indianapolis really nice place and they just open a c library down there and it was the biggest event they've ever had at their library and it looks like there's more people here than there was there so i can picture you guys like is that it to him and show him how it's done i got to go way back here ok now everybody else cedes you gotta look excited let your arms up stuff yet you guys are awesome so much fun i'm so excited to be here what a beautiful place so you guys are a little bit about me i'll tell you a little bit more i am for a small house farm which is in sanford michigan this is a small house right there it's not like a tiny house like you see on the internet you know it's like eleven hundred square foot but i've got two young  boys and they get bigger every day and every day seems like mouse gets a little bit smaller you know small house is about to go out effort sustainable living you know we try to grow majority of our own food there we raise our animals and things like that pigs and chickens and all that kind of fun stuff i got a water catchment system i keep thinking all these things i'm doing are improving the value of the home my wife and i disagree on that sometimes is what i do from a nine to five because the bank won't take seeds as a payment we will talk about that too much today but essentially what i do is i call press oil from various seeds and nuts and then  live across the street are small houses from levon hundred acres of forest so we gather a lot of herbs out of the woods and then we make them and so well those products and we can talk about that at another time here's my kids they have nothing to do with my presentation i just like to show them off aren't they cute and he sells it at the farmer's market flea dollars a pound very clever man tell you a little bit about myself i have a limited time i have so many things i want to say you guys but i'm going solo personal story about me so i was raised by my grandmother and my grandmother was fascinated with technology in particular she was really into the microwave love the microwave microwave or that when she would make tea she would warm up the water in the microwave and disagreement you know it takes just as long to do it on the stovetop she don't hear that she was doing it in the in the microwave so we had a lot of packaged foods that was cooked in the microwave i'm relatively ok i came out all right so i don't you know to the point my life now where we grow majority of our own food you know right on the land where we plan our seeds and we're out there doing the work for me was a complete change of everything that i had to do everything that i learned growing up we had to learn how to do the opposite of that myself all over as i got older but these guys right here man they're doing it from the beginning you know i mean they're learning the right way to live they're out there planting those seeds their name in the pigs that become our dinner you know they are involved in the process from the beginning to the end whether they like it or not you know i find i do a lot of programs for children and give them no idea where the food comes from so many kids have no idea where food comes from that it's frightening so this is a great opportunity to get kids involved in that so they're kind of my inspiration to show off well let's move along so what is the seed i brought a prop i got this here i was when i was down in indianapolis we went to this herbal place and they  selling these things they call them african mojo beans and the lady told me that they keep them for good luck it's a prosperity charm of some sort i told her it's a five a being should know it was talking about but it's a big seed so we're going to use  man inside of this see right here this thing this thing right here is everything that it takes to grow like a twenty one foot long vine what they call pods on a full of beans all the things that we need to eat and in doing so not only does it produce our food but it also produces the seeds that it needs to grow the crop next year all inside of this little tiny package man that's a miracle as a miracle right so regulator named roland what she's an indigenous seed activist and one day she says to me we're talking seeds and she says ben you know it seems like it's kind of like a little baby in a box with a little packed lunch on because they're cute so all this dictionary definition is accurate i think the seeds are a lot deeper than that and we really need to appreciate the value that seeds are we don't have that by that sometimes i give presentations i bring all my joy candy bars with me i think it all majority and are such a great representation of what seeds are think about what's in it all my joys or the main ingredients all mince coconuts chocolate actually in a kid pointed out to me corn syrup all of which are made from seeds right everything we do is made from seeds so why do we want to save them so we're going to talk about how to save seeds of some point but really i want to focus on why we're saving the se people say to me all the time but ben why do i want to save my seeds man you know i can go on the internet i don't have to get off my couch we can do it on our phone now we can internet it up and we can see all the most exotic seeds in the whole wide world and get them delivered right to my door why do i need to save seeds why do i want to participate in  community seed program like this and let me tell you community first and foremost all you guys all you guys look how beautiful this is i was so excited to see this community building i did take a picture you guys every time we get together to share season stories we make our community s i was at this thing started destroyed he was a master gardeners talk ladies want to come talk about seeds and things so it's kind of a big room is kind of an alcove and i got there and i was watching the ladies and they were mingle and they were laughing and share stories and having so much fun they had no idea that i was there it watching them and stuff these ladies came from all or place didn't even all know each other but they were coming together to meet and share stories and build bonds over plans their love of plants is the same thing seems make plans right all of you guys how many guys know each other personal rather see just some of you could all get to know each other now this is what we get when we share save seeds as a community first and foremost as a local and reproduceable food supply so at the beginning i said have small house we like to try to grow a majority of our own food i have two young boys i will never be able to grow enough food to feed