Pole bean reseeding itself

Pole bean reseeding

One bunch of pole beans at the community garden weighed down their corn stalk poles so much that they bent over and touched the ground. They got moist enough after some rains that this happened. Very beautiful effect.

Jimmy Cracked Corn

Mirai sweet corn, dried

Seeds for another year

When I opened the packet of Mirai sweet corn seeds this spring, I thought I had gotten a bad pack. Each seed was wrinkled and flat and completely unlike any other corn I had planted or seen while dry.

It was a hybrid, so I don't know what I'll get next year.

Surprisingly, it grew. Very nicely too. I have to say, Mirai sweet corn was the most delicious sweet corn I have ever tasted.

How tasty was it, you ask?

So sweet that I ate every ear without butter or salt. So sweet that I ate some of it raw. So sweet that it was actually difficult to cook with…the leftovers would be too sweet to eat. It might as well be grown as a sugar crop.

Mirai produced small ears of corn on short 5 or 6 foot stalks. Most stalks had two ears of corn. This one ear of corn yielded about a half-pint of seeds. Supposedly hybrids don’t come true from seeds. I’ll have to try.

What the heck?

Well, I’ve been too busy to post!

I have canned salsa for 3 nights, pickles for 3 nights, fruit jam for 3 nights, ketchup for 1 night, sauerkraut for 1 night (plus 1 night to put it in the crock and nightly checks for 10 days), tomatoes for 1 night (so far), pizza sauce for 1 night, and . . .

We have been camping with good friends (completely sans rectangles, so no pictures), tending the garden and practicing for this weekend’s upcoming Amateur Chef competition!

I do have a few pictures of this and that, taken over the course of the last month. They’ll be posted eventually, but for now . . .

There is a bushel of peaches in my kitchen and I still haven’t saved seeds from any of my tomatoes.

Saving Lettuce Seeds

Normally you want to pick all of your lettuce either before it gets bitter from days that are too warm or before it sends up a seed stalk (bolting). To save lettuce seeds, you need to let the plant grow flowers.

The lettuce has bolted

Lettuce flowers

Partially dry group of lettuce flowers.

I cut the whole head of flowers off the lettuce when some of the seeds began to drop onto the ground and took it inside. I let it dry out  a bit more in a paper bag.

Find a dry flower

Break open the dry lettuce flower

Here are your seeds!

Lettuce Seeds

More lettuce than your family could eat.

One bolted lettuce plant could easily yield enough lettuce seeds for your whole next year.

Tomato Sun Scald

Sun scalded tomatoes

When I finally got around to trellising my community garden tomato plants, they were a huge tangled mess.  I pruned back many of them quite a bit just so I could see what I was doing to get them strung up off the ground.

Sunburn!

Unfortunately, many tomatoes that had been shaded up to that point were suddenly exposed to 3 or 4 days of bright, direct sunlight with unseasonably warm 95 degree days.

With no leaves to shade them, the green tomatoes got burnt.  Scalded by the sun!

Though these might rot before getting ripe, I am going to try to see if they might mature on their own.  Even if they are half-rotten, I should still be able to save some good seeds for next year from inside the other half.

Saving Radish Seeds

Here is an update to my previous post about saving radish seeds.

Dried radish seed pods

I let the radish growth die naturally and dry outside to a nice tan color.  I picked off the stems with the seed pods and had what you see above.

Green pod has turned light brown

Just like a pea or a bean, each dry pod contains a few radish seeds.  Let’s open one up, shall we?

Hooray, seeds!

I expect the nice round ones are probably more viable than the flat wrinkled ones, since the ones I originally planted were all nice and round.

The verdict is that, yes, I can save radish seeds.  And until I absolutely need to, I won’t.  It’s a lot of extra work to get these seeds from a plant that would otherwise be picked in 25 or 30 days.  I’ll consider it knowledge tucked away for a rainy day.