Denise Costich, a new member of the @seed_savers_exchange board, visited our operation yesterday to share information she’s gathered from years of work in hot, humid seed collections in Guatemala and Mexico. She checked out our seed drying and seed storage and offered this advice: find a way to get the seeds super dry and focus on keeping the humidity down in the sealed seed jars - that’s more important than focusing on the humidity in the room they are stored in, since well sealed jars are their own enviroment. Also, while keeping the temperature relatively low helps prolong seed life, and keeping the temperature from fluctuating is even more important, keeping them dry is the most important. She brought us some DryCards from the University of California at Davis that measure humidity (UC Davis sent us some samples last week too) and we experimented on some of our drying seeds and seed jars - it all looked pretty good. But while our seeds are below the threshold for mold growth, we could do better to prolong their life. We do check our germination rates on each batch of seeds yearly, but we talked about randomly sampling some more often throughout the year as we improve our dryness to see the impacts. One thing we are sold on, and now just need to find a source of, are Drying Beads - a clay based desiccant used in many humid environments to more rapidly dry down seed and food harvests in a more controlled environment than air or sun drying. The US source went out of business. For the most part, our seeds have great germ rates for years, but we are always aiming to do better and better. Thanks Denise for your ideas! (at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
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