to do. I clipped off the tops and brought all the broccoli seed heads into the garage in a bucket.
There is definitely an easier way to do this, but the way we did it was like this. Russ and Benjamin sat in the backyard with me and pulled pods off. Once we had four or five pods in our hand, we rubbed our palms together over a big blue bowl until the dry pods disintegrated, leaving the seeds exposed. We tried our best to pick out the chaff. As you can see, we're collecting a pretty good bit of broccoli seeds, but a lot of chaff, too.
I went inside and got a fan and turned it on high. Then I poured the seeds into the bowl from a bucket. It took some trial and error, but soon had it sort of fine tuned where the chaff would blow away and the heavier seeds would fall into the bowl.
We could have cleaned the seeds more with additional time, but we got the seeds about as good as we could, considering the time and effort involved.
I poured the saved seed into a dark colored bottle and labeled the seeds, "Waltham Broccoli Seeds, saved Spring 2023" with a Sharpie on freezer tape that I affixed to the bottle. Then I put in our saved seed box. This fall we'll pull these out and plant. Since they're saved, I'll generally plant a little heavy as I haven't tested germination. Always good to plant heavy and thin out later than not have enough coming up in the rows when you need.
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