Last year we shared a picture of the radish we allowed to go to seed.  Today we are harvesting those seeds and will share with you this experience.  First, here is a look at the seed pods that grew from the radish.

First we removed the pods from the dried radish plant and discarded the largest stems and stalk.

The radish seeds are small, round, hard balls which are heavier than the dried pods that encase them.  Next we need to liberate the seeds from the pods by crushing them.  With this amount of seed pod, the quickest way was to gather them up in my hands and rub back and forth.  I considered getting a meat tenderizer tool to crush them with, which I don’t think would have been a bad idea, but I had enough hand strength to crush them between my hands, or even between my fingers.

The smaller, heavier radish seeds are all inside this pile of pulverized pods.  Now we need to separate the seed from the chaff.  The easiest way I found to do this was to tip up the lid from the tote I was using as a working surface, gently work the chaff back and forth, and the round seeds would roll down the lid to the bottom.  I could pull the chaff material back to the top and continue the process, liberating more seeds.  Because the chaff is lighter than the seeds, I can now lift off seedless material from the top and set it aside.  Also, I can use a technique called winnowing to remove additional chaff material from the pile by blowing gently on it.  The lighter chaff will blow away from the top of the pile, leaving more material dense with seed below it.

Through this patient process of rolling, blowing and moving the chaff around, the vast majority of seeds collected will roll down to the bottom of the lid.  Once the seed has been separated from the chaff, the next step is to store the seeds in a cool, dry location for future use.

And this is how we can turn one or two seeds into hundreds of seeds to use in the future.  God is good.