all of these children are impossible right so i know we have to go to a farmer's market i like to go to farmer's market it's a lot of fun i can meet the farmers i can see how they grow the food i can ask them all sorts of questions make sure that you guys go to the farmer's market right so you guys know how boring that is so then i invite myself to the farm i was there to do that i want to come and see people can say a lot of stuff but i want to go and see how things should be and grow and while i'm there milling about i'll say something like  grows it right when the seeds are coming from another part of the state where the seeds are coming from outside of the state some of those seeds when you buy seeds from libraries or stuff those you come from other countries right there's other local about that you know what i mean local seeds grow local food and you guys have all the local seed you right here right here in your own community which gives you improved flavors and varieties right because you are saying the seeds from the taste is tomatoes you only see the seeds from the juices melons you only say the seeds from the earliest peppers whatever it is that you like in your garden you select for that when you say those seeds saving seeds is like breeding plants in the most simple form you become a plant breeder every time you save your seeds you select for the traits that you appreciate the things that you enjoy and that's what you get every year in your gardens which gives you the ability to maintain a bathrooms at it and the one had a hot tub and i was kind of stuff and when we look at i was most really into that and i think that really helped her that this was the house for us she just the look on her face when i bought the house and i tore all that stuff and it all out of there right and so now instead of the hot tub and all those random things i don't need i got shelves for all my seeds and i got boxes and bins and baskets a whole room full of seeds you should come and see so if there is ever disaster man i am set so you see the thing on the internet the doomsday vault rights full of all the seeds are will never see any of those seeds and you know what i think i don't think we want to i have no interest in seeing any of those seeds and i'll tell you why there's this thing people we will get into the debate but people believe this thing called climate change if you're familiar with that  they believe that the weather is rapidly changing and the seeds need to adapt to that so the seeds that are in the doomsday vault that have been there for a decade sometimes those who dream and old are that those seeds are frozen in time literally frozen in time in a world that we don't even live in anymore when we have to dig those seeds out of being frozen and we plant them they came from another place they have not adapted to this environment the greatest seed bank in the world is the seeds that we put in the ground that is where the seeds belong every time they grow they continue to adapt to the changing environment and they get stronger and better we don't want their seeds we got our own sea dry here you got a whole box of all this huge a community needs and you guys can grow them and adapt than to have them right here it's a lot easier to get here than it is all it to the doomsday vault anyways and give yourself a individuals necessarily but as a community and as communities we work together we're always stronger i've got enough seeds for me i'm going to seed for everybody my neighborhood you guys have enough seeds for everybody in your neighborhood you don't need anybody else you don't have to worry about order and seeds on line just come down your local library see libraries as we're going to talk about now we've got a great explanation already about what c libraries are all about i think they're wonderful we have worked now there's forty five c libraries here in the state of michigan that's awesome that's awesome i like to go to other states and tell them that they can feel real jealous me of something cool like michigan to there's five hundred or so in the country we got it was fifty one right here in michigan i'm not a mathematician but that is impressive let me tell you what this is how they work just like a library works is that a check it out the books and take it home check out the seeds and you take them home if you don't bring your seeds back though there's no penalty or fine or feet so was told ok but we highly encourage you to do that how many of you guys are already actively saving se wow look at all the hands this is wonderful no no keep your hands up keep your hands up all you guys are the hands up now look around and everybody find somebody else with a hand up that's a new seed buddy right you guys are crucial to making this thing work example go down to gross point park we have a wonderful c library down a gross point park last year we distributed seeds to four thousand people four thousand people came they need the seeds and they come and get them awesome in the year you know how many seeds can bat five not a sustainable program right now there's no problem with that you know seed saving exchange and myself included many organizations will donate all the seed you will ever need to keep these programs running because they're very important and as long as people are going home and growing food and eating fresh food that's a win that's definitely a win but it's not a sustainable program now all you guys with your hands up you're the ones that are to make this work if each of you just pick one variety one thing that you already know how to save seeds from and save seeds from it actively think about how fast seeds grow  to grow tomato plant how many tomatoes on a tomato plant how many seeds in a tomato do the math right think about that one see could turn into a lot of seeds once he could turn into thousands of c's enough for everybody in this room it's just that easy so you guys it's crucial that we all work together to make this program happen here's the map now it's not even updated there's more dots in this already there's nobody here from the u p a because i cut you guys right off the map there's only like three dots on there and it really wasn't as right there there's me look at how close we are like neighbors diversity now when we save seeds we celebrate diversity look at the diversity in this room right seeds are just like that i'm going to jump down so i can look at a picture better look at this thing look at all the different sizes the shapes the colors look at this picture beans phaseolus voulgaris to be specific the common bean right we can all grow these we all have