Hey @GrouchyOldMan here’s my breakdown:
1 - trim all fan leaves and then hang/rack the flowers in my drying tent.
2 - flowers stay in drying tent with sensor controlled humidifier OFF, interior circulation fan ON and exhaust fan ON.
3 - Everything is allowed to over-dry, we’re talking taking a nug in your hand and when you apply pressure it crumbles into dust. This usually takes over a week in the drying tent in winter with the low RH%.
4 - In a large metal bowl go all the flowers from the tent, and then with gorilla gloves (car shop nitrile work gloves, aka: heavy duty) I crush all the flowers in my hands, using my fingers to work through the mass breaking up everything which separates flower from seed, and the calyx outer coating of the seeds themselves.
5 - Once the mess looks even, I lift up the bowl and swirl it around which makes the seeds go to the bottom of the bowl with the plant matter staying above. Yes, this is basically just gold panning tech.
6 - Now I pull out the **Pigeonman’s Overbuilt Cyclone Seed Separator" and go to town. This is too complicated to explain so here’s a link to where I already did! And with pictures!
But here’s a video of the thing in action which uses vacuum pressure to pull off the light-weight plant material into a DIY dust collector" which stops all the trimmings from ending up in my shop-vac so I can reclaim the goodness via bubble bags.
The “trimmings” saved to make bubble:
Once this is all done I take the seeds and put them on a lunch tray. Under bright lights I move all the seeds to one end of the tray and with a slight angle applied I vibrate the tray which causes all the heavy (and viable) seeds to wriggle down to the bottom with any white/dead seeds not moving much at all.
I blow lightly as well so those nonviable seeds float away from the goods. This goes back and forth for a while until all the colour looks uniform. I even have a black lunch tray to dump after to triple check for colour matching.
A pic of the final seed batch after sorting:
This was just a small seed run but my buddy who grows big for his commercial business now comes by to sort HIS seeds here because to quote him:
“This thing is brilliant and just works, I want to build one but I need my kids to grow up so I can have more space to store it… but I also can’t be bothered.”
