Farm Intern Notes: First Seed Harvest, Mache
The Mache has gone has finally gone to seed - making up our first seed collection of the season.
It raced ahead from the start: coming up before any other green in snowy March...
then lost its juicy leaves...
to focus on flowering...
and finally, a few weeks ago, shed its tiny white flowers to dry to a brittle brown, signalling that it was ripe for seed collecting.We pulled out the entire plants, let them dry further in the hoop house and, last week, processed them to extract clean seeds.
Here's Farmer Stu demonstrating complex seed processing technology (a house fan!).
mid-cleaning
All done!