(rhythmic music) >>What we have here today are turnips and collard greens.

These are Delta Blues collards and Purple Globe turnips.

And you think of American food culture, they're ubiquitous in the southeast and really they're a true international crop.

These seeds originally came from Asia Minor in the Mediterranean.

They became popular hundreds of years ago throughout Europe and made their way to the Americas.

And now they are a staple of the American table.

It's important to save these seeds for cultural preservation because you're really saving a legacy.

You're saving family legacies and years of stories of gardeners throughout the ages preserving these foods for us to enjoy on our tables now.

So when you are looking for seed pods and saving seeds and growing your plants for seeds, you're gonna want to let them go through the whole cycle.

The seed garden is wild looking.

It's not gonna be a curated beautiful garden.

I don't generally put any pesticide or anything like that on any of these because I want the most robust plants that I can possibly have in my garden.

The ones that are gonna survive, the ones that are gonna give you the best.

It's very interesting because when you think of collard greens, you think of big wide leaves.

When they start to bolt this time of year, it is early June here, these started bolting a couple months ago, they're gonna stop putting their energy into leaf production, food production, and start focusing all of that energy up into these beautiful seed pods.

And you can see from the turnips, they get very leggy and they stop putting that energy into the big turnip bulbs that we're used to.

So these are dried seed pods from globe turnips and they're a pretty, pretty easy thing to grow and save seeds.

These plants were planted last year in the late summer and you're gonna wanna let them get dry.

The green pods don't have mature seeds in them yet.

And you can see these ones are not ready and fully mature to go and they're very green, bright green.

But when you harvest them, they're gonna become papery thin.

And when they dry a little bit, they're gonna split open fairly readily and the seeds will just easily come out.

And you wanna look for darker brown or these orange little seeds.

It's really great to bundle them all up, let them dry, and I'll roll them in a sheet and then smoosh 'em down in that sheet and when you take it apart, all the seeds will fall to the bottom and you can basically just blow the husks and the chaff away from the seeds.

Very simply, they're very light and the seeds are heavy, so they'll all fall to the bottom and you don't need anything fancy for it.

So if you're interested in saving seeds, this is a really great and really easy place to start and you, yourself, will become part of that story.

You become part of the legacy of thousands of years of gardeners and farmers growing these out and saving the seeds to pass on to future generations.

So I hope you try it.