Winnowing

A while ago I showed a photo of my onion heads in a bowl, waiting patiently for seed saving.  Yesterday I finally got around to cleaning the seed.  Cleaning seed means separating the seed from everything else (pods, stems, coating, etc.) that you don't want.  

For biennial onions, the hardest part of saving seed is overwintering the onion bulbs so they flower the second year.  Once that's done, and pollination is successful, the rest is fairly easy. 

Wait until the heads have finished flowering and set seed.  You want the seed pods mature, somewhat dry but not too dry - otherwise the seed will fall before you've had a chance to save it.  Put the heads in a bowl, bag, or whatever so the seeds that do fall aren't lost.  Wait a week or three until the pods are completely dry.

Scrunch the dry seed pods into a shallow sided bowl.  Rub the pods between your fingers to break them open.  Not overly hard, though -- you don't want to damage the seed.  Gently shake the bowl so the heavier seeds fall toward the bottom of the bowl.

Now here's the delicate part.  Very carefully and lightly blow into the bowl, aiming away from you.  You're trying to blow the lighter chaff (bits of dry stem and husk) out of the bowl without blowing out the heavier seed.  This is what's known as 'winnowing.'  Be sure to wear safety glasses while doing this part - a piece of chaff in the eye is not fun.  I know this from experience!

Continue with the rubbing, shaking and blowing.  You may blow some black seeds out of the bowl.  This is ok - the lighter weight seeds are usually not viable.  And if you blow out a few good seeds, it's not a big deal.

Eventually you'll get to the point where you can't blow any more chaff out without blowing out seeds.  It doesn't have to be perfectly clean - the photo above is plenty good for my needs.  If you were selling seed by the ounce, you'd probably have to be more picky.

Voila!  From those six onion heads I got about 3 tablespoons of seed.  Which I will tuck away in a small jar until February when seed starting begins.  Onions are the earliest seeds I start, because they take a long time to reach planting size.  This year I'll let some of my Red Wethersfield onions stay in the ground, for seed saving next year.