It’s now early October and all of our summer crops are ripening. Corn, squash, tomatoes, watermelons, okra… the list goes on! And the ripening will go on too… all the way up until our first hard frost. What a blessing!

This season we’ve been enjoying luxuriously warm fall temperatures which are helping our garden’s summer crops continue to ripen up. Given the chance, many of our summer crops will continue producing and ripening fruit right up until cold weather kills them.

Fall is harvest season because all of our crops are ripe at the same time. Short season crops that we planted in early or late summer are ripening at the same time as summer crops that we may have started indoors or in greenhouses all the way back in late winter.

A few weeks ago our family celebrated mid-Autumn festival, or moon festival, which is a culturally significant holiday in Ann’s Vietnamese heritage. Like most long standing seasonal holidays, mid Autumn festival hearkens back to the not so distant past when all humans related to the seasons as communal gardening and farming cultures directly relying on plants for food, medicine, tools, shelter and art—basically everything!

The celebration corresponds with a full moon, or the harvest moon. But it is also within a few days of Fall Equinox (September 22nd) which lands right between Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice. Thus Fall Equinox denotes the mid point of fall.

Around the time of Fall Equinox the garden is picking up speed, with regards to ripening summer crops. All of the annual plants that haven’t already gone to seed and withered are well established and growing. The fruiting summer plants are setting fruit and ripening faster.

As we pass Fall Equinox and continue moving towards winter (as we are now in early October) the evenings cool down and days shorten which correspond with a slower pace of fruit setting and ripening. But it’s interesting to notice that while there is less daylight to photosynthesize, all of the summer plants can make up for it, in a way, because their root systems are more established and their leaves can harness more light than they could when they were younger and smaller.

Even still, it eventually becomes so obvious when those final green tomatoes and squash have slowed down and will never ripen on the vine before frost comes. Until that day…

We harvest, harvest and harvest what veggies and fruits we can!

We delight in all the summer veggies that make us feel like it is still summer and we delight in all the fall fruits that sweeten the shortening days.

We are not just harvesting summer veggies, we are harvesting seed for all of our crops. At least seed from all the crops we want to grow again, which admittedly is most of them.

In fall time we are harvesting, harvesting, harvesting seed.

And then eventually we are bringing in squash, tomatoes and other summer crops which will sit on the shelves in our home and in our coldest room. Even late ripening watermelons can sit on the counter for weeks, if not a few months. And as we eat those fall ripened veggies & fruits we will continue to harvest seeds from them through the winter remembering the precious rays of sun.

What Are Wet Seeded Crops?

Wet processing seeds refers to cleaning seeds from moist fruited crops. Fruits contain wet flesh. Unlike dry seed like corn and beans which dry on the stalk or vine before further processing, wet seeds need to be processed before they are dried or planted.

When I think of wet processing seeds I am thinking of summer fruiting crops like: tomato, pepper, eggplant, tomatillo, watermelon, melon, squash and cucumber.

What do all these plants have in common? Their seeds are surrounded by wet flesh (rather than dry husks or pods).

Coincidentally all of those above mentioned plants are included in what we temperate climate gardeners consider summer veggies, many of which need a long season to produce abundantly.

It makes sense that they are summer crops, because they make such big fruits, relative to their seeds. Extra energy is needed to produce huge, juicy, often sweet fruits. And then we ask those plants to produce not just one tomato, but many!

Thank you plants and thank you hot sun for all the delicious fruits of the season!

Its not just garden veggies that produce wet fruit. I am also thinking about tree fruit and perennial berries. Peaches, plums, apples, currants, raspberries, blackberries, honeyberries… and many, many more of course. Perennial fruits and berries also have wet flesh, often quite sugary, surrounding their seeds.

How Nature Plants Wet Seeds

If we let those tomatoes, peppers, peaches, plums, raspberries and blackberries just hang on the plant, what would happen? If the birds don’t get to them first they’d eventually drop to the ground. They may mold, rot, ferment, get eaten by bugs, freeze and thaw any number of times. In the case of the smaller berries some may dry first before rotting and freezing.

If left to nature, some of those seeds would sprout while many would succumb to the elements or simply not find the right conditions to grow or thrive.

We humans love to optimize the viability of our seeds and we love to be able to plant seeds in a controlled way so that we can keep an eye on our beloved green babies. We love to share seed with other gardeners.

So we wet process our seed to be able to clean, store, share and replant seeds from wet fruits.

What is Wet Processing Seed?

Wet processing seed is extracting the seeds from the fruit. Since the seed is ripe when the fruit is ripe, we can often simply eat the fruit and save the seeds at the same time. With fruits like tomatoes or melons, seeds can be scooped out while the flesh is put aside for consumption.

Then we take those wet seeds and clean them. Some wet fruited seeds like eggplant and apples are already relatively clean. They come clean from the flesh and can simply be rinsed and dried.