these we're all familiar with these we'll look at the differences in the seed coat the sizes the shapes that is beautiful every time we save our seeds we save diversity like this this is cool so this is a reproduction of a wood carving from eight hundred ninety four here's the beast  mentioned went to texas picture of all you guys are going to mention that to jersey cabbages to be specific or they're known as the walking stick kale for sure now you don't see these things anymore i would love to bring these back why do you think you don't see these things as  can drive a tractor over it spray chemicals on it can drive a tractor over i want to harvest it either you know i mean we have sacrificed a lot of diversity in our food system in the name of convenience we have to grow a lot of food for a lot of people and we've got to cut a lot of corners and we've lost a lot of food because of that man i love the jersey cabbage look at this thing i can grow beans up these things so many good uses i can build walls grow walls of these things to block all my neighbors i don't like i found this is what they look like isn't that nice there in the u k so they're actually going to get their name jersey from the jersey isles where they're from from the english channel that's the island where they're native to absolutely beautiful and there's a company in the u k growing up for the sticks they polish them up and make really fancy walking sticks out of them and if you've got one hundred fifty dollars you want to real sweet she thinks she's pretty clever well i was in baltimore talking to baltimore master gardeners and i found a lady in the back of the room that's got a botanist friend of united kingdom what do you know i've got like ten of them they're this tall right now i've been over winter and the cabbage is the biannual so it takes a couple of years we'll talk about that a little bit to get seeds out of a man but they're about this big and i'm super stoked about it and when i get seeds for these things everybody i know is going to have seeds from these things and we're bringing back the jersey cabbage  here's a beautiful picture look at this tomato show a couple slides of diversity here this is a beautiful tomato from bread gates he's a breeder out of california comes out of probably six or seven new beautiful tomatoes every year that's kind of his gammick pretty nice look at that so people say ben what are your favorite seeds and i never will always say oh i like beings i like corn and stuff like that other stuff where i can see the diversity right now you know so when it's winter time and i'm jones for the garden i can pour out my boxes on the bed roll around in my seeds and things this is called two hours right it's a french squash i mean these seeds are bigger than quarters tremendous right we go all the way down to this tiny south south american watermelon guy look at us on our hair red seated watermelon isn't that beautiful tell you the story so in mount pleasant my pleasure michigan this place is called the seventh generation building it's a cultural center you can learn all about native heritage all about indigenous life you know all sorts of incredible things but i got a big garden program there and they do some three sisters gardening and all sorts of stuff and i participate in that and i help them out with stuff in there told me some stories so when they open this place thirty five years ago they want to have some traditional indigenous plants and tobacco is a sacred urban they were going to grow some tobacco here at the seventh generation building well now the guys from from kentucky brought up some burley tobacco seeds from down in kentucky brought them all the way up to central michigan so they could grow at the center and as you can imagine if you grow burley tobacco seeds from somewhere kentucky and central michigan how would they do terrible but some of those plant flowers and they collected the seeds from those flowers planted again the next year well maybe a little bit better the next year and the strongest plants may flowers again so once again they collected the seeds from the strongest plant planted again the next year now they start to see some improvement they say th year from the strongest plants plant to get next year and continue this process of selecting for their strongest plants thirty five years down the line their grant tobacco plants because of me incredible plants awesome stuff primo stuff all the tribes want to get their hands this plant could barely survive and now with rise from adaptation from the simple act of selection and seed saving this is what they were able to accomplish that's absolutely incredible and every time you save your seeds you can do the same thing and we can preserve some history now when i go to a new library and i want to pitch them on having a c library program and this is where i start libraries are in the business of preserving history that's what they do this is kind of my angle into the conversation the preservation of history this is when i get the most excited about seeds because i get really excited about the stories that come along with them so i've got a couple stories and i'm going to tell them to this one so exciting oh my gosh i might lose who i think i'm excited now would i tell this story ok so i'm in berkeley michigan at the tsongas beer institute for peace and i'm giving a talk for some franciscan monks the franciscan monks invited me there to talk to the community about the importance of seed saving i had never met franciscan monks before they were wonderful people and it was quite a meal that they had prepared for me and they make candles that was like their thing i made all his home a candles and they sent me home with some candles wonderful people well anyway so we're there we're talking about the community and i like to talk about the preservation of history in this sort of thing and never be after the presentation people want to come up to the table and we can chat and swap some seeds or what have you and this couple comes up to the table they're like hey we got a we got to bea and you can ride bikes around on the trail and have a good old times beautiful if you've ever been down there they recommend it's awesome place to go down there ride bikes and have a great time and they come to this place is kind of like the old farm type of thing looks like a museum in there let's get off our bikes more walk around and check this thing out there walking about have a good time and this old dude pops out from behind the barn so what are you doing here this is my house oh it was sold he only thought it was a museum he's a nice guy