Bringing seeds in from the garden is a regular family activity during the late summer and fall time. Most plants want to make flowers to reproduce while the days are long and the air is warm. The bees, flies, wasps, moths, butterflies, hummingbirds and many others are very happy to oblige!

I absolutely love watching the garden erupt into symphonies of flowers in the spring and summer! Many of them send their stalks high into the sky toward the sun and moon! Others are lower to the ground and have their own unique ways of attracting pollinators to their flowers.

Inevitably many of those flowers are pollinated and wither up and desiccate. To some, the dried up crispy once-flower stalks, are an uncomfortable sight to look at. True, there is dry dead plant material everywhere in the garden and it can look messy and chaotic. There can be grief to see brown and dead flower stalks where there was once green, lush life and dazzling color display of flowers.

When I look at those dry crispy seed stalks, joy comes rushing over me! I see plants that have made seeds! Seeds represent to me the abundance that nature is always expressing. They represent the joy of new life to come. They represent sharing seeds forward and reciprocity with other gardeners.

Harvesting and cleaning our garden’s seeds is also an act of joy for me because I am living closer with the seasons, dancing with plants as they express their dynamic rhythms of life.

I harvested some dry crispy seed heads, but now what? How do I clean them?

Recently we talked about threshing those crispy seed heads to release the seeds. Threshing is usually required before we can screen dry seeds to clean them.

What is a Screen?

We are all familiar with screens—they are found everywhere in our lives. Screens on windows help us cool down on summer nights and warm up on fall days while keeping the flies out.

There are all kind of screens in our kitchens! Screens block food from going down the drain, they strain our pasta cooking water while keeping the noodles from falling into the sink. Screens help us steep tea so that we don’t have to drink tea leaves & stems.

Some gardeners use shade cloth, a kind of screen fabric that allows less light to pass through so that we can protect sensitive plants from sunburns. Even air filters for our homes and cars are types of dense, or finely woven, screens that allow air to pass through, keeping fine particles behind.

A screen is a filter that allows smaller stuff through while larger stuff is blocked.

How Do We Screen Seeds?

We just covered screen as noun — Something that filters one from another. Now we’re going to talk about screen as verb.

To screen seeds means to separate seeds from chaff using one or more screens.

We clean seeds with screens using the same principle as screening water from our pasta in a colander. Instead of water, we want to remove dust, stems, flower petals, insects, seed heads, broken plant bits and other stuff, collectively known as chaff, from our seeds. We want clean seeds!

Screens can help us filter out most of that chaff from our seeds. All it takes is a few various sizes of screen and we will be well on our way to clean all kinds of seeds from their chaff.

When we pour our threshed seeds into a screen, anything smaller will pass through and anything bigger will stay above. So we just need to pick a screen that allows our seed to fall through while the bulkier chaff stays up top on the screen. Or vice versa.

Earlier I mentioned how our kitchen has a bunch of screens. Well that’s where I recommend any gardener start looking for seed cleaning supplies! Round up your various sized colanders and strainers to see which one would work the best for the seed you want to screen. It helps to have at least a few screens with different size holes.

If you don’t already have an assortment of kitchen strainers, start with what you do have already or find some more options at your favorite local thrift store. They are very common so its not hard to find some good sieves and colanders with a little patience. Or better yet, ask your grandma. She probably has a good assortment!

Enjoying this article?

We'll let you know when new articles are available!

Be sure to place a clean bowl, bucket, bin or other container under your screen to catch the seeds as they fall through so that you don’t lose them.

Get Playful With Screening

Not sure where to start? Just try one screen out and see what happens! Invite your inner child to the seed screening party… its so fun to try different size screens and see which ones help us separate chaff from our seeds.

My inner child loves getting creative while I experiment with different screens:

“Hmm.. that strainer didn’t separate much chaff from my seeds.”

“Oh, my seed got kinda stuck in this sieve. OK let’s try that one instead, it has bigger holes.”

“This colander has different shape openings. Cool that let more seeds pass through!”

Gravity is our friend when screening, because it pulls seeds down through the screen. But sometimes the bigger chaff blocks seeds from going through the screen. Shaking the screen or agitating the seeds and chaff in the screen helps seeds pass through more easily and thoroughly.

Every type of seed has a different shape and texture. Smooth round seeds, like kale seeds, slip through chaff and screens effortlessly. Bumpy or gnarled seeds, like Swiss chard seeds, might need more coaxing if the chaff tends to hold onto them.

Refining the Screen

When we collect our screened seeds from the container we screened over, there is likely some chaff that passed through with the seeds. We can try another size screen to see if we can get more chaff out.

Sometimes our screens can get all the chaff out from the seeds. But more likely than not we are left with some chaff in our seeds.

Depending on our purposes that might be good enough for us! If we are cleaning seeds to replant next year, sometimes a little chaff doesn’t matter.

If we are cleaning seeds to eat, the chaff might not always be palatable. However, green leaf chaff is often edible, and even medicinal, in the case of many herbs.

Stems and other fibrous chaff like bits of seed pods or husks, on the other hand, are not fun to eat.

Maybe you would like to sell your seed. When we clean seeds for sale, we try to to remove most of the chaff that we sell. The seed industry has set a fairly high standard for clean seeds and a certain level of quality is expected by gardeners.

I’ll share how we clean out the remaining chaff from our screened seeds in our next article… stay tuned!

Want to learn how to process bulk seed at a homestead garden scale? Create more resilience and become empowered to clean the seeds that you grow to stock your pantry, share with your community, or sell to other gardeners.

See our course Seed Processing for Abundance for details!

Recommended Reading

Living Abundantly With Seeds — 27 ways seeds offer connection, empowerment and resilience for your family. A free, inspirational guide.