Hey, good morning, it's Jason here again that Fraser Valley Rose farm. I'm down here in the basement
Doing some work towards a video on roses from seed "from beginning to end"
I want to give you a video on the complete process and I'll be doing that in the spring
But one of the steps I'm doing towards that video
Is about collecting roses from hips, cleaning those seeds and readying them for
Stratification. I thought because it's so timely I would show you some of those steps right now
So it really does begin with that first step if you have roses in your garden and you want to try growing those from seed
You can go into the field and collect the rose hips. Look for well ripened hips. That should be red or orange
Not the green hips if you can help it
The other thing that you can do with them or you should do for them at the same time is label them
Make sure you know
Which ones are which. The next step is that you take those rose hips and you throw them into a glass
Now you can do this fresh like right now when you harvest them or you can do it later after they're dried
It makes no difference
The step is the same you throw them into a glass, you cover them over with water
you mash them around a little bit maybe with a
spoon or with your finger try to get them mushed up a little bit and then you leave them to sit for a day or
two and what you end up with is:
A mush that looks a bit like this it still has the seeds in there
It still has some of the pieces of the hips and the pulp. I'm going to show you how to separate out
Everything there
So what you have left is clean seeds that you can either store dry or you can continue on to the stratification step
That'll be outlining in my other video
Alright this is what I have here
I still have a spoon in the cup and you can see if I pull it out here that
There's a mixture of the rosehips, the seeds,
the stems, and any debris that I brought in with them, there's also a whole bunch of seeds at the bottom
so I'd like to separate this out and the only
Other supplies you'll need is just a little wire mesh strainer like this
There's nothing complicated about this
It just may take a little bit of repetition
Rinse out the jar
And now you can see that a whole bunch of the seeds have already separated out and
That there's some hips that haven't fully broken down
so what I'd like to do is
Take some of the ones that have broken down or some of the pulp that's already separated from the seeds
There's plenty of seeds in here, so I don't have to worry if I'm actually pulling out some seeds with the pulp
if you were
Dealing with something you had fewer seeds of you might want to be a little more careful with this step and preserve
More of the seeds
but for me
I'm going to do a rough job of just pulling out the loose pulp and I may take some seeds with me for that step
Next thing here just run some water over it
And see how much I can work through the wire mesh just to get that debris out of there
Okay, next look at that spoon back here take these seeds out
Of the mesh and put them back into the glass
Clean the mesh here
Stir it around
And now you can see (or I hope you can see) that there's a whole bunch of seeds right at the bottom of this
And then there are some other seeds that are floating on the top
It's hard to make any
Really good assumptions about the viability of the seeds based on the ones that are floating and the ones that are sinking
Although I have to say that in the past
I found that when I grabbed some of the ones that are floating and crunch them around in my fingers
I find a good percentage of those to be empty or hollow not having a seed inside and because I have so many
At the bottom and don't need to preserve every single seed and I'm going to be a little in cautious here
and
Just pour off those ones on the top
Like I say nothing complicated here
Just a lot of repetition if you want to try to get really good clean seeds
Stir around
Now the water here still has debris floating around in it and
At the bottom we have those seeds settling so once again, I'm just going to pour off
If you get that debris out of there
Stop when I'm getting to the bottom where I'll be pouring out seeds
One more time a good stir
And to see what I'm seeing here
I still see and I hope you can see this on the video some little black pieces of debris in there
So I'm going to pour off the water
One more time trying to get rid of those
Good let's return to the strainer
For good clean seeds. I'm gonna do one more push through the strainer
And depending how fussy I'm being I can stick those back in the jar or the glass and
Pour it off a few more times in this case. What I think I will do is I will just go ahead and dry these
Now to do that step you just want to spread them out
you can do it in this or you can put it on to a piece of
Let's say paper towel or a coffee filter or something like that just to let them dry out after that
make sure you label them right away and
You can store them dry
It doesn't have to be refrigerated (room temperature is fine)
Just dry in like a ziplock bag and just make sure you've labeled them. All right, that's it for
separating the
rosehips from their seeds and having the clean seeds for storage or for
Continuing on to stratification. Thank you so much for watching today. And if you have any questions drop those below the video