I agree with gingin!
I was cleaning Alyssum seeds and I had beaten up the vines pretty hard, so there was a lot of chaff. It looked like any remaining seeds were immature or never pollinated, but I wasn't sure.
So I put a pinch of "chaff" on a wet coffee filter, thinking I might get 5-10 volunteers.
Instead the whole coffee filter was covered with a hairy mat of rootlets, tiny stems and seedling leaves - over 100 sprouts, seemingly 1,000% or 2,000% germination. Clearly, the "chaff" still had lots of viable seeds hiding in it.
Now my policy is to spend much less time trying to browbeat a few more seeds out of each harvest. If I just shake the pods or seed-heads instead of pulverising them, there is very little fine chaff, which makes cleaning fast and easy.
Those 'clean seeds' are what I save to trade. But if I got only a small number of clean seeds, the first thing I direct-sow for myself is the so-called chaff!
