How to extract seeds from lettuce

Extracting the seeds from lettuce is very simple.

To achieve the best possible quality for the next harvest, we will choose a lettuce that is well adapted to our garden and that we see that it looks good and is healthy. We will let it glean (grow) and you will see that several flowers come out from the top, that’s where we will get our seeds.

Gleaning lettuce

• Here you can see when the flowers containing the seeds have already come out:

When the lettuce dries, we will cut the spike and put it in an envelope or paper cone upside down so that the seeds fall on their own, so we can leave them for up to 3 and 4 weeks. One way to «help» this process is to shake the lettuce every two to three days to get the maximum amount of seeds.

Once we have obtained our seeds, we can perform a simple test to discard the seeds that are empty from the rest of the seeds. We put them in a container with water and the seeds that we see that float can be thrown away because they are empty, the ones that sink are the ones that interest us and the ones that we will keep.

We let them dry and we keep them in an envelope where we will have written the date and their name and we leave it in a glass jar, hermetically sealed if possible, in which it would not hurt to put pieces of chalk that we will have put in a pan for a few moments so that they absorb any moisture that may be there and do not spoil the seeds.