I mentioned at the time that they would form very attractive seed pods. And so they have. All of the patches had gotten a bit unwieldy this year so I set out to pull it all out and cut off the pods so I could save the seeds and sow them elsewhere. Plenty have already shed their seeds where they were so they’ll be back, hopefully in less of a tangled mess than this year.

Meanwhile, I have seeds to harvest.

From the point of view of a botanist, the pods are are work of art. They are compartmentalized, and there is a row of seeds attached to a membrane in each compartment. More on this later.

The task at hand was figuring out how to get the seeds separated from the pods as efficiently and cleanly as possible. Thinking cap. Food mill. It did not work. But the smallest sieve on the mill did work as a filter.

As you can see, though I have to handle each and every single individual pod by hand, I am making great progress.

That’s two inches per hour!