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 > > _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.ibiblio.org http://www.pacificbulbsociety.org/list.php