Small seed workshop: Preserving diversity

Do you have a great bean variety in your garden and would like to sow it again next year or pass it on to your neighbor? Or have you always wanted to know how to harvest, clean and store tomato seeds?
These and other questions about seed harvesting, processing and storage will be the focus of the event at the Department of Organic 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 for €10 per person from 2 pm to 4:30 pm and get hands-on.

Most home gardeners buy new vegetable and flower seeds from the shops every year. However, for many species such as beans or lettuce, it is relatively easy to obtain seeds for sowing in the coming years, and biennial crops such as carrots and chard can also be propagated easily with a little practice. In addition to the cost savings, there are other advantages: the respective variety gradually adapts to the 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 a high ornamental value.

As a botanical garden, the tropical greenhouse is dedicated to the conservation of species and therefore diversity. Every year, therefore, the teaching and learning garden also features seed-bearing vegetable and herb crops, which are cleaned and stored in the fall. In this workshop, we would like to pass on our knowledge of seed processing and provide insights into the handling of biennial crops.

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

You can take some of the cleaned seeds for your own garden.

With gardener and agricultural engineer Catherina Merx.

Pre-registration by 23.9.21 at: tropengewaechshaus[at]uni-kassel[dot]de or 05542-98 1231