Saturday 11/16/19

I’m building a new compost pile and collected a bucket of leaves and soil from under some scrub oaks. I try to add a bucketful to each compost pile to add more bacteria and fungi. 

Saving tomato seeds. 

Squeeze or scoop the seeds and gel into a jar. Add a small amount of water and just set a lid on it but not tightened down. Put in a warmish place to ferment a few days. When the pulp has disintegrated but before it gets moldy fill the jar with water and stir. Let it settle then pour off the water with any floaters. Seeds that float are no good. Strain through a fine mesh and rinse well. Spread out to dry then store. Do the same for squash and pumpkins. The fermentation kills seed borne diseases. 

Pepper seeds aren’t in a gel so just spread them out on a paper towel until dry enough to store. 

It was a cool cloudy day so I worked on taking this old shed apart. 

Some bolts were stripped and impossible to remove. When all else fails get the sawzall. 

But in other places my arms were too short and I only have 2 hands. I think it took 3 of us to put this thing together. 

I finally did get 1 piece of tin off the top. By then I was tired and my hands were sore. Time to do chores anyway. 

Giotto on afternoon guard. Poor guy up all night barking off owls, coyotes and pigs. 

And day is done. Time for food and bed. I have no idea why this picture is upside down. I didn’t take it that way. 

A Little Seed Saving

Sweet Magnolia pea seed

It was a grey drizzly morning this morning (although we didn't really get any rain) so I spent some time putting up seeds.

First up was a big bowl of dried pods from the Sweet Magnolia purple snap pea. These are really beautiful pea plants with purple flowers and pods.

Sweet Magnolia seeds

Even the seeds are pretty, shades of brown and green, sometimes speckled.

Got them jarred up and started on the mustards. There was a small amount of red mizuna mustard.

red mizuna seed heads

When I cut plants for their seeds I usually just stand them upside down inside a feed sack and let them sit in a warm dry room until they are completely dry. In the case of mustards the seed pods will pop open, dispersing the seeds. You can hear them popping sometimes. To make sure all the good pods have popped I just slap the seed heads against the side of the bag.

seed and chaff

The stems and seed heads go to the chickens and I pour the seeds and chaff out into a bowl. Most of that chaff on top is empty seed pods and easy to pick off a little at a time.

Then I'll swirl the seed around in the bowl and blow on it, which the chaff is lighter and most of it will blow off, leaving some pretty clean seed in the bottom.

Red Mizuna Mustard seed

After the mizuna I worked on the 3 bags of Giant Red Mustard seed heads, but didn't quite get finished yet.

The physical act of saving seeds is pretty easy. Just pick almost ripe seed heads and let them finish drying out. If they are in wet juicy pulp like melons or tomatoes, then I mash the pulp and let it ferment, then rinse and dry. The fermenting process helps kill seed born diseases and it eats the pulp, making it easy to get clean seed. Some plants do have special considerations however. Like corn. With corn you have to save seeds from 100 plants or more in each generation, so that you keep up enough genetic diversity for the plants to continue to be healthy.

Oliver or Oliva????

Back at mom's house I finished cleaning up an empty pen and moved some babies. One baby is an olive egger but I"m not positive yet if we have an Oliver or an Olivia.

mm boy or girl, that is the question

Then my sister refused to come out of her trailer because this spider was on the outside of the door. So I rescued it and put it over in the plants. I'll see if we can find out what kind it is, it's pretty interesting looking.

unknown spider

The Eggplant Breeding Experiment

Neon Hybrid Eggplant

A few years ago I grew the really pretty pink Neon Hybrid Eggplant. I just loved the color and this photo does not do it justice. But it was a hybrid and I really would like to have a pretty pink open pollinated variety. One that comes true from seed each generation. So I'm working on breeding my own. I saved the seeds from the hybrid and this year I planted some.  I planted about 10 and they are growing in 2 gallon pots on my patio.

