Seed collecting time. Collecting all seeds is relatively easy, even tomatoes that need to ferment, however there is not much easier than saving seeds from melons and squashes.
When harvesting your squashes and melons, look for the largest ones that ripen the earliest and are the most flavorful. Keep them marked in your mind.
When either cooking or eating the specimen, grab a handful of seeds from the pulp.
Clean them of the pulp that clings to them. Pictured here if pumpkin seeds. I find throwing them in a small dish of water and letting the seeds float away from their pulp and to the top an extremely easy way to clean them.
Scoop them out, discarding any pulp that still clings to them, and spread them out in a single layer to dry. When dried, package and label.
This is where gardening gets to be so cheap it's free. You can grow the majority of your vegetables from saved seed, potentially making your garden free. As far as my knowledge extends, you can not save seeds from the Broccoli family in our climate, as they need to overwinter to produce seeds. Almost anything else is possible. I save lettuce seeds, tomato and ground cherry seeds, pepper seeds, swiss chard seeds (hopefully, as they haven't fully formed yet), melon seeds, squash seeds, mache seeds, cilantro seeds, radish seeds, bok choy seeds and many more, including many flowers.
No comments:
Post a Comment