How to Collect Cabbage Seed | Complete Guide from day1 | Seed Collection Episode 4

Hello and welcome to Roots to Sprouts. In this video, we are going to see a complete cycle of a cabbage plant. From the time we plant the cabbage sapling, all the way it flowers and it produces the seed pods and how we collected the seeds. Cabbage belongs to Brassica family. They are very closely related to other vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower and Brazil sprouts. And another important factor is cabbage is also a biennial plant. What is biennial plant? Biennial plant is a flowering plant that normally takes 2 years to complete its biological life cycle. In the first year, the plant undergoes a primary growth. That means it produces its leaves, stems and roots and it's in a development stage. Usually the stem of the plant remains short and the leaves are low to the ground. That's the time you need to be really careful with the cabbage butterflies. They are very fond of these vegetables, especially to all biennial plants like cauliflower, cabbage, Brazil sprouts. They commonly lay plenty of eggs on these leaves. So you need to have a closer look on these plants during the first year so that it's not completely damaged by these insects. After the first year, the plant enters into a period of dormancy. Many biennial requires a cold treatment before they will flower. This year in February 2021, we had a major snow in Dallas that really also helped these biennial plants to produce the flowers. During the next spring or summer, the stem of the biennial plant elongates greatly and you can see the shoots coming up in the middle of your cabbage plant. As you see in this video, the single stem that has come out from your cabbage plant has propagated now and started producing multiple heads of flowers. And in each flower, you can see the green shoots that's coming out. Those are the seed pods. These are yet to turn into a kind of orange or like a brownish color. By the time you can really feel they are dry. So wait for that time until then you have to do nothing to these plants because they are still growing and the seed pods are getting healthy and it will produce seeds at the right time. You can see now what I said exactly a few minutes ago. So now the seed pods are dry. For this we have to wait for two seasons. It's not a quick process. You should have patience and it takes a good amount of space in your garden. This one cabbage plant has taken 75% of the space in a 4x4 bed. We have to patiently wait for these plants to get into the full season for them to get these seed pods dry so that we can harvest. As you can see in this particular plant, as we were waiting for two seasons, only like 50% of the seed pods were dried and the remaining 50% of the seed pods, I don't know how long it will take for them to get dry and we didn't have patience to keep them that long because we need to use the space for other vegetables in the summer. 100 seeds are normally sold for $3.5 to $5 depends on the seed variety and what kind of is it an organic or heirloom or non-GMO. There are so much of different options that you can buy these seeds but normally it varies from $3 to $5 depends on the type you choose and that in a pack it will have like 100 seeds but look at the size of this plant and the number of seed pods that it carried in each plant, it's like unbelievable. Let's take a closer look of one seed pod. Look at this seed pod, how light it is and it is fully ready to take the seeds from these pods and I'm not taking much effort, I'm just rubbing my fingers on these seed pods and it's and it already opened and you can see the seeds falling out from the pods. From one pod, I just counted in one seed pod, I was able to get like 25 to 30 seeds depend on the length of the seed pods. So what we did, we collected all the seed pods which were dry and we kept it in a ziplock for few days and then we started collecting the seeds from these pods. It wasn't an easy exercise, you have to go through multiple steps in clearing the dust and taking out the cover of the seed pods and dry leaves and so many things but it was a fun process. Just an advice or a word of caution that I want to share with you, since these seed pods are so light, sometimes a strong wind can open the seed pods. So you have to be really careful, the place where you have this plant that you left for seeds, next year you can expect hundreds of cabbage plants coming from that. So finally we started packing the seeds in the pouch and we labeled the pouch with the year that we collected the seeds. I think I remember it was like 16 grams of seeds we collected and I don't have patience to count how many it was but the rough math is like 4 grams can hold 1000 seeds. So you can calculate that. I hope you like this video, I will talk to you on a different video very soon. Thanks for watching and supporting our channel. Take care. Bye.