S&S Seeds Experience

After over 35 years of collecting wildland seeds, S&S Seeds is familiar with the seed characteristics of an extensive number of species including native wildflowers, grasses, and shrubs.  We have learned how to ascertain the ripeness and potential viability of seeds from natural growing plant stands and know how to determine the best method and most favorable time to collect these seeds.  Collected field material is dried, assigned unique lot numbers and delivered to our state-of-the-art seed conditioning plant located at Rancho de las Flores in Los Alamos,California.

Our experience in wildland collection has provided useful information for seed production in our fields at Rancho de las Flores for over 20 years.  We have been growing native and non-native species for seed production.  We have over 450 acres of farming land which enables us to isolate fields to prevent cross pollination and to match soil types for higher quality yields.  

We have specialized seeding equipment that can plant a wide variety of native species seed and have unique harvesting equipment which allows us to obtain the optimal amount of ripe, viable seed. Field material of species harvested is allowed to dry and after ripen on tarps. Each harvested lot is given a unique lot number. 

Field material from the tarps is mechanically threshed and then re-conditioned at our seed mill.  S&S Seeds' skilled mill operators determine the best method of conditioning the seed from our wide assortment of cleaning machines including scalpers, air screeners, indents, gravity & debearders. 

After cleaning, the seed is inspected for uniformity and sampled.  The seed samples are sent to independent certified seed testing labs to test for purity, germination and pure live seed (PLS) and the clean, dry seed is delivered to our Carpinteria warehouse storage facility.

 



Fields at Rancho de las Flores

For more information, contact our friendly staff of experts: