Small seed workshop: Preserving diversity

Do you have a great bean variety in your garden and would love to sow it again next year or pass it on to your neighbor? Or have you always wanted to know how to harvest, clean, store seeds from tomatoes?
These and other questions about seed harvesting, processing and storage will be the focus of the event at the Department of Ecological Agricultural Sciences in Witzenhausen on Sunday, September 26, 2021. In the Teaching and Learning Garden at the Tropical Greenhouse, Steinstraße 19, 37213 Witzenhausen, you can learn the basics of seed production from your own garden for10€/p. from 2 to 4:30 p.m. and get hands-on.

Vegetable and flower seeds most home gardeners obtain new every year from the trade. However, for many species such as beans or lettuce, it is relatively easy to obtain seeds for future years' sowings, and even biennial crops such as carrots and chard can be easily propagated with a little practice. In addition to the cost savings, there are other advantages: the respective variety gradually adapts to regional conditions and can thus become more resistant to some diseases, and the preservation of the variety is ensured in this way. In addition, the flowering vegetable plants often enrich the garden with high ornamental value.

As a botanical garden, the tropical greenhouse is dedicated to the task of preserving species and thus diversity. Therefore, the Teaching and Learning Garden also features seed-bearing vegetable and herb crops each year, which are cleaned and stored in the fall. We would like to share our knowledge of seed treatment in this workshop and provide insight into how to handle biennial crops.

After an introduction to the topic, we'll work together to seed out beans, blow out lettuce seeds, and unroll cabbage seeds. We will also perform wet processing on tomatoes and cucumbers. We will prepare root vegetables and other biennial crops from the garden for storage over the winter so they can be replanted for seed next spring.

Some of the cleaned seed can be taken home for your own garden.

With gardener and agricultural engineer Catherina Merx.

Pre-register by 9/23-21 at: tropengewaechshaus[at]uni-kassel[dot]de or  05542-98 1231