A new, slightly dangerous method of removing wiregrass seeds from culms
They say that Necessity is the mother of invention. We would like to add that Desperation is also pretty good at birthing new ideas.
Imagine yourself in a room full of wiregrass seeding culms (see photo to left). You have maybe a month to get all those valuable, pesky little seeds off of a billion culms that have been chopped off at the base.
Really what you are looking at is a room full of wiregrass (times 4).
The only immediate way you can think of is to pull the seeds off each culm… 1 billion times.
We don’t know about you, but that prospect sent us into a state of desperation. There had to be a better way! We love wiregrass, but we also love our sanity.
Looking about, we spied our noisy old box fan in a corner of the lab. Its use solely as a cooling mechanism was about to change…
The DIY method of harvesting seeds from hand-cut culms
Disclaimer: Use this method at your own risk. We cannot be held responsible for battered knuckles, bruised hands, dusty rooms, or seed-laden clothes.
Step 1: Remove the fan covers from either side of a box fan.
Step 2: Select a small handful of wiregrass culms, about the equivalent of 1 inch in total diameter. They should all be facing the same direction (as much as possible), tips with tips and cut ends with cut ends.
Step 3: Shake off any loose seeds into your seed collection container. We used large yard waste bags made of double ply brown paper. See photo to left. These bags are ideal because they do not hold moisture.
Step 4: Turn box fan onto its lowest setting. Make sure it is in a location inaccessible to children or accident-prone adults. An ideal location would be in a corner where seeds can accumulate as they are whisked off the culms. We faced our fans under a desk so blowing seeds would be trapped.
Step 5: Grasp the wiregrass culms at the cut ends and place the culms against the running fan blades to knock off the seeds. We had good luck holding the seeds parallel to the fan, but also found it useful to hold the wiregrass culms at both the tips and cut ends and bend them slightly before inserting into the fan to remove the seeds closer to the middle of the culms. Some combination of these methods will allow you to remove >90% of seeds from culms if you are rotating the wiregrass bunch as demonstrated in the video below. We found that the fan would get a little bogged down if we tried to insert the culms too far into the fan or if we inserted too many culms at one time. If that happens, just slow down.
Step 6: Turn off fan and sweep the wiregrass seeds and culm pieces into your seed collection container. Alternatively, we first dumped this material onto a counter and picked out larger culm pieces and inflorescences, but generally speaking, the fan removed most of the seeds and chaff (i.e., lemmas and other plant material).
When you’re finished, you will have a great excuse to deep clean the work room, new music, clothes and shoes that poke you, but most importantly- beautiful, undamaged wiregrass seeds!!
If you use this method, we would love to hear any tips and tricks you discover! Leave us a comment below or send an email to firelab@ifas.ufl.edu.
