If you’ve ever wondered how to grow and sell seeds alongside your market crops, The Seed Farmer by Dan Brisebois is here to help! Packed with practical advice, this guide walks you through everything from choosing seed crops to harvesting and resale.
In this excerpt, Brisebois shares smart strategies to manage seed crops without disrupting your farm’s flow. It’s all about working smarter, not harder!
Grow Seed Crops In Your Market Garden
Now that you’ve got a list of your first seed crops, how hard is it going to be for you to add these seed crops to your market garden?
As you can imagine, it depends on the crop. And the big difference is how much growing time and farm manipulation it takes beyond growing the market part of the crop.
Because to grow a seed crop, you first need to grow the vegetable, flower, or herb. And up until that point, your seed crop doesn’t look any different. You need to plant, weed, row cover, and do all the things you would normally do to get that crop to a marketable phase. So all your current growing skills can be fully used here.
And in some cases, this is almost all you need to do to get to the seed part of the crop. This is the case for tomatoes. If you can grow tomatoes for fruit then you’ve gotten to the part where the seed is mature. All you need to learn is how to extract the seed and clean. Easy peasy.
But in other cases, getting to a market crop is only half the growing journey.
Think about lettuce. Once you’ve got to the salad or head stage, there are no seeds to be seen on this plant. There are more growing steps to get that crop to the seed stage. And there are more growing challenges that come along with those steps.
Here are the main challenges that you are likely to encounter:
- Seed crops are in the ground longer than other crops and can wind up being in the way of other farm operations
- Seed crops have more vegetative material (and seed pods!) than many market crops; this provides extra challenges for lingering humidity to spread disease
- Seed crops can leave seeds behind that become future weed problems
- Seed work is extra work you are adding at the peak height of your growing season and creates opportunities for burnout.
How to Manage Seed Crops that Are in the Field Long Past Their Market Stage
When some crops don’t fit with the timing for your other crops, this can interfere with the efficiency and effectiveness of your farm. This can result in frustration and compromise other operations.
At Tourne-Sol, we sow partial beds of cilantro and dill every two weeks from May to August to keep a steady supply of fresh herbs. We do this because these crops are at a perfect leaf harvest state for one to two weeks and then put up flower stalks and become fibrous. That’s when we usually till under these crops. Sometimes we let some dill and cilantro keep flowering for the pollinators or for a seed harvest and till everything else in the bed. This leaves little islands of flowering plants that tractor operators try to maneuver around as they sow cover crops or prepare more planting beds.
If you only have one or two crops like this over a whole season, it might just cause a bit of grumbling, but if you have a hodgepodge of lingering seed crops sprinkled through your farm, it might trigger a nervous breakdown.
Here are a series of ways to mitigate this problem.
Trellis seed crops
One of the problems with lingering crops is that not only are they in the way where they are planted but often they have tall stalks that flop over into other beds, getting in the way of doing work in those beds too.
Trellising plants keeps those plants orderly and constrained to their bed. So at least the impact is limited to where they are planted.
Seed crops are pretty light compared to tomatoes or other crops you might already trellis, so your setup can be a bit simpler.
I like rebar stakes for trellising; they can be used for many years—seemingly forever. Five-foot stakes are tall enough for most crops. You can put one stake every ten feet or so, sunk one foot into the ground. Then put a few lines of twine around the crops. If you’re dealing with single rows, you can pinch the crops between two lines of twine. If you have multiple rows in a bed, you might put a row of stakes on the outer rows and only string up the outside of the row, effectively penning your plants between the two outer rows.
Hortnova flower netting is an option for plants that aren’t too bushy and out of control.
Grow seed crops on the edge of blocks
The worst place for a seed crop to be is in the middle of an empty block. Those crops break up empty space into smaller harder-to-manage areas. If you place that seed crop bed to one edge of your field block then you can keep the remaining empty area as one unit and not have to break up operations.
Move seed crops somewhere else
You can also dig up the annoying seed crops and plant them somewhere else. Many crops are surprisingly resilient to being transplanted to other places. I’ve done this many times with lettuces that have just started to bolt and brassica greens too. I’ll often remove a fair amount of the foliage to reduce the impact of the move. And I make sure that they get water right away to help them establish.
You can move seed crops to other places where they won’t be in the way. This could be with other long-season crops, or a home garden, or even into containers. Moving seed plants into containers that are close to the barn can be an especially easy way when you’re dealing with a dozen or two plants.
Grow seed crops with other long-season crops
Lingering seed crops are problematic because they are in the field longer than the same crops in their vegetable phase. But if you look at your other crops, you’ll see that some of your crops are in the field just as long as your seed crops.
Here are some other long-season crops you might have in your fields:
- Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants
- Squash, summer squash, cucumbers, melons, watermelons
- Cut flowers
- Woody herbs such as oregano, thyme, sage, and others
- Leeks, onions, celeriac, parsnips
Let’s say you have a bed of arugula that you know you will let go to seed after harvest. You could choose to grow that single bed with other long-season crops instead of in your salad green blocks. This means that your salad green harvesters will have to visit multiple areas on some harvest mornings, but that inconvenience only lasts a week or two and in exchange you don’t have seed crops in places you don’t want them to be.
When I place seed crops with longer-season crops from different crop families, I always look at the longer-term crop rotation for that block to make sure that I’m not creating host crops for pests or disease that might compromise the crops in the coming years.
Plan for dedicated seed blocks
As you add more seed crops to your farm, you can simply plan on field blocks that are mostly seed crops. You might also include a few of the long-season market crops mentioned above to fill up these blocks.
