Spitballing ways to dry seed cones for processing.

sgbotsford said:

Further processing: Seed needs to be dewinged. This is usyually done by a short soak in warm water. This will also separate out empty hulls -- they float. Seeds need to be dried to 6-8% moisture. Some of htat is air drying, but air drying stops at 12-15% dpeending on humidity. Final drying is with a jar and silica gel, with periodic reweighing to see when the seeds are at their final moisture level. In glass jars, the seeds will keep 5-20 eyars at -18C.

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You may want to consider using 3A molecular sieves in place of silica gel. They are much more efficient, aggressively captures water and can be reused indefinitely by baking the at about 1000°C. The fact that it requires such a high temperature is a feature since the implication is that, unlike silica gel, molecular sieves won't ever add to the humidity at the temperatures you are working with.

I love sieves—the 3A sieves have a pore size of 0.3nm and will not absorb larger molecules. So they can do neat tricks like drying alcohols that even distilling can't do because the alcohol-water azeotrope boils at a lower temperature than either chemical.