Saving Seeds at Home with Vandana Shiva

seed-saving is the most important thing to do in our times farmers have been made to believe that they can buy seed every year but what's available in the market is chemically bred seed coated with neo neo tides genetically engineered seed so if you want to do real farming or real gardening you need your own seed the nature of seed is to go to seed to multiply to be shared and all the new laws are designed to prevent us from saving seed to make seed uniform rather than diverse and to remove human intelligence from the reproduction and breeding of seed and so you're a scientist when you start to save seed much better scientist then those shooting genes with gene guns blindly not knowing what they're doing to produce GMOs you're a scientist in service of life on Earth but there's a second reason why everyone must be a seed saver because the colonization of this planet and life on it is taking place through the seed through genetic engineering and patenting and that's why in 1987 I started the movement to save seeds and created navdanya I'm so happy that witness Tanya and navdanya international the garden that Rishi and Manju and their family has built here in urban California is showing another way California is such a disaster of trying to grow food in a desert pretending you are in a wetland and that has led to violence both to the people whose water's being taken but it has led to violence against the earth and the drought of California should be a wake-up call so get out of the supermarket get out of the drought get out of seed slavery get out of food slavery soil freedom by knowing your seed saving it and this video that has been prepared will help you in starting that path even if it's one pot on your windowsill just to tear us in the or a garden like this beautiful one in the heart of California this is how all of California should look and this ends up being a water conservation system rather than water guzzling system that the monocultures are California has another road and that road sign is right here when we buy food in the grocery store today we're buying food that was not developed for our health that food is grown with seeds that have been hybridized genetically modified and just bred generally so that it could last through transportation so that would stay on the shelf for a long time and so that will look pretty we're not eating food that is nutritious that was grown in healthy soils so that they're full of vitamins and vitality and we're not eating food that was developed to be healthy when we save seed at home when we grow our own food we take back some of that that power we can actually grow food that helps the planet that restores ecosystems that restores ecology when we save seed we're actively creating our future and we have to care for the seeds so that the seed can care for us I learned to save seed at dr. Shiva's farm in India called navdanya and I've been taking those practices and using them to develop this garden that we're sitting in here today we're at the growing home this is the garden that I've been developing here in Los Angeles California for the last four years now and this is the demonstration site where I've taken the principles that dr. shiva is constantly expounding and talking about and I've been putting them into practice so that people can see the different world that's possible and it all starts with the seeds today I'm going to show you how to save seeds I'm going to show you some of the basic principles behind saving seed let's look at what a fruit is first a fruit is a container that a plant grows to spread its seed so fruits that you're used to seeing in the store like lemons or apples are fruit because they have seed in them but other plants like zucchini bell pepper chilies these are also fruits because they develop seeds that we can then grow new plants from when we're harvesting seeds from a fruit we have to make sure that that fruit is completely mature and that the seeds in it are mature the way to tell that a fruit is ripe is that it changes color chilies will start off green like this and then eventually they'll ripen to a different color like these red chilies or these yellow chilies when they've turned completely changed colors I know that the seeds inside of them are ready for me to harvest now actually harvesting seeds from a fruit is really easy because the seeds are already there and they're easy for us to to pick out so I'll start off I'm going to show you how to harvest a chili seed all I got to do I'm just going to cut the top off here and then carefully slice this open just on one side and when I open it up these seeds are ready and I can just pull them out and that's all there is to it harvesting pumpkin seeds is just as easy all right I'm just going to take a knife I'm going to cut this thing open and inside here I have the right pumpkin seeds as I'm digging through the pumpkin seeds I'm looking for seeds that are irregular so you can see this one here it's got its flat it's dark it actually has nothing inside of it so I'm going to set that one aside and then just keep picking for only the bigger plump seeds that feel full it's very very easy to save pumpkin seeds I'm going to show you one more weird thing that we grow here this is a loofah and you can eat it when it's small like this just like a zucchini and when it gets big and matures again matures changes colors then it dries out inside and you can see here this is the loofah that you would bathe with and if I pop off the end here then the seeds just fall out like that and those seeds are ready to be planted or stored so super easy harvesting seeds from fruits is the easiest thing to do seeds can also grow on flowers and carrots are one of those plants that produce seeds in the flower head so when you grow a carrot first the greens come up and the root develops and if you don't pick it eventually it'll send up this tall stock with and this big white umbrella like flower will form on the top and that flower head actually has thousands of little flowers in it and when the bees and ants and the other insects come and they pollinate those flowers then each of those flowers will turn into one seed and when that whole head dries out it'll end up looking something like this so this is a dried carrot seed flower head and each one of these little pieces right here is a seed some