Easiest Way To Save Radish Seeds

why did the police officer pull over the watermelon that was walking down the street late at night he was looking seedy [Music] what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my Gardener Channel in today's episode we're going to be saving seeds because you all loved the episode where we saved spinach seed and you asked for more so I thought I'd bring you guys along for saving some radish seeds so that's what we're gonna do buckle up it's gonna be a fun one it's gonna be a nice CD episode so let's go all right so when it comes to saving radish seed they're a tad bit more tricky than spinach if you've been following along with this seed saving series but they are still very very simple so what we've done is we've simply grown the radish and just let it go now the one downside to Growing uh you radishes for seed is that you can't consume the actual radish the nice thing is though is that one plant can generate hundreds of seeds as you'll see and so with spinach you can harvest the leaves throughout the growing season enjoy those in salads and then just let it go to seed and you really haven't lost any Harvest whereas with some of these varieties here you actually kind of have to sacrifice the Harvest for the seed and so it kind of just takes that that ability to plant maybe a little bit more or to say all right I don't need all of what I'm growing I'm going to save two to five percent of what I'm growing for seed production and that's really all you need to be able to generate all that more seed for next year and so what we've done we simply let our radishes go to seed when they flower this is what they look like lots of beautiful flowers in fact this is only about two plants right here this is such a big bush and it just constantly provides more and more flowers and as those flowers are pollinated they form these pods now quick tip for you guys the pods are delicious they're super crisp they remind me like a cross between a pea like a snap pea and a radish incredible flavor try it sometime but once those pods dry out you're left with this all right so here we have three different examples of the kind of the life cycle of a radish seed so you have here obviously the flowers there's an abundance of those then you have once they're pollinated the green pods here these are the edible little seed pods that taste incredible like I said they're really tender and when you get them early they have a wonderful radishey taste but tastes almost like like a pea spicy peppery sweet super awesome as those dry though you're left with these and these are the very bone dry seed pods now you want to let them stay on the plant until they are I don't know if you hear that bone dry bone dry because what you want is you want dry viable seeds inside if you harvest the seeds from a plump pod like this this right here will have seeds inside but they're going to be so water rich and so um you know not not quite fully developed that they're going to rot these will rot in a heartbeat so there's too much moisture content in these these are better for snacking so all we're going to do is just take these dry seed pods off and drop them into a bin now you want to pick the largest healthiest driest pods because those are going to have the highest chance of giving us a viable seed the variety we're saving seeds from is known as Cherry Bell it's a very sweet super reliable kind of household name variety of radish one of our all-time favorites so one quick tip for all you guys when you're harvesting things like radish and broccoli and cauliflower a lot of your a lot of your plants that form pods like this you do want to harvest them before a strong storm because what these will do and they're very good at doing it is cracking open in the center and then as soon as they split all those seeds pop out on the ground so if you don't want to lose your seeds you want to harvest them while it's nice and calm out and be careful when you're harvesting too because the simplest little amount of pressure can crack those pods open and then the seeds just go flying everywhere so I like to just kind of harvest each one individually and that way I'm not spreading a bunch of volunteer seeds because that gets to be a bit tedious weeding out all those those extra plants that grow but here you can see some these pods here these ones have broken open and there are not going to be any well very little actually there's a bug in there so you'll notice here look at this big pod little pot those are going to stay I don't want these little pods here they might have a couple seeds in them but maybe that one is okay but these smaller pods here they're better off just throwing the compost pile all right and now it's kind of just like a very therapeutic process of taking each seed and kind of just crushing it between your fingers to drop the seed out now this is going to lead to a lot of chaff and plant material but if you watch our spinach saving video you'll know we have a way of dealing with that but this is just a process of just breaking this seed down to really small pieces getting that that husk to break up as well so it's lighter weight increasing the surface area really helps to get that chaff kind of broken up and this is what makes gardening fun just kind of sitting here on a nice day saving some seeds now all I need is kind of a rocking chair maybe you can put that in post maybe there's like a really a rocking truck and be sitting on I need like a I need like a table maybe like right here you guys in a post if you could put like a table here um with like a glass of lemon it'd be great so that's all I need all right so for about five minutes I've taken the seed pods and crushing them up we're left with a really good fine uh kind of a breakdown here of the uh the seed pods and what our seeds inside of here but you look at this and you say okay there's obviously seeds in there but there's so much other trash there's no way I could just take this and plant this in some seed starting material and you're right you really shouldn't do that so what we're going to do is we're going to basically process this out and the first way to process this is by settling by density seeds are always going to be denser than the plant material and so what you want to do not always but most of the time is be denser than the plant material and so what we're going to do is we're gonna do a little shake like we did with the spinach video like I said that spinach video is the gateway to seed saving because it teaches you so many core skills so we're gonna shake right we're gonna settle that seed right we're gonna settle that seed you can also give it a little bump and settle really kind of agitate and get that material all fluffed and then once we get it down to a corner now you can take it you take that top material off just like that and we can see how good we did by using another bin here and I don't see any seeds in there so that's good I can grab a little more from the top no seeds in there so I can keep doing that I can keep grabbing from the top I still don't see any seeds in there and that's because the seeds are dense they're down at the bottom so to prove that point I can take this stuff off here all right so we just removed all of that plant material and that was like 80 percent of it and there's hardly any season there might be like one or two seeds in that really very little and if there are seeds they're probably going to be inviable because the more dense seeds look at this they're down here along with you know heavier plant material wetter plant material stuff that was just kind of difficult to sift out so I can literally take all of this now and I can do basically our second method which is winnowing so now we're ready to winnow and if you recall back to the spinach saving video we're going to do what's called the reverse locomotive right so the wheels on a locomotive right they all go like this and we're going to do that in Reverse right and we're going to do is we're going to get the seed to hit the wall of the container Arc up and come back what that's going to do is it's going to get air in between those seeds so we can blow away all that other chaff all that other plant material that is lighter and less dense and so you go like this we're gonna blow all right check that out that is awesome I absolutely love saving seeds because it's so satisfying that end result is just takes five six minutes that's all it takes all right so there you guys go there is how simple it is to save radish seeds I hope you all enjoyed I hope you learned something new if you did make sure to hit that like button subscribe if you haven't already and especially subscribe if you're looking at learning how to save even more seeds because in the next episode we're going to be saving some lettuce seed as well and then we're going to go through the list we're going to be saving a ton of other seeds in the garden so if this type of thing interests you again make sure you hit that like button subscribe if you haven't already and save some seeds yourself remember this came from just one plant and we've got basically probably three packets worth of seed here from just one plant so I hope you guys enjoyed and as always this is Luke from the in my Gardener Channel reminding you to grow bigger take care bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 11,005

Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening

Id: l1Y-5mxgQZ4

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2023