he's used to that how about i give you a tour i've lived here my whole life i'll show you the place you know show you all around to show you my gardens and stuff and he's a great gardener you know i mean just like any good gardener you want to share the fruits of his labor he said would you please take some zucchinis home with you when you go here have some corn take some beans right and he loads up the baskets of their bicycle and send them on their way and ride the bike spangly wow what a story that's that's what an experience that we just had there at the hotel in the room the cordon is delicious and while this is all much fun you know the guy's a gardener and he realizes some of those beans are pretty plump they've got some mature seeds and down south they like to grow their beams that way so maybe i can save some of these beans take them home grown in my garden michigan so stick some in his pocket take some home sure enough some of them grew right now he's got a cool story to tell everybody right these are the seeds from his honeymoon and when people come over to his house he can give them a tour of the garden and to almost every every time he cooks his wife dinner it's so romantic honey these are the honeymoon beans you know super fun stuff so that's the story they tell me they're like hey we brought some seeds with us do you want some of them banned of course i do let me load up the truck right let me get a box so you know driving home from song experience to peace in berkeley michigan couple hour drive home wonder if i can find this dude on the internet right everybody's on the internet you ready lived in caves go tennessee he was the last man to have ever lived in smokey mountain national park what are the odds so this is how it goes right i've been working on this my historical references f d r is the one who started national park shit and it kind of went like this here's the border of the park and if you live within the board of the park you know and it is so that's what they did and herman family said you can't kick us out we've been here for five generations hermits kids were born on this homestead kermit was born on this homestead kermit's parents were born on those homes that you know five generations means all the way back to the first settlers that settled in this land was kermit family that lived in this place so the government in some wise moment said ok well let's just say sure enough that's where he lived so these seeds were handed kermit family from the cherokee when these people were first settlers we've been able to trace them back that far is an hour while it gets better it gets better so on the internet it turns out you know this is a national park now or whatever but nearby in the closest town of what the heck so i called him up and i'm like guys i got a bean store you want to hear this bean story the guy at the museum like who is this you know what i tell him the story and he starts getting stoked you know like you hears voices get higher and higher as he's understanding the significance of what i'm saying to him so this last fall i always go down to berea kentucky bill bast he's got a big down there he's an appalachian historian he's got the largest collection of appalachian seeds in the country really cool guys like eighty five years old and show up at house and  sharp as a trap and he will walk you through as being you walk the whole bean garden this old guy walks through the whole thing and he'll tell you every single story from everything's cool guy anyways i drove right past his house barrow on my way to marysville and said that's where i went to fall and i went to the museum and i brought the beans with me and i put the beans in there so now there's a handful of kermit's beans right next to this picture of kermit in the museum we return the seeds back to their home we've cleared a portion of the land out there a nice sunny spot and we're planting some of the beans there a living museum of bringing the seeds back to the home where they grew originally how cool is that every time you save your seeds it is that significant that significant that guy twenty five years ago that said this is a tasty bean i wonder if i could save some of the he's from the rough wood seed collection well william's grandfather was an avid seed saver like to the point where they thought something wrong with this guy he was saving seeds for everything back the seeds he didn't even open seed seed save seeds from his friends save them all right he had boxes and bins and baskets and probably a whole room in clean up the estate so he went there and clean it up in the back of the barn they find a freezer chest big freezer trash right and they open the freezer chest up and it is packed full of seeds kray and packed full of seeds so they start digging it out and they seven or whatever it was at the turn of the century everybody got really hot around red tomatoes as a big deal really one nice round red tomatoes now see companies in the business for one thing make good money and if people are buying the seeds they're going to stop sown the seeds nobody is interested in these wacky looking kind of brownish orange tomatoes could offer them people don't have them people were saving those seeds this tomato was literally thought to be extinct until they found it in this freezer just so they took some of those seeds to try to grow i'm sure and also of them grew right  resilient little buggers right reasons were old and some of them still sprouted well baker group heirloom sea company stooped and they understood the significance of what was happening here is that we want to take on this project we want to make sure these seeds are lost you know we'll sell some of the seeds on our website will raise a bunch of money you you know you've got a lot of seed you've got to deal with now so they're selling them on the website a few years back for fifty cents a c for tomato seed right some of the money we know went back to the rough woodsy collection so  was not here so i could be honest with a bought a whole bunch of a whole bunch of them if she had any idea that i was buying seeds boy bunch of them but so not only did i do my part to preserve history but did the practicality of this so i planted the seeds i was super excited about and agree with all the other ones and it was the earliest tomato for me that year you know so what's fun very vigorous i'm super excited about this save the seeds from those tomatoes i'm planning to get the next year yet again the earliest tomato so that's odd so this last year i planted all my other tomatoes first and waited like two weeks before i planted the seeds then all the other tomatoes went on the field when they're ready and i'll wait another week or two before i took all my first tomato i picked last year for birds that's crazy right so that's super sweet so not only are we preserving history but the practicality of these seeds man if you think about it from a oh i'm excited to grow tomatoes because i don't eat tomatoes in the winter time that first tomato  spring yeah so same season just about historical preservation but there's a lot of practical uses to it too so it just depends on what you're into i happen to be into both here's this one now this is the c library story but i say last to tell you guys because right now and it was that sounds like this big right super tiny little town if you blinked you'd miss that i think i missed it on my way here it was the largest event they'd ever had at their library at the c library opening it's funny how that keeps happening packed full off for every penny that you would send they send back a little tiny back and seeds well starter kits you know to get kids started so he sent off some pennies and he got some seeds back and he planted in with his good lawyer we had a great time with it so i want to keep doing this smart man though saving his pennies he said i'll just save the seeds but point buy in these things every year they're free now at this point so you save this season groom again the next year and just continue to do so love them not only is this an incredibly productive green bean but it even makes a great soup bean you know i mean i've made chili with these things wonderful stuff so he got into his kids grew up michigan same town means i've been in that same soil this whole time well you know a few years of that and then nature gets in you know nature is always trying to mess up your work so it's too high here it's too wet there that is too dry there is too cold and the gardening is always a challenge and she had a really rough year and she lost almost all of her beans and when i met her at the c library opening shed a little handful of them that's all that was left around buildings so what would what do we do ban well if you want some done right you take it to a master gardener so i took some of the seeds of a master gardener friend told her the story she said will take care of these and she grew those beans like i've never seen i'm going to sense that and they haven't done nearly as well for me from the little handful of beans she brought me back to jars full of seeds that's significant so we took them right down to lake in their community see library just like you guys have right here you guys can do that too every time you save your seeds it is that significant so what your seed story inevitably i believe truly that somebody in this room has an interesting story about a seed from their family a seed that they've saved so many here and i've seen a lot of hands when asked to save and seeds the odds are pretty good the one of you might have something good this is a good opportunity for you to mention it don't be shy you're awesome that's awesome and that's what makes it happen isn't that fun isn't that exciting and i bet there's more of you out there and just a little shy so don't worry after today's over you go all year to come back here and talk to a librarian about the wonderful seeds that you have so we're talking about how to save the seeds we still got time for that right so these are the words the fly around when we talk about saving seeds open pollinated high bred heirloom organic genetically modified song about open pollinated plants essentially what this means in the simplest form is when left to its own devices as nature would intend it it will pollinate openly with the plants around it and breed true to form so my t left to its own devices will produce seeds that will grow terra cotta tomatoes very simple stuff right as opposed to a hybrid now a hybrid is when you take two plants of the same species cross pollinate and with each other to get a new variety right most of the stuff you're going to get in the grocery store is a hybridized variety and there's nothing inherently wrong with hybrids at all some of the great especially that you're going to buy and eat are most likely hybridized but in the seeds even world if you get very tricky so i make is simple that exploration is possible when you cross the two plants to make the new variety the hybrid it's called the f one first generation f one that's the hybrid right so now we save the seeds from that and plant them the next year the f two this is the second generation right and in this generation is all the potential expressions of genetics that you could get from the original cross to make it even more simple you have no idea what those seeds are going to grow all sorts of wild stuff you know i mean if you're crazy like me man it's super fun to do and you can come up with some fun stuff but in the community see sharing program if you get very frustrating when you plant seeds and you don't even know what they're going to grow here's a good example a lot of sweet corn going to get your hands on a hybridized right if you save seeds from hybrid sweet corn and plant them again the year the odds of getting a sweet corn is very slim how disappointed would that be sweet as a recessive gene it's very easily lost in the mix so when you're sincere in sharing seeds or beginning seed saver avoid hybrids stick with the open polonaise if you're coming here and taking seeds from here they're already open pollinated so it's easiest way to do it just get to see it here now heirlooms a tricky word is real tragedy everybody likes to use it by me there are some kids that roast coffee bean being that they're grown for sixty five years as a lakeview michigan heirloom does a seed need to be heirloom to save it absolutely not remember the blue tomato for bread gates that's a new tomato but it's open pollinated and it's delicious and i'm saving seeds from it sure am and you can but let's think about why are people heirlooms i mean maybe they're delicious maybe the early maybe they're sentimental whatever the reason is that somebody thought it was worth saving that seed and sharing it for fifty years probably a good enough reason that we want to do it too right organic is a matter of preference if you were to ever get anything for me ever ever it's all organically grown i'm not certified organic i'm not going to give the government my money i don't have any money  all these sides right synthetic inputs and these plants have adapted to that sort of treatment so then you take the seeds from these plants hold your gardens and grow them organically without those