of the flower heads won't develop good seeds so you still have to check each flower to see if the seed is good this seed head is pretty good you can see the fully developed seeds whereas this one here it's kind of black and when I look at it the seeds look small and they look like almost rotten so I'm not going to use the seeds from this flower head now I don't want to go through and individually pick off every seed so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a quicker easy way to harvest the seeds what you'll need is some kind of sieve a fine mesh sieve and it's very very simple so I'm going to take the seed head a seed head that I've seen is fully developed and I'm just going to crush it between my hands and now all the seeds have fallen onto my sieve and now I'm just going to take my sieve and crush the seeds along the sieve the smaller seeds the undeveloped seeds are falling through a lot of the just other material besides the seed the leftover stickers and branches are falling through and what I'm left with is your carrots eat almost pure so you can see here this is all good carrot seed that I can use next year to grow my carrot crop so that's it that's how you save seed from a flower plant in the pea family and the mustard family they produce their seeds in pods with the mustard the flowers come and they're pollinated up here but then the pods are produced along the stem so you can see these are the green pods right here and eventually those dry out and these are some radish pods radishes are also in the mustard family and when I break this open I will find some of these radish seeds and so these are the radish seeds right here you've probably eaten green peas before and when you let that green pea completely mature and the whole plant dries out and the pods will dry out then you just open that pod up you can harvest the green pea seeds right out of the pod like that then we also can do beans so when you eat green beans you're eating the immature bean pod and if you let that mature just like you would a pea pod then you can crush that open and inside you have the bean seeds these are called purple hyacinth beans this is a rare variety of being and when I pick these seeds especially the bean seeds I want to look for any little holes because there's an insect that will bore into that seed and eat the inside out so this one here has you can see the holes from the outside actually and when I cut when I open the pod up you'll see the seeds there misformed and they are full of holes and these are not seeds that I want to save because they're not going to grow to harvest seeds in a pod you can just keep going through all of your dried pods and opening them up like that or if you have a lot there's a little bit easier way where you take a bunch of pods and you crush them all together and then once all the seed shells are crushed then you can just blow everything else away and what you're left with is your seeds so now that I've showed you how to harvest all the seeds now you actually have to save them you got to put them in a jar and label and mark them so I'm going to show you inside how we store the seeds for the next season after you've harvested the seeds it's really important that you dry them out completely before you put them in something to store them so we made this drying rack here and in this drawing rack we have all these different trays that have a window screen material at the bottom of them and that way there's airflow and the seeds can dry out really well you can make one of these at home or you can just use a paper towel or a few layers of newspaper something to absorb the moisture from the seeds if there's any moisture on the seeds they could rot and go bad and you won't be able to use them next year so really important dry the seeds out when we put our seeds in our tray like this we also make a little tag and on that tag we write the name of the seed the date it was harvested where it was harvested from it was a harvested from our garden or someone else's garden and the grade was it a really good seed a grade a seed or was it not so good you know maybe a grade B or a great C something that we would use in case we ran out of other seeds so put that tag in with the seeds so that you know exactly what's in here and let it dry out for about a week touch the seeds before you store them and just make sure there's no moisture the other thing you can do is try to break one and if it snaps really easily and you hear a crisp snap then it's dried out and it's ready to store when you're drying out seed make sure you're drying your seeds in an area that's dry dark and well-ventilated that way they dry out quickly and completely and they'll store for a really long time once your seeds are dry you can put them away for storage always store your seeds in glass plastic is porous and moisture can get in bugs can also eat through plastic so glass is the best storage option I'm going to tape my seed label onto my jar and then start to fill in the seeds the other thing that I can put in here just to make sure that the seeds are safe are a few leaves of dry bay leaf or dried oregano any herb that has a really strong smell has a lot of essential oils because these leaves will keep bugs from living in the jar and from eat your seeds so they can be a really good lifesaver if you have a lot of seeds and you don't want them to go bad now the seeds are in our jar and we're going to put the drawer away into our seed bank and your seed bank where you store your seeds should be again in a dry dark area away from direct sunlight now once your seeds are in the seed bank they're good here for two to three years and it's important to remember you're a seed saver now so you have tons of seed I have maybe a thousand loofah seeds in here and I only need to grow three or four plants so part of being a seed saver is sharing your seeds share your seeds with your friends and family and neighbors so that they can also start to grow that abundant nutritious healthy food and let's start to regrain the earth

Channel: Sarvodaya Institute

Views: 95,787

Rating: 4.9456258 out of 5

Keywords: permaculture, urban, farming, farm, garden, organic, local, food, grow, your, own, healthy, green, sustainable, ecology, Sep 8, 201, seed saving, Saving seeds, vandana shiva, heirloom

Id: Xar4vixyzUs

Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2015