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Seed Harvesting, Will This Work ?

Rednekf350

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Good evening everyone,

This is my third growing season and never really gave much thought to seed harvesting. After a good growing season and three primings, I have more color cured tobacco than I need. So, I just let the plants be plants.

Tonight I was picking all of my remaining peppers and then I went over to say goodbye to my tobacco plants because we are supposed to get our first hard frost tonight. I noticed my Burley had a ton of mature seed pods on the flower heads. I cut several heads off and dropped them into a bowl and I had seeds falling out just from dropping them in the bowl. I took them in the house and rolled all of the mature pods in my fingers and in no time I had 3.2 million seeds. I sieved out the pod fragments and was left with a huge amount of seed. I did notice a lot of small, flea-like bugs dropping out of the pods with the seed and they were crawling around in the sieved seed. I put the seeds in the garage tonight hoping the cold will help knock them out.

Can I expect good germination from this ? I will still purchase new seed in the winter but I want to see what kind of success I can get out of these too. Any though on what the bugs are ?

Thanks !
 

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deluxestogie

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They will surely give you excellent germination. But of what? Were the blossom heads bagged to prevent cross-pollination. Any other tobacco varieties growing with ½ mile of the burley?

My personal opinion is that tobacco growing requires way too much work for me to lavish any effort on mystery seed.

Now that you know the routine for collecting and sieving the seed, you'll be ready to bag some varieties for seed collection next season.

Bob
 

Rednekf350

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Thanks Bob.
I would venture to say there is no tobacco growing within 50-100 miles from me so that shouldn’t be an issue.
I’ll keep checking to see if the bugs die off. If they are seed pests, I don’t want to bag it yet. I squashed about 5 or 6 in the paper plate after sieving but there are more in there.
 
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