Hi I'm Dave Epstein of Growing Wisdom and I'm here today at Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Albion, Maine. We’re going to talk today about when you order seeds from a place like Johnny’s, how do they get the seeds in the first place? It’s a process, it’s called sluicing and the process begins by taking these guys, the tomatoes, putting them through a big machine like this, almost like the food mill I use to make my tomato sauce. They take off the skins, they end up with a mash. You can see that this mash is basically skinless tomatoes. They put it through the sluice which is interesting because it’s really running water over that mash, the seeds fall to the bottom, then they're going to be dried and eventually packaged. It’s really hat simple.

A lot of the tomatoes you see growing around the farm end up as seeds that you can order. The process is so simple and the equipment also is just so simple to get those seeds. So next time you order a package of seeds from a company like Johnny’s, you know a little bit of the background of how those seeds got there.

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