“Would you just look, showing off in public like that,” the carrot gossiped about the Brandywine tomato.  “It’s literally falling out of its cage!”

“The very idea,” the turnip agreed.  “Just look at how people fawn all over it when it’s ripe.  It’s embarrassing.”

Here at Seed Savers, biennials don’t take a back seat to the glamour vegetables, all seeds are treated equally.  It’s just that certain kinds of vegetables present unique seed saving challenges, such as biennials.

Biennials, such as carrots and turnips, need two growing seasons to complete their life-cycle.  Most never make it to their second growing season because we’d much rather have them on our dinner plates than bolting in the garden.

Carrots, celery, parsnip, chicory, some radishes, beets, chard, leeks, seed producing onions, some turnips, kale, collards, some cabbages and mustards, kohlrabi, broccoli, and cauliflower, are all biennials.

Most biennials are wind/insect pollinated which means (challenge 1) they have to be grown in isolation so that they do not cross-pollinate.  Preventing cross-pollination ensures that the seed we are saving is true-to-type and maintains the traits from the parent plant.  We accomplish this many ways here.  One method is to grow plants far enough apart so wind-borne pollen cannot travel between them. 

 However, some biennials have weedy cousins (challenge 2).  Because of this, even if we isolated our cultivated varieties by distance only, weeds in a nearby pasture or ditch could cross-pollinate with our vegetable varieties.  Here in Iowa, wild parsnip, cow parsnip, and angelica commonly grow along roads and in pastures, which could cross-pollinate with our nearly 50 varieties of cultivated parsnip.  Another potential for seed contamination is garden carrots mixing with their wild, royal cousin, Queen Anne’s lace.  To help with this, we use yet another way of growing plants in isolation -   tents.  Isolation tents allow us to keep visiting pollinators away from the varieties we are growing, while introduced pollinators, such as honeybees, can do their pollination work inside the tent.

 Because flowering doesn’t happen until the second growing season, by the time biennials start pollinating, they have already been on quite a journey.  This is mostly due to (challenge 3) our cold winters in Northeast Iowa.  In warmer climates, a gardener can leave their biennials in the ground all winter.  This is not the case at Heritage Farm.  Here, biennials are started by seed in our greenhouse and then transplanted into the field.  A general rule of thumb around here is that biennials need to be mature by the time winter rolls around.  For example, a carrot would be started in late July. 

 After all this work, we get to what’s happening on the farm this week - getting our biennials ready for winter.  Most biennials need a period of vernalization, or a cold period before flowering.  So, we’re digging up the biennials and preparing them for storage in our root cellar.  Ideal storage for most biennials means keeping the temperature as close to freezing with high humidity.  This means cutting the top off the plant one inch above the roots and storing what’s left in potting soil.  Home gardeners could use a variety of mediums for storage: sand, burlap, leaves, or potting soil.  Usually, we put as many plants together into one pot as we can fit.

 But don’t worry, it’s worth it.  Finally, your biennials will be able to hold their own in the garden, and say to that glamorous tomato, “See, I’m worth saving too.”

Note from a seed saver:  if you want to save biennial seed check out the specifics for each plant.  With so many vegetables to choose from growing out there in gardens,  seed saving, storage, and planting techniques vary. 

BELOW:  Horticulture staff with turnips

BELOW:  Horticulture staff digging kale to be stored for winter.

BELOW: Leeks getting ready for winter storage.

Harvest, the season of abundance is upon us. 

This time of year, gardeners everywhere are eating and preserving their way through the harvest; starting with the produce that won’t store past the first killing frost of autumn.

Winter squash is one of those vegetables that bless us with a grace period before we harvest the seed.

Squash is native to the Americas and has been cultivated here for hundreds of years.  The book Buffalo Bird Woman’s Garden: the classic account of Hidatsa American Indian gardening techniques, recounts historic methods for harvesting squash and saving seed.  It’s a humbling reminder of how long seed saving has been going on as well as an acknowledgement that there is never just one right way to do something.

By no means is cracking open these hard - and often huge shells - and roasting them for hours easier than preserving any other garden vegetable, but their harvest comes at time when the first days of fall seem to slow everything down.  Perhaps squash has become synonymous with these cool, foggy days because it has adapted over so many years to our growing season. 

So here are some squash seed saving techniques, then and now.

Technique 1:  Slicing squash open.

According to Buffalo Bird Woman, “each of the old women had a squash knife in her hand, made of the thin part of the shoulder bone of a buffalo; butcher knives of steel are now used. The cut was made by pressing the bone blade downward into the squash as the latter lay in her palm.”

Here at Heritage Farm, where we harvest thousands and thousands of squash seeds, our methodology is a bit different.  Because we harvest so much squash for catalog seed production, one way we harvest seed is by using a homemade device affectionately referred to as “the guillotine”.  We put a squash on a platform; pull down on a long handle with a wooden wedge attached to one end, and voila, you have split squash.

Technique 2:  Removing flesh from seeds

Seed saving was quite a different process for the Hidatsa. Buffalo Bird Woman said, “Squash seeds, freshly removed from the squash, are moist and mixed with more or less pulpy matter.  To remove this pulp I took up a small handful of the fresh seeds, laid a dry corn cob in my palm and alternately squeezed and opened my hand over the mess.  The porous surface of the cob absorbed the moisture and sucked up the pulpy matter, thus cleansing the seeds.”