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Other seeds need to be further separated from fruit pulp and juices. One way of doing that is by decanting the the seed. When we add water to our juicy, pulpy seed mixture we can pour off the water pulp and juice.

The denser, viable seed sinks to the bottom of the water and doesn’t get poured out. We can keep repeating this by refilling our container with water and decanting the seeds until there is nothing left but clean seed.

Fermenting Seeds

There is one other step in wet processing: fermentation. Sometimes we ferment the seeds in their juices and pulp before decanting them.

There are two main reasons to ferment wet seeds:

1. Loosen the seeds from flesh, gel and placental tissue
2. Reduce fungus and bacteria on the seeds which can cause disease in the plant.

To ferment the seeds just let them sit in the fruit’s juices in a cup, bowl, jar, bucket or any container relative to the size of the seeds and their juices until they start fermenting. Smell it every day, soon you will smell the fermentation. Sometimes, if its warm enough, you’ll already smell fermentation in the first day.

If the fruit is dryer you can add a bit of water, but generally speaking fruit whose seeds need to ferment have enough juices already within their flesh.

Depending on the crop, fermentation can take anywhere from 12 hours to 5 days. There are so many factors that affect fermenting time like temperature, sugars and the type of seed being fermented.

Seed fermentation can be a bit of an art form. If your household is anything like ours, and if you’ve fermented any food whether it is sauerkraut, kim chi, kombucha, soda, wine, beer, you already know that fermentation is an art form.

Mostly it comes down to observation and looking at the seed to see when it is clean. There is wiggle room with timing but what we don’t want to do is ferment too long because it can cause the seed to sprout or even die.

Usually wet veggie seeds with softer coats only need to be fermented 1-3 days or so. Tree fruits with harder seed coats have a bit more wiggle room with regard to time they can be fermented.

As in the case of tomato seeds which have gel coating that prevents germination, some people use the mold test to know when the seeds are ready. Other people stir the ferment to prevent mold, or to stir the mold in as it starts forming. With other seeds like melons and watermelons that shouldn’t be fermented too long at all, mold would be an indication that you’ve gone far too long. Smelling like vinegar is another indication the seeds fermented a bit too long.

After fermenting seeds they are decanted as described above.

Drying Wet Seed

With our summer veggies we want to spread out and dry the cleaned seed as quick as possible so that they don’t mold or sprout.

In contrast, with most temperate climate tree fruits and berries it’s best to keep them moist and plant the seed right away. Most temperate tree fruits and berries actually benefit from or need to be cold and moist stratified (stay tuned for a future post on this topic).

Humans Are Creative Gardeners

There are many very specific, sometimes exacting, recipes for wet processing seeds. What I love about seeing all the different recipes is that its a reminder how creative humans are.

There is no wrong way to clean seeds and more often than not there are many different ways that we can clean our seeds. The same is true with wet processing seeds.

The more a seed grower relies on cleaning seeds for an income, the more precise we may want to be with regards to having a quality product, with a very high germination rate and an efficient seed cleaning process.

For the rest of us gardeners, homesteaders and part time seed growers, seed processing should be fun, exciting and approachable. Seed cleaning is something the whole family can be involved in whether we’re doing it professionally or not.

There really is no wrong way to clean seeds as long as we end up with some strong, healthy seeds that will sprout when planted.

In my older friend’s wise words:

Why do you go to all the trouble of fermenting your tomato seeds? I just pull some seeds off my sun dried tomatoes and plant them in the spring!

Learning From Nature

In nature seeds are sprouting without human intervention. Seeds are being dispersed, planted and grown literally everywhere there is dirt and rain. In nature wet seeds rot and replant themselves.

We see this in our garden when the volunteer tomato plants grow where tomatoes had fallen and rotted before freezing last winter, or when the squash grows out of our compost pile and makes the most and biggest squashes ever.

“Nature Knows Best” is one of four ecological principals stated by Barry Commoner.

Nature knows best how to plant seeds. Nature plants seeds with the help of all plants, mammals, birds and insects. Every life form on land, from the bacteria to the elephants, are involved in the process of making soil and fertility so that seeds can grow.

This is summed up succinctly in the permaculture principle “Everything Gardens” by Bill Mollison.

We humans have our own ways of gardening and tending seeds. We can hunt and gather, we can wildcraft, we can wild tend plants and their seeds—and we can live as gardeners and save our seeds so they can be shared around and replanted in future seasons.

I like to remember these expressions like “everything gardens” and “nature knows best” because they help take some of the pressure off being human. I don’t have to know everything and I don’t have to control everything. We’re all in it together—all life on earth, seen and unseen, known and unknown.

It really helps to lighten my load a little more by shedding a bit of my hubris about everything I think I know. I’ll load up again soon, don’t worry!

Thank you Mother Earth for giving me the opportunity to live on this beautiful planet alongside all of your other children.

Thank you plants, wild and domestic, for giving me the opportunity to grow, clean, marvel at, share and plant your beautiful, wise, abundant seeds.

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.