Desktop Seed Cleaner

Gilbert Nancy Contr 9 CES/CEC Nancy.Gilbert@beale.af.mil
Wed, 02 Mar 2005 08:24:41 PST
Thank you for your help, John. We presently hand clean all our seed with the
occasional help of a blender with masking tape over the sharpened edge of
the blades. Cracking the seed pods of Dichelostemmas and Brodiaeas takes a
rolling pin or the blender and not all are cracked in this process and one
has to be careful not to overdo it and damage the seeds. We have sieves and
they help also, and we still have to carefully puff away to blow off the
small chaff and yet not blow away the seeds. Although this works fine,
manually processing the seeds from raw seed in capsules to cleaned seed for
storage is often very time- consuming for us.
How much of a hassle is it to adjust the settings on the Clipper?
Thanks. 
Nancy

-----Original Message-----
From: johngrimshaw@tiscali.co.uk [mailto:johngrimshaw@tiscali.co.uk] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 10:19 PM
To: Pacific Bulb Society
Subject: Re: [pbs] Desktop Seed Cleaner


Unless you are handling enormous quantities of material I should have
thought a manual process would in fact be just as quick as using a machine
in which you have to adjust all the settings for each species. The genera
you mention all have dense, more or less round seeds that lend themselves
very well to a manual process of simple sieving and winnowing that would get
them 99% clean in a couple of minutes. A graded series of seed-cleaning
sieves would be useful.

A clipper will only go so far: there would still be the final cleaning to be
done by sieving and winnowing.

My recommendation for a seed-cleaning equipment supplier would be Seed
Processing, from Enkhuizen in The Netherlands, which produces an
extraordinary range of equipment in all shapes and sizes, but I do not know
if they have a USA representative.

John Grimshaw



Dr John M. Grimshaw
Garden Manager, Colesbourne Gardens

Sycamore Cottage
Colesbourne
Nr Cheltenham
Gloucestershire GL53 9NP


Website: http://www.colesbournegardens.org.uk/
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gilbert Nancy L Contr 9 CES/CEC (by way ofMary Sue Ittner
<msittner@mcn.org>)" <Nancy.Gilbert@beale.af.mil>
To: "Pacific Bulb Society" <pbs@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 10:05 PM
Subject: [pbs] Desktop Seed Cleaner


> To All,
> Do any of you out there have any experience using small scale seed
cleaning
> machines for processing bulb seeds? In particlular, we are interested 
> in the Clipper desktop seed cleaner or equivalent and how well such a 
> machine handles the pods and small seeds of California native bulbs 
> such as Brodiaeas, Alliums, Dichelostemmas etc. We also would 
> appreciate any leads as to where we might be able to purchase a used 
> seed cleaner at a reasonable price.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Nancy Gilbert
> Far West Bulb Farm
> Zone 7, Northern California Sierra Foothills
>
>

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