Here, we scoop out the seeds from inside each fruit into large plastic bins.  Because there is always flesh attached to the seeds, letting them sit in the bins overnight helps the fleshy part break down.  The following day we pour the seeds, flesh and all, through a series of 5 gallon buckets, each with different sized wire screen bottoms.   We use a hose and spray as much seed as possible through the screens, collecting pulp in the first bucket.  The last bucket collects the seeds for drying.

So before you start salting, roasting and eating this year’s pumpkin seeds (remember a pumpkin is a squash after all), set aside a handful of raw seeds to dry and grow in next year’s garden. 

BELOW:  Commericial Garden Crew member putting Thelma Sander's squash through the guillotine.

BELOW:  Rinsing flesh off the squash seeds.

BELOW:  Inside of Thelma Sander's squash.

This TED talk features Cary Fowler, a Seed Savers Exchange board member, discussing the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway and the importance of genetic preservation for our agricultural crops.

Seed Savers initially depositedf 485 varieties of vegetable seed from its collection.  Since then, a second deposit has been shipped and received at the Nordic vault.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault functions like a safety deposit box for biodiversity and global food supply preservation, storing duplicate collections of seeds on behalf of gene banks from around the world.  The Seed Vault offers protection against loss of diversity due to natural disasters, wars, equipment failures, accidents, and loss of funding that can plague even the best gene banks.   Located at 78 degrees north, far above mainland Norway, three vault rooms have been fashioned inside a mountain, down a 125-yard tunnel chiseled out of solid stone.  Naturally cold already, the Seed Vault is further cooled to below -2 degrees Fahrenheit.  At this temperature, seeds can be stored safely for decades-even if the earth warms or the power goes out.  The Seed Vault will soon house and secure the world's largest collection of seeds, including many varieties no longer grown by farmers or gardeners.

This and more information can be found at www.seedsavers.org/Content.aspx?src=whatsnew.htm#vault

We’re harvesting sunflowers this week, which have some of us wondering about the whole sunflower seed business.  Of course here at Seed Savers, we harvest seed to grow, but we’re curious about those who harvest seed to eat.  Which brings us to baseball, where players chewing sunflower seeds has become a ubiquitous part of the game.

 If you’ve watched a major league baseball game recently, it’s obvious seeding has replaced chewing tobacco as the healthy chew of choice.  In a single season, the Cleveland Indians will go through 12 cases of sunflower seeds.  The Detroit Tigers have a “Who likes sunflower seeds?” discussion panel on their forum.  Here fans argue the best brands for eating, the virtues of BBQ and Ranch flavor, and plot how to steal seeds from their wife’s flower beds.  Even The Washington Post devoted an entire feature to the classic bird food, “The Great Sunflower Seed Shortage of 2005."  For baseball players, sunflower seeds have replaced tobacco. 

 But this craze is nothing new.  North and South American Indians have used mature sunflower leaves as a tobacco substitute for hundreds of years.  Helianthus annuus is native to North America, and many of these old varieties are still around.  The Tarahumara White Sunflower was originally grown in the Sierra Madres of Northern Mexico.  The Arikara Indians in the Dakotas, and the Seneca Nation in New York, grew self-titled varieties that are now offered commercially. 

 When Helianthus found its way across the Atlantic, Russians began to grow sunflower seeds commercially for their oil.  And like many seeds here at Heritage Farm, new varieties of Helianthus eventually made their way back to North America from all corners of the world: Mammoth Russian and Rostov from Russia, Taiyo from Japan, Italian White, Hungarian Black Seeded, and an old Turkish variety called Supermane, to name a few. 

 This week, the garden crew harvested their way through a jungle of Titan sunflowers, a seed we describe in our catalog as:  “One of the tallest-growing, biggest-headed and largest-seeded varieties available to gardeners.  This is one for impressing your neighbors and winning awards at county fairs.”  And the proof was in this Titan forest the garden crew was clear-cutting.

 Sunflowers are ready to harvest when the back of the flower has turned yellow, which is not so easy to determine when sunflowers are 14 feet in the air.  After double checking to make sure there are no co-workers standing behind, the crew will pull on the stalk until it snaps.  Once it snaps the weight of the flower head takes over and timber!  The giant head is then cut off with a pair of loppers, collected on a flatbed, and taken back to the high tunnels to dry. 

 Next week we’ll be drying seed.  Out in the field, the garden crew hand-picked the biggest flower heads with the most beautiful seeds for seed stock.  We’ll save this seed to grow next year.  Part of the stem was left on these flower heads so that we can hang them to dry.  The hundred or so remaining heads are spread out on a screen.  It’s essential to maintain continuous air flow, so that the flower heads don’t rot.  But the biggest challenge to drying sunflower seed is keeping mice and birds away.  We keep birds away by completing the drying process indoors.  Unfortunately for us, the same time of year to harvest sunflowers is also the same time of year mice are trying to find their way indoors.  Setting traps helps, but only if you can bait them with something they like more than sunflower seeds (which they love).  We use raisins, a fruity enticement that seems to work.

 It’s also that time of year when major league baseball playoffs begin and ball players will be seeding with a new found intensity. 

BELOW: Garden crew memeber poses with Titan Sunflower seed stock.  The tallest sunflower was recorded at 25 ft and 4.5 in., grown in the Netherlands.

BELOW:  Garden crew lops the heads off of Titan Sunflowers.

BELOW:  Taiyo Sunflowers drying in high tunnels.