I have been collecting seeds the past three years. I spend hours meticulously cleaning them. I become obsessed and try to sqeeze out every last seed I can find when I'm cleaning them. Why do I do this??!! I don't need all these seeds! Really I probably don't need any of them.

Maybe you were descended from Johnny Appleseed. Who knows. But one thing I have learned is that sometimes by collecting the seeds, we are not helping the plants. Some seeds need to be left to the elements in order to germinate; by locking them safely away in our little bags and boxes (I'm guilty of this also), the seeds may never have a chance to live. If you love them, set them free!

That being said I am in the process of trading hundreds of seeds with other similarly obsessed people over on Cubits.org - Ella's Garden - Hog Wild Piggy Seed Swap. It's not too late...step away from that tray of seeds!

Greene, Jennifer asked me if I wanted her to send them to me to trade but I think maybe next year. I will be leaving for MI shortly after the swap closes and I have a lot to do before that so I was afraid I'd get swamped with requests if I took them. She's not interested in doing the swap. (Why should she when Mom will do all the work and then grow the plants for her! )

Well, I'll apologize here, she does all the work of collecting AND cleaning. Me, I collect but not so much clean them.

Just so you know, you can set an early 'closing date' for your swapping list on the Piggy Swap to allow yourself more time to count and package the seeds. So maybe next year Jennifer and you could team up. We must encourage the young people and set a good example; you can oink and she can do the bookkeeping part of the swap.

I suffer a similar malady. I gather seeds impulsively, many of which I don't really want, then find them in my car, on potting bench, in a drawer.

Only by leaving the chaff am I able to know what most of them are later, but it sounds like you are fastidious enough to label them anyway.

>> I become obsessed

Me, too. Then I get frustrated when I find that I can't separate EVERY speck of material either into the SEED category or the CHAFF category. The ambiguous mixtures are frustrating.

"This is MOSTLY chaff, but I bet there's still a lot of seeds there!"
"These are almost all sees, but SOME of specks might be chaff or non-viable seeds!"

So now grab many seed heads and only shake and rub gently, so I don't create a lot of broken-up chaff.

Then I collect "enough" clean seeds for trading and giving away. I know that if I rubbed harder, I would have all that frustrating in-between, hard to clean stuff.

However, I have no regrets about saving lots of "seed-plus-chaff" for my OWN sowing. So after I have plenty of clean trade seeds, I'll give it a few more whacks and some mashing and rubbing, and then clean that until I'm bored or its time for bed. I save that for MY planting.

The first time I cleaned Alyssum seeds, I spent hours on separating out the chaff, and thought that "maybe" there were still "a few" viable seeds in the "chaff" baggie. So I put a teaspoonful of "chaff" on a damp coffee filter ... OK, I got 50,000 % germination, so there wasn't much point in cleaning, after all.

I think the hardest plants to get seeds out of are Salvia. Not many seeds to start and the seeds are hard to get out of the little trumpets, so by the time you have many seeds loose, you also have ten times as much seed-sized chaff as there are seeds.

I cleaned Salvia clevelandii / Cleveland Blue Sage for someone once, and was forced to fall back on picking seeds out one at a time with tweezers.

I keep thinking that I could build a wind tunnel - separator with a computer fan and some cardboard boxes. or something based on static electricity.

Life's too short, leave some chaff! Think of it as fiber for the soil

When I come in with grocery bags of seed heads I'm always glad to know that there's someone who'll love to have all of those extras! Well...most of them anyway! Maybe not all...

Nature is so generous, I hate to let any "go to waste".

But she is SO generous that we CAN'T give away as many seeds as she offers us.

I think people are smart who say "leave some there for the birds".

Not only would I try and collect it all, I would try and plant it all! Duh! Not anymore though.