How to Save Onion Seeds So You Never Buy Them Again

what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my gardener channel i am so excited for today's video we're out in the garden today as you can tell things are looking awesome zucchinis are doing great cucumbers doing awesome tomatoes are flourishing everything is doing absolutely spectacularly the uh the cold weather crops like the broccolis the cabbages the collard greens they're thriving as well everything has been awesome despite the fact that it has not rained in almost five weeks uh our part of michigan the thumb of michigan is actually uh officially under drought conditions already it's not even well it's july now but it's not even august not even the heat of the year yet uh so it's gonna be a it's a hot and a dry season but uh what we're doing is we're basically watering when we have to and then we're relying on the cores we put in our raised beds if you haven't seen core gardening make sure you check it out it has been an absolute game changer for us and i certainly would not i would never do it any other way uh core gardening has saved our butt this year this year more than any other year it has saved our butt so make sure you check out those videos we basically just are we're burying a straw bale in the ground about eight to ten inches deep and it's acting as a sponge that holds on to water because it has so much surface area that it takes a lot longer to dry out so it can actually uh so basically in between rains it can hold on to that moisture every once in a while we have to soak it with the hose to keep it charged but the goal is to keep the water in the soil so that the plants can take it up and you don't have stressed plants but everything's looking amazing but that's not why i came into the garden today i actually came into the garden to film an episode on how to save onion seed now our onions have bloomed the seeds are ready to harvest and i gotta bring you guys along for it because it's a really short window of time and we don't want the seeds to fall off the seed head otherwise we're going to have volunteers everywhere which wouldn't seem like a bad thing however we want to keep the variety contained and we want to save the seed for future generations we want to grow them in the garden for many more years as well as have some to give away to friends and family and so i want to bring you guys along to show you just how simple it is to save onion seed now we have lots of different seed saving videos this is going to be an ongoing series here on the channel so i'm going to post a link to the playlist down below to all of our seed saving videos that we've done i highly recommend checking it out because when you can learn how to save seed not only do you have food security but you also have seed security and i cannot stress the importance of that enough it is something that for for hundreds of years home gardeners have been in charge of preserving the biodiversity of the garden that's where heirloom seeds came from and that's how varieties special varieties been passed on from generation to generation and have become heirlooms that we know today and love today but we've become so accustomed to just going out to emmagartner.com or to your local hardware store and buying seeds but if you can learn how to save them yourself you can take back that power put it in your pocket and not only save money but if the seeds for some reason are not commercially available you've got them and that is awesome that's empowering and it's also a way to preserve biodiversity which i always stress is super important so let's get on here i'll show you how to save the onion seeds it takes no time at all let's go all right so onions are a biennial that means they flower the second year however where it gets a little confusing is that onions will flower the second year but then we'll flower every single year after so we actually grew these these are tokyo long bunching onions and we grew these we actually grew these three years ago they flowered last year for the first time and then they flowered this year the first year they did not flower and so what you want to do is you want to plant them in your garden and just let them grow we actually had some seeds that fell down to the ground and you'll notice we've got we've got some beautiful bunching onions beautiful beautiful bunching onions now you could obviously eat these you could preserve about you know two to three plants and let them go we let about 10 plants go and then those flowered that was last year and then they come back and they will form flowers now the flowers will bloom this is a younger one as you can see then they start to dry and then they start to open and so now you can see the seeds little black seeds popping out and so what we can do is we can actually take ever so gently take it and drop in the bucket now you can see just how many fell off when we did that but i'm just going to drop them all in a bucket for right now to keep them from falling on the ground because as soon as they get jiggled the seeds will fall everywhere you gotta be very careful ah the tiniest little jiggle will send them but look at that isn't that cool look at that all right so i've just gone through here and harvested all of the seed heads that actually have seeds showing what you'll see here is that a lot of times the flowers will dry and kind of semi-open and people will think that they're ready they're not ready until they actually open that's one of the things that's one of the reasons why to be really careful when you're harvesting these seed heads because they will drop everywhere as you can see there's onion seeds literally everywhere and those will all create new volunteers which doesn't seem like a bad thing but they can definitely become a little bit of a problem if you don't want them there because they will keep coming back year after year after year and so that's free food yes which is awesome however i want to be able to save the seeds and preserve them so that i can grow them in other parts of my garden now what you'll notice is that flowers will form throughout the season so there's actually new flowers that haven't even opened these flowers are just beginning to open and there's lots more so this is gonna be a perpetual thing and so when i come in here and i actually pick off the entire flower stalk i don't always get seeds from the entire flower itself or from the entire seed head i should say each one of these are individual little flowers but the entire seed head is going to come off and that way i can just pull it off pop it in the bucket and it keeps most of my seed in the bucket rather than all over the garden and then it's literally as simple as just taking the seed head and smacking it along the along the side of the bucket as you can see all the seeds falling off there it's nice and empty beautiful and i'll just do that to all these seed heads and then in the bottom we'll be left with lots of seed the really amazing thing is that from just one seed head you can potentially get up to three seeds per flower as you can see each flower holds three seeds indicated by those little seed pockets and there are i mean hundreds of flowers so you can get thousands of seeds from one just one flower that's very labor intensive obviously it takes a lot of time to do this that's why that's why seeds so expensive is because it takes somebody to meticulously do this and this is only part of the process now you've got all of this which includes seeds some bugs some chaff and then what you have to do is a process called winnowing which basically means you take the seed and you drop it and then all of the chaff will blow away leaving you pure seed in the bottom so i'm going to go ahead i'm going to do that i'm going to wait for the wind to blow it's kind of a windy day today and i'm just going to drop it as you can see and all the seed falls back in the in the bucket but all the lighter material blows away and that's just a process of refining the seed down to just the seed so there's no chaff and waste that's pretty amazing isn't it to go from that to that i love gardening all right so we went from the flowers into the bucket we refined for about five minutes or so through winnowing it takes hardly any time at all check it out almost 100 pure onion seed is that crazy look at that almost pure onion seed now if i continued to winnow obviously i could just get it pure and pure and winnowing also does one other thing and it actually helps uh sift out in viable seeds the lighter uh seeds that aren't going to be viable that won't germinate those will also blow away along with the chaff so there is huge benefits to winnowing highly suggested once you get down to what i have left in the bucket you could actually take a kitchen sieve and just kind of shake it in a kitchen sieve and that will remove any further dust and debris that might be uh you know residual so that can get you even finer but when you're when it's all said and done you can get this at your house down to almost 100 pure onion seed just like you get in the store and then you can give it away to friends and family grow it for future years and as much as i hate to say it being someone that sells seed you never have to buy a seed again but people always ask me why do you empower people to buy you know to grow seed or to save their own seed so they never have to buy it again and my answer is because it's so important it is a vital tool to have in your gardening toolbox and so i want to empower you to save your own seed grow your own seed promote saving heirloom varieties and so i hope you guys will try it so i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new if you did make sure to throw a like up there subscribe if you haven't already and we'll catch you all on the next episode grow bigger home everyone bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 62,316

Keywords: Seed saving, Gardening, MIgardener, Seed, Saving seeds, Garden, Tip, Howto, How-to, Tutorial, Beginner garden, Heirloom seeds, Growing onions, Walkthrough, Luke, Mi gardener Luke

Id: D4o2eijxDWw

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022