inputs of the plant is adapted to they're not going to perform nearly as well as you would like them to if you start with organically grown seeds and then grow them organically that is the treatment they prefer and that is the treatment they have adapted to it's a great head start for having a good garden so if you plan to grow organically it does not hurt starve organically grown seeds genetically modified on the other hand is a very different topic that i certainly don't have time to get into so some people will clarify this so people say to me oban we've been genetically modifying plants forever hundreds of years we've been doing it and they're confusing genetic modification with hybridization hybridization is a perfectly natural function when we take two plants of the same species from that part two plants of the same species and cross pollinate with we could all do that in our gardens anyway we want right genetic modification is when we take genetics from something outside of that plant species sometimes from a different species sometimes from things that aren't even plants at all right and changing things on the cellular level it's a very different animal so to speak  contract for something maybe think about that for a second you might find some process genetically modified foods potatoes zucchinis as they do those apples corn soy cotton you up in our country a bottle at our house is gluten free on it there's no ketchup on the whole planet has gluten in it right it's like a marketing thing right and it's the same thing with the g m o project verified it's a marketing for my wife we were just down in india and we went to a fresh time grocery store if you guys ever seen these fresh time grocery stores this is new to me i live on the sticks right now they had a bread cutting machine all these crazy things is very fancy and it was so she bought this hummus it's brought back to the hotel she said oh i got this homage to g m o free look it's got the sticker with the butterfly on it and i was like oh cool and i looked at it and there was not one ingredient in the hummus there's not the modified in any form just good marketing no no you didn't hear some flour canola not a plant she can or i have to mention that you know canola just stands for canadian oil low acid from the rapeseed plant didn't think the word rape seed would sell well in america but that's another topic for another day this is some important information no question need to know how and when to get involved in what's happening with your plants if you're intending on saving seeds from all of them this is a little bit of stuff very simple stuff it's like riding a bike ok so here's a story my year old when he was young w is the easiest of the easy there is no reason that every single person in this room is not trying to save seeds for this list write this list down take a picture with your cell phone whatever you got to do to remember this this is the easiest of easy s very similar flower structures and therefore they produce seeds the same way and therefore you save the seeds from them the same way now not everybody is growing garbanzos and copies of things like that but they all fall in the same category beans of peas being the easiest right everybody's grown beans right we have some green beans ok so i just had a thought for the southeast indiana food growers conference about agriculture sustainable agriculture talking about people by save and seeds on their farms and a lot of people grow beans are all or all these excuses why we're not doing it so we're breaking down the numbers and you can scale this up in any direction you want but no matter how many be injured growing you only need to save two point five percent of those plants to get enough seeds for the whole crop next year two point five percent it's a very small amount and the beans is the one that is the biggest out of all of them it gets a lot smaller from there when i was so these things are all dried beans dry sees super awesome as if they're dry so with beans and peas you literally when you're done with them you just leave them on the plants to die right so sometimes when you're saving seed you've got to think about a little bit farther than just the plate right some of the things that you grow for food when the right to eat are not right for seed saving so when you're planning your garden if you like to rotate your crops or you know if you succession planting or turns everything into a cover crop or whatever you maybe sometimes you've got to think the things are going to be in the garden a little longer than you used to beings appeaser want to you leave them there after you're done eat them leave the rest of the plants two point five percent is what we've figured out just leave them behind to dry now you've got crunchy beans and peas you got to crush them and essentially all that does is separating the shell from the seed right in any way that you want i have young kids so i set them down on the kitchen floor with a bushel basket and they do it by hand and they love it my anikin is like a bean shucking machine he will do it all night long he gets so excited they're you know they're all different colors and stuff and so who like it's christmas all night long it's absolutely amazing but let's say you don't have a mannequin or you have a large quantity of beans i find that a pillow good for cracking up the beans but it's good for you know mental well being is boston will part that's all you're doing you can put them out on a tarp invite all your friends over have a big dance party and there's lots of ways to get this done it is breaking apart so you're trying to they're nice and dry they'll shatter really easy that's how nature intends it and you want to win oh i'm out now now you're so cool man because no matter what the seed is no matter what the size to matter what the shape whatever it is it's designed by nature the seed is heavier than the shell when it breaks with all of all of them it's almost like it was intentional so this lady here in the picture lives in this magical land where the wind will always blow at the right time in the right direction of the right philosophy i do not live in such a place but what she's doing here is you know the winds blowing all the junk away and all the beautiful seeds she's got a big pile of them right there i use box fans i find the box fans work quite well i go for it in wisconsin he's a scientist type he's got two box fans that he puts together need just both the knobs you know  book for every seat in the you know he's very technical and you don't need to be that way it is kind of adjusted as you go and you'll be able