At this time of year, many plants are setting seeds. Don't forget to get some photos for the database.

Karen

Yes, photos of seeds are an important part of any plant data base.
A good over the winter project as we order seeds,
and also a fall project as we collect seeds from our gardens.

Add a coin beside the seed so we can get an idea of the size of the seed.

@kqcrna, Thanks for the reminder; I harvested and uploaded some seed and pod photos yesterday.

@CarolineScott, sorry I forgot to add the coin. Next time I'll remember.

Probably not necessary for most seeds, but sometimes it helps new seed savers to know what they should be looking for.

Karen

I already planned it to do it during the long winter we have. Hope my camara is good enough to take pictures of the sometimes very tiny seeds.
Only have to find out which European coin has the same size as the coins that are used in the USA. Any suggestions of people who were in Europe and have 'Euro's' left are welcome. Or tell me, which coin is used. I will have some trades with people from the USA the next few weeks, so maybe I can ask them to send me a coin too (if it's not too expensive).

You could also use a pencil, Biro/pen or scale/ruler in the photo for comparison.

I like a skinny ruler with both mm and 1/16th inches.



Is there some very widely known, uniform size seeds like petunia, broccoli and radish? Then we could say "a little bigger than petunia" or "almost as big as broccoli".

We could glue 10 seeds of each "standard variety" onto white index cards and share them around, like the National Bureau of Standards.

Or, here's another idea that is technically accurate, but useless to 99.9% of gardeners. I mean, who has 5-10 grades of wire cloth handy?

If you have a collection of hardware cloth in mesh sizes like 60, 30, 26, 22, 18, 16, 12 and 10, you can make a stack, drop the seeds in the top, and just shake. Then look to see which screes they passed through, and which screens are holding most of the seeds.

Then the size could be reported as "mostly passes through 22 mesh", or
"stops at 26 and 30 mesh".
(22 or 30 wires per inch, square openings around 0.045" or 0.033")

- Most window screening is 24 mesh (I think) I found some at 18x14 threads per inch
- Kitchen strainers are mostly either around 18 mesh or 30 mesh.
- Fabric stores have cheap "mesh" fabric at 8 threads per inch, and maybe some other sizes. - You can make a nice strainer with windows screening or fabric plus an embroidery hoop.

Maybe, for medium-small seeds, we could photograph them with a "standard window screen" of 24 mesh. Then for small seeds, you could see how many fit loosely into a .042" square (1.06 mm square). For larger seeds, you could compare them to what is almost a 1 mm grid.

Umm... yeah.... I think most folks are unfamiliar with sizes of different screen material. And new gardeners are likely to be unfamiliar with even easy seeds like petunia. It's possible some people have only grown pelleted petunia, or maybe none at all.

Veteran seed savers can generally identify seeds after a few years of collecting them. It's the beginners who might find pictures helpful. I know they helped me a lot as a newbie. Something of well-known size like a coin might be of added value, but really, a simple photo of most seeds is pretty adequate without any size comparison I think.

In some cases including chaff in the same photo, labeled as such, might be helpful. e.g.sometimes beginners can't differentiate between chaff and seeds in echinacea cones. Displaying both, labeled, in a photo makes the difference obvious.

Karen

>> Displaying both, labeled, in a photo makes the difference obvious.

I agree! I wasn't sure what was what in alyssum seeds until after I tried germinating some "chaff" on a coffee filter. It seemed to have around 500% germination, so lots of things were seeds that I didn't THINK were seeds.

By the way, the PVC shells for my seed sieves are PVC DWV Sewer & Drain Adapters ("DWV" is the key word).

I got the idea from Katlien over in DG years ago:

I wrote a rather poor "Idea" about using hardware cloth to sieve seeds. I wish I could edit that and add photos!
http://garden.org/ideas/view/R...

Of course you are in the .01 percentile.

It seems to me that a lot of what we add is for the benefit of the people new to gardening, new to seed saving. Many times we get to be 'know-it-alls' and we forget that we were once begging for information to help us have better gardens. We don't need to talk down to the new people, but we should remember to always include them.
(And when I refer to 'new people' I also mean 'me' because there is so much more I can learn each and every day.)

I agree with all of that:

- we should remember to stay helpful to beginners
- I often forget
- I'm a perennial beginner

Some times I venture over to other forums and get really intimidated because I have no idea what they are talking about.

I don't see how anyone can become an expert in every aspect of gardening unless they live to be 399 years old. And by then, most of what they know will have been out-of-date by 200 years!

Maybe four or five years ago, when talking about gardening, I thought that "flowers, or vegetables?" was a detailed question.