Preserve old seeds, heal the soil, make your compost: the revolutionary practices of permaculture
Silvia Floresta is a mother, an activist and a permaculture teacher in Portugal. She has a passion for the land and seeds and believes that the future of ancient species is in their preservation by the freedom to share our seeds.
After years working as a botanist in the historic gardens of Sintra in Portugal, she travels to Australia to learn permaculture and launches Da Semente a Árvore blog to share her tips.
She teaches today in several projects in Portugal including Aldeia do Vale . Here you will find some of his articles translated from Portuguese.
Seed collection and conservation
To pick and keep your own seeds is easy enough. People do this for thousands of years and only since this century, it’s a job done by professionals. With a little care you can grow better seeds than the commercial ones and have better germination, strong growth and healthier plants.
Start by choosing the right plant!
Like living plants, beings are constantly adapting to their environment, by collecting seeds year after year, you participate in this development, which can be very useful.
Care must be taken with cross-pollination, with species that can be pollinated by hybrids or GMOs (genetically modified organisms) Ask your neighbors and friends who have gardens nearby. You can isolate your crops. Different isolation techniques that are simple to put in place exist.
To gather and preserve your seeds it is necessary to wait for the maturity of the plants. The harvest is very easy, it is necessary to wait until the plant or fruits are ripe, more mature than to eat them. They must be harvested on a dry day, if the weather is bad, frost or rain, it is better to let the whole plant dry in the house to collect the seeds. The methods vary according to the species.
Seeds that are in a fruit or wet substance should be washed and allowed to dry on a network or fabric of natural fibers in a warm place to dry naturally.
Some seeds such as tomato must go through a fermentation process before to remove a product from germination.
❀ Here is an example to recover the seed of tomatoes:
Open the tomato in half, keep the pulp in a container, mix with a little water, let stand for 3 days, covering and stirring once a day.
A mushroom begins to appear in area of the mixture. This mushroom not only eats the gelatinous coating that surrounds each seed but also prevents germination and produces antibiotics that help fight seed-borne diseases, such as certain bacterial diseases.
After 3 days, fill the container with warm water, empty everything and keep the dough at the bottom. The seeds are there. Repeat the warm water process until you have a cleaner water in the container. Then let the seeds dry before storing them in glass.
The purpose of gathering and storing old seeds is to preserve the species itself and to avoid loss or alteration due to external influences (crossbreeding with other species).
In practice, we need to grow and feed the plants as they grow and keep equal amounts of seeds from each plant. These two practices together serve to minimize genetic loss.
Every problem has its solution
Even when they are dried and stored properly our seeds still in danger. Some are tolerant to desiccation (the process of water removal), others are not.
It is mostly aquatic plants and trees that are intolerant and whose seeds die if they are dried.
To keep the seeds intolerant on drying, place them in a container with vegetable foam or damp paper towels. Make holes in the lid of the container so that the seeds continue to breathe and put them in the fridge.
The tolerance to desiccation of seeds can be stored for long periods of time (some for many years), but long-term storage is lost some viability and some seeds die, and with time degrades the tissue structure and genetic material.
The mold is a problem in seed storage, they can start sweating in the containers in which they are stored. You can solve this problem by adding rice to the bottom of the container.
Another problem with dry seeds are insects like weevil mites. Freezing seeds is one way to avoid insect damage, although some insects are frost-resistant. In which case add a little diatomaceous earth (add enough to cover the seeds).
The traditional leaf of the berry is just as effective as the frost or the diatomaceous earth.
The storage of a wide variety of seeds is a way to resist the growing monoculture of seeds, plants and sterile foods produced by large multinational agribusinesses such as Monsanto.
To know more :
Continue reading the blog Da Semente a Árvore and know how to restore the soil and compost.
Discover Aldeia do Vale, a permaculture school in Portugal
Discover Quinta das Relvas, a farm in Portugal focused on sustainability and art where i had the chance to meet Silvia and attend the Permaculture Design Course in the context of Build up your life’s Erasmus + project.