to get a feel for the distance that you need and the velocity of the fan and to get those things to blow away it is clean it off you do it in a basket and toss it up in the air  it is so important just to write down the variety name write something down please you know i like to think i'm cool and i work for so many beans of corn i can identify all of them can't i like to think i'm going to remember something twenty minutes from now i can't or won't neither will you just write down the label says please do it so when i got bags of things i have no idea what they are i'm just wait for a really really industrious grower to take them on for me now let us i'm going to throw in here because lettuce is great everybody grows lettuce nobody ever lets let it go to seed as soon as your le just ride with it ma'am it's not adversity it's opportunity we can't change the way that we think about these things you know what i mean it's not that my lettuce is better it's not making seeds or nobody has a we're happy let's see production body nobody's going to question that these things are awesome so the bowl and they make these beautiful yellow flowers and they open it up and they're gorgeous and then they close back up and when they open back up again it's a puff to see dispersal mechanism and the wind's going to blow these things away and blow a lot of seeds all over the place and if you like me just let that happen the a perpetual lettuce everywhere just pops up little surprises but if you want to collect them you can go right down the row and just pull the little puffs off and put them in a paper bag so i got it or if you don't have time for that you can put a paper bag over the whole plant cut that plant right off who there you go and it does do it just do the work for you and then you'll have them and it's very easy to separate the puffs from the seeds and you burn the seeds bet your c library and put them in the drawer lettuce very soul of homes this is your eggplants tomatoes i put them together even though they're a little different because they're relatively similar they have a couple differences and will focus on them shortly but here's the flower as you can see generally safe from b s like that across pollination tomatoes there's a little more slam there's a possibility of it we'll talk about how to avoid that i isolation is your best friend just grow one variety then you don't have to worry about it or if you grow more than one variety give them some space between them maybe put some flowers between them so then the bee when it's got the pollen on there but will stop somewhere else first before august the next plant really simple stuff  plants you want to leave on the plant past the eating stage this is one of the ones that picking eggplants to eat is different than picking at plants for seeds leave some behind to get well over ride if you don't know you know i mean they get all gross you've seen it happen that but when they're ready to go they're ready to go super c of super super simple right here's the process so you take your tomato you cut it at the horizontal the equator whatever you want to call it think about a tomato when you cut it sideways it opens all the chambers that are inside it right you want access to all those chambers and then you cut your tomato open and you squeeze it out into a jar for trays you like mean you have lots of them we do big buckets but it's the same scenario into a jar right at low water to it is that somewhere why are we doing environment that you need to sprouted tomato seed right so nature's way smarter than that so the specifically to stop these tomato seeds from sprouting nature smart so going to work around that this is what we do in the fermentation process so we take our seeds in our group and we throw in the jar with a little bit of water to it we set it up in the window sill in a warm sunny place i recommend covering it light this is this white stuff it's the funk and you see the fun i mean she did the job well done perfectly rounded ready to go so up here at the top is all those growth inhibitors that we talked about all the little bits of tomato stuff that you don't want anymore all the seeds that were mature yet are floating all the diseases inherent in your tomato seeds are there and at the bottom of the jar all that's left is good healthy viable tomato scene awesome i get one hundred percent  because you want to label it all the way and then when you're done you can scratch it off and turn it and label it was something different i mean look at these things and you can use these things for years and years you get out of these things so i think we use paper plates for my house i don't know what other people use them for but they're great for seeds and then when they're nice and dry wait wait right got to be like nature we've got to be slow we've got to think it over give us some time if you see these are not all the way dry when you package them up the mold got sawhorses with screen doors on things saying a film a whole pole barn with seeds and sometimes i start to panic because i'm like oh my gosh i'm in a space and i've put seed the way before they were dry so i speak from experience it's so frustrating to do that it's just wait book that's what's up here you should check it out peppers of the americas it is so fun talks about how like you know the proper start of the wild plant bolivia and how it's expanded across in the county to dorset people came over here and they took the peppers overseas and it's so fascinating to see how seeds and plants travel you think about like peppers and tomatoes and things are like such an important part of the culture in europe imagine italian food without tomatoes right to asking for south america there's a long time in italy where they didn't have tomatoes right and then when the italian immigrants came organza bag over top of the tomatoes they're self pollinating so they can make this the fruits without any outside inputs to cover them right up and also make a fruit trends out of this bag and then you mark this part of the plant with little twine or something so you know which one it was you could take the bag off and  here happy seeds here's a pepper plant that i do now peppers although they are self pollinating have big open flowers and bugs long of to visit them and remember this week or how sweets a recess of gene is the same thing with peppers if you have a sweet pepper a hot pepper and they're cross pollinate with each other all you will ever have is hot peppers right so people don't want that if you want to think these things through if you have to grow a great variety of things in a small space