Eggplant #1

True to the genetic prediction, the resulting plants are roughly 50-50 white or purple. The purple ones are long and slender and the white ones are more globular.

Eggplant #2

Eggplant #3

I have numbered the plants according to the order they are setting their first fruits. I am also tracking their productivity separately.

Eggplant #4

Eggplant #5

Eggplant #6

Like most solanums eggplants are basically self pollinating, although I have a lot of bees, so some crossing could occur naturally, I"m not going to worry about it.

While there isn't very much variation in this generation the next generation should show a much greater diversity of size, color and shape.

Unless some of the others are more prolific, I will probably only save seed from #1 and #2, since they are the sturdiest and first fruiting. Next year then I will raise as many plants from each batch of seed as I possibly can, because the more I plant, the more likely I will get a pretty pink one.

Eggplant #7

Have you ever saved your own seed and developed your own type of plant?


I learned a lot about plant genetics and how to breed plants, the best methods of seed saving and a lot more from Carol Deppe's book, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. She tells you how in very simple layman's terms. I think every serious gardener should have a copy of this one!

Seedy Saturday

Red Hollyhock

Welcome to Seedy Saturday! I'm still having some difficulty getting a Mr Linky widget so if anybody knows how to contact those folks I'd appreciate it; if they have a contact button on their website I have not been able to see it. In the meantime, if you have seeds that you would like to give away, you may drop a link to your blog post about it in your comments.

This weeks Seedy Saturday giveaway is for old fashioned hollyhocks. Many different colors of them bloom in my garden, from white and pale pink to a dark burgundy.  Hollyhocks are of course out breeders, with many bees and butterflies visiting the flowers and spreading the pollen far and wide, so no telling what colors will show up in any given batch of seeds.

Mom's Hollyhocks

While classed as a biannual, that is growing a plant the first year, blooming and setting seed the second year, then dieing off, many of mine live from year to year, producing a bigger clump each spring. This partly depends on the weather, if they don't get enough water at the end of blooming they will often die back. So far I have never noticed any of them dieing of cold or snow in winter. But our winters are not nearly as severe as in some places.

I got my first seeds from my mom's hollyhocks and I'm pretty sure she got them from my granny who probably got them from her friends and relatives. They really are just an easy pass along flower!

Seedy Saturday Rules: Everyone that comments on this blog post before 6AM Monday morning is entered to win free hollyhock seeds and the winner will be announced when I make my Harvest Monday post. I will mail seeds to other countries, (I am in the United States) but you are responsible for knowing your own country's rules and if they will be allowed in or not. I don't have time to keep up with stuff like that.

Seed Saver's Jar, Pink Hollyhocks by maryhysong
See more Seed Candy Jars

I am sooo totally pumped! These cute little 'candy' jars from Zazzle look like a great thing to put seeds in and would make a fab gift for your gardening friends! I'm off to go make as many as I have photos for! But you can make your own, just upload the photo of your choice from your computer and change the text as you wish. If you can't figure out something on the Zazzle template, just give me a hollar [hysong AT cableone DOT net] and I'll help you out, if nothing else I can help you find the instructions on Zazzle itself.

Saving Seeds: Onions

With everything that went on July 4th and after (see my posts here) I forgot all about these guys. I save a lot of my own seeds for my garden. This picture is the seed head of an heirloom onion called Italian Red Bottleneck, which I obtained from the Seed Savers in Iowa. Each of the little bud like things was a small flower and now have several small black seeds in them.

You can see where one of the pods has split open, exposing the small black seeds. When a couple of pods have opened I go ahead and cut the whole stem and bring it into the house to finish drying out.

[edit]Which I did and now they are very dry and ready to clean, which hopefully I'll get to in the next day or so. In the meantime I will publish this post which should have been done back in July; don't know how it ended up still being a draft all this time....
I learned a lot about saving my own garden seeds from Carol Deppe's book, I think it should be on every gardeners reading list! She is a geneticist by training and a serious gardener. Her instructions are very easy to understand and implement in the garden.