I’ve been enjoying collecting seeds from many of our garden plants this season. It’s early August and we still have several months of seed harvesting to go before frosts, cold weather and shorter days bring a close to the season.

Here we are in the cross-quarter days between Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox. Even though its still quite hot (we are currently experiencing yet another heat wave), the shorter days are becoming much more noticeable and I can literally feel myself pulled into fall which coincides with “harvest season”.

We are a family of passionate seed savers and so we also harvest of our beloved seeds alongside the harvest of veggies, flowers, medicine and fruits. By this time of year we’ve already inevitably harvested seeds of all sorts of plants into various containers stowed on our porch, in the shed, covering counters in the kitchen, window sills… you get the idea!

Seeds are life and we live with seeds.

After collecting a dry seeded crop (like kale seeds or beans) my next task is to thresh the seeds.

What is threshing?

To thresh means to separate seeds from their seed heads.

Often threshing comes down to physically breaking open the seed head enough to let the seed fall free. If you are a gardener and you’ve saved and replanted seeds from your garden then you’ve probably already threshed seeds.

Threshing Beans

When I save a bean pod that has dried on the vine, eventually I am going to crack open the pod to reveal the seeds. After I have finished oohing and ahhing at how beautiful the seeds are in their cozy little bed, I’ll pluck or drop them out of the pod.

I’ll drop the beans into a carefully labeled envelope or baggie where they will wait until the next season when they are to be replanted.

Threshing Sunflower Seeds

Here’s another example of threshing that many gardeners can relate to — Sunflowers!

Those of us in love with growing sunflowers may inevitably end up saving some of the seeds (that the birds didn’t eat yet) for replanting the following year.

To get to the seeds we’ll need to hold the sunflower’s seed head and wiggle and pull out seeds. To tell you the truth, its actually easier to rub some of the seeds out to make space for more to rub out easier (see photo below). Another option is to break off a piece of the dry and crispy sunflower head in half and then use our fingers to pull out the seeds starting from the broken edge.

If you’ve ever coaxed sunflower seeds out of the sunflower’s seed head, then you’ve threshed!

Threshing Rudbeckia Seeds

With Rudbeckia (aka Black-Eyed Susan) the process is similar since Rudbeckia and Sunflower are both in the Asteraceae family. But the Rudbeckia flower is way smaller than a sunflower of course!

After the Rudbeckia flower is spent, the whole flower head will dry up into what we now call the seedhead. Take that dried up, crispy Rudbeckia seed head and rub it between your fingers. Seeds will fall out into your palm.

So there you have three examples of threshing seeds on a personal garden scale.

Threshing Other Dry Seeds

The process is similar for most dry seeded plants, keeping in mind that like each plant is unique and each type of seedhead has its own personality. Each seedhead has a different structure, but often there are repeating patterns, especially within the same family of plants.

Threshing, as part of process of seed saving, is the curious gardener’s call to explore together with the seed head to discover where the precious seeds lie waiting. Sometimes the seeds are more or less front and center, like with the sunflower, only temporarily obscured by small petals that eventually fall or get rubbed off. With other plants we will have to find a way to break open the seedhead, as with with the beans’ pods.

Our curious fingers will learn as we dance with each plant how to open up their seed heads to discover the seeds inside. Once open, its a matter of collecting those seeds and saving or immediately replanting them.

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Threshing Seeds in Bulk

What about the gardeners and homesteaders that want to save a LOT of seeds?

What if we are growing a small plot of wheat to bake bread with and hope to collect several pounds of wheat seed? Perhaps we want to grow pounds and pounds of dry beans for our family to eat through the year? Or maybe we’d like to grow a significant amount of herbal seeds for our spice cupboard or apothecary?

What if we want to grow and harvest large amounts of seed in order to sell seeds as a portion of our homestead income? Or maybe we want to grow many extra seeds to share with our community at a local seed swap or seed library.

If we answered yes to any of these questions, then we need to scale up our threshing. Using our fingers is great for small amounts of seed, but when we scale up, fingers become too tedious and slow.

We need to step up our threshing game!

We already know that thresh means to separate seeds from their seed head. The word thresh comes from thrash which means to beat or flail. And thrash is derived from the Old English þrescan which meant “to beat, sift grain by trampling or beating” (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Prior to our modern post-industrial culture, all pre-industrial agrarian cultures threshed their seeds manually for food, fodder and planting.

Back in the day, gardeners, homesteaders and farmers all knew how to thresh seed and they did it in appropriate volume so that they could have food throughout the year! They would stock their silos, barns and larders with grains and legumes to eat, for example.

Prior to agriculture, and still to this day in many cases, traditional cultures practice horticulture with their native plants. They rely/relied on all kinds of wild tended seeds for food and threshed their seeds in order to get at them.

Large quantities of seeds requires bulk threshing to be efficient. This often comes down to dancing on dry seed heads or beating, crushing or cracking them with some kind of stick or tool.

The mechanical crushing of the seed heads releases the seeds of many plants at one time. The more plants that seeds were collected from, means more hands and feet are needed, so scaling up threshing becomes a family or community event.

Large vs Small-Scale Threshing

These days large farmers use huge, expensive equipment to thresh tons of plant material at a time.

Huge monoculture fields with uniform plants and homogeneous genetics require all of the plants to be harvested at once, sometimes upwards of tens of thousands of acres. With higher labor rates, subsidized farming and cheap fossil fuels, using massive machinery is a must for big ag. The human and the community elements are thus all but removed and threshing goes from a creative expression, or a dance with nature, to precision, production and profit.

Many small scale farmers, on the other hand, often still use their bodies and basic handheld tools to thresh their seed harvests. Many of them still dance on and with their seeds.

Well, its true, some small-scale seed farmers do employ comparatively simple small-scale machinery to help thresh some crops such as grains. There are products on the market but small scale threshing machinery can also be improvised and home built for the DIY’ers. Even with machinery there is still room for individual creative expression and relationship with the plants, provided we don’t scale up too much.

Enthusiastic gardeners, homesteaders and small-scale farmers alike enjoy the process of dancing or beating seedheads to release the grains. When we work with diverse crops, processing seeds can be exciting and rewarding. What a joyous way to use our bodies’ renewable energy—to partner with the seed of life.

Embracing the Seed of Life

While there are similarities, every plant is so different and has its own personalities. The same can be said for their seeds. I find so much joy in harvesting, cleaning and saving seeds from the plants I love most — and threshing seed is no exception!

On another level, threshing seeds has taught me valuable lessons about finding my own inner nuggets. As I journey through life I can thresh my problems and struggles after they’ve senesced, breaking apart their weakened, dried forms to shatter and release the valuable lessons and inner joy and wisdom that were patiently waiting inside my heart all along.

I am so grateful for the plants that I am lucky to steward in our garden, as they continue to steward me. I am grateful for the abundant seeds that plants so graciously offer our family—so that we may hold their seeds in our hands and hearts in awe for but a brief moment before returning them to the soil and sharing them beyond our garden near and far.

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.