you have to do things like this now you can get one of these bags you can get on the internet whatever and it's really simple let's go down the road with these bags over the plants you don't have to do a lot of them one pepper plants making thousands of seeds you know to back up a couple of them back up a couple of things and let him go and those are the seeds for the c library all the rest of them you can just eat  whatever you want with just a few so all it takes is when it gets a little bit trickier insecta when pollinated plants like melons and squash they will easily cross pollinate each other that's how they're designed by nature as they need bugs to move pollen from one every melon ever on the planet i got to grow moll in this one space so it gets a little tricky but your home just grow one one and then you know you've got pure seeds that share with your community this is the family cubase ca so this is the plant family this is the here's those decorative gourd things that they sell at the farmers market stands all the time these will not cross amongst each other right so simple as would understand this you can grow as zucchini hubbard squash a butternut squash cucumber a melon a watermelon and a decorative gore in a pile in your garden and have pure seeds from every single one of them right so you can still have a lot of variety in your gardens and still grow a lot of cool stuff without having to worry about cross pollination and this way we can isolate these things by selection so i don't think you can have a lot of stuff because it's very easy to have a ton of things look at all those cool things you can grow and still have pierce eat the place that you really want to watch here is right here because although it's all your summer squashes like i said it's all acorn squash here's the hand pollination we don't have time to go through this we could talk about this another day here some slides about hand pollinating it's a lot of fun if you get a lot of free time like i do like to his hand upon it here's a female here's your mail right we're closing them up so they can't get pollinated by anything else until i do it and then here's me doing it here's the female flower right there were very delicate with her here's the male we've removed all of his paddles you can tell here the male flower looks like a paintbrush or you laugh and then he does paint these things you know if you get two males to a female that's ideal think about how nature works right a b does not just go from one flower to the next and go home if it's lots of flowers you want to assure good pollination and then he's you know what you're done with him you know  then so you taper up and she's ready to go and you'll be able to within days the obvious will will start to swell the flower will drop off business she did it right so then again mark this thing put a little piece of twine or something on that so you know that you did it so you don't forget  it's a little bit riper than what you would eat a debt to get seed if you take a green acorn squash and cut it open you're only going to get a few good seeds out of it you look at things it looks good right now you're going to a whole bunch of seeds out there melons on the other hand when they're right they're ready to harvest seeds from right you know it's funny to talk about this you know and i've been thinking about this a lot lately and i go all over the place i literally travel from state to state in town to town talk to people about seeds and what a funny thing that is you know because it was just a couple lifetimes ago just a few generations back where everybody just inherently did this it was just the thing that we did it should be in a cookbook it's part of every color and every step when you harvest the fruits you save it seeds that's what people did because it was necessary for survival and just in such a short amount of time we've stepped away from that you know to where we have to teach each other and help each other kind of interesting when you chameleons say the seeds cucumbers on the other hand look at those seeds you're familiar with those translucent weak things they'll never don't often leave your cucumbers just leg gets all big and there it's not a big deal it's a great opportunity to try to harvest some zucchini seeds you know what i mean it's not adversity it's opportunity we have to change the way we think about things now this one man we've been trained in practice to say watermelon seeds we all do it and they're all wet seeds again you process them the only other ones other than tomatoes that all ferments are cucumbers other than that you just take them out clean them up real good make sure they're dry on a paper plate what i found a handy trick is if you take these wet season put them in a jar with water healthy viable mature miles right so you can't go more than five miles without running into a cornfield so i find that it helps to stagger my plantings you know people don't talk to their neighbors much anymore so this is a great option to talk to a neighbor and find out what kind of corn they're growing or ones are going to tassels so the t much lot of them are biennials they're interesting because they have perfect flowers but they're not self compatible so they need a good population in order to make seeds they need to be over which are fertilized radishes i put on here specifically and tell my kids their broccoli coins and they love them you know me i'm so just got to think about things a little bit different and the radish pot is a great example of that here's some additional resources if you want to talk about learn some seeds seed saver slash learn to take a picture of the slide this website has more information than you'll ever want to know about anything i set up at night when i'm home alone surfin this website the books were a library lots of books i've got some great examples down here i'm sure they have these seed to seed by suzanne ashworth is the primo number one but the seed garden from seed savers exchange is also a wonderful option full color photos if you know what i'm saying and i also like the complete guide to same exceeds the subsidized as you can see by the bookmarks is the want to use the most not only does have your garden vegetables in it but it also talks about herbs and flowers and landscape plants fruit trees and all sorts of wild stuff so get in on that relatively new but essentially what we do is we adopted growers to produce seeds that we then donate to c libraries and if you guys are interested in growing seeds for the seed program i have all sorts really cool stuff up here and i would love to share that with you so