I make a lot of mustard throughout the year. I would like to try to grow my own mustard seeds. How much seed could I expect to get from 1 plant? I usually use between 25 and 30 pounds of seed per year. To harvest it do I need to remove hulls? Wow so many questions for a simply bag of mustard seeds. Any advice would be appreciated. Pam
I grow a fair amount of different types of mustard, but collecting 25 -
30 lbs of seed seems like a lot. I usually let 3 or four plants go to seed and collect a few ounces of seeds from them for the next planting. So I would guess maybe an ounce per plant? And yes, you will need to remove hulls. I do it by hand given the small amounts, but it is very labor intensive. I'm sure there must be other ways of hulling them.
Growing your own mustard seed would be impractical to say the least. There's probably a list of things that just don't lend themselves to being done on a greatly reduced scale. I'm sure that growing enough mustard to harvest 30 pounds of seed must be right up near the top of that list. As a rough guess, I'd think a single plant would yield about 15 to 20 grams of seed. And, growing it would be the easy part. Average harvest yield for mustard seed runs about 1400 lbs per hectare. A hectare is roughly 107,640 square feet. So, to harvest your 30 pounds of seed you'd need a garden plot of about 2300 square feet, in other words a plot of ground almost 50 feet square. After it's been planted and has ripened, there's the harvesting which is normally done by combine. You probably don't have a combine, besides, it's pretty hard to manoeuvre a combine on a 50' x 50' plot, so you'd have to harvest by hand. Cut all the plants down, let them dry for a few days, thresh them by hand to get all those tiny seeds out of their tough little pods. Make sure to do it on a nice smooth surface, like a big tarp, so you don't lose any seeds. Wait for a nice breezy day and winnow them to get rid of all the chaff and you'd be pretty well finished. I enjoy making and using different mustards but, I buy my mustard seeds in bulk even though I have 50 acres of land on which I could grow it. If you're determined to give it a try, I wish you luck. Let us know how it goes. Ross. To email, remove the "obvious" from my address.
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