Garden and Seed Saving Updateand a Thank You

Hello I wanted to give an update on the state of the garden. Currently the garden is in a transitional phase. The items currently growing are bell and jalapeno peppers, watermelon, sorghum, asparagus and tomatoes. Garlic and potatoes have been harvested and are making excellent meal contributions, onions are done growing and are good to eat. The squash and zucchini had a tough time fighting the squash bugs and got pulled up but had provided some good food for the time they were going. We harvested the corn, carrots and beets and got them put up in the freezer. Some of the corn had been eaten by corn earworms but most of it was salvageable, next corn planting we will be more prepared to combat the worms. The heat and lack of rain has been taking it's toll, but at the same time showing which plants are more resilient to lack of water and forcing us to contemplate more efficient watering methods.

So now the garden work is focused on weeding and preparing plots for planting of pumpkins which Mike plans to have ready to sell for Halloween. We want to thank the visitors we had, Eli and her friend, for coming out and helping weed the garden, it was a big help! We also got a chance to pick peaches which Eli used to make a great pie. They were also nice enough to leave a generous donation, THANK YOU

I have the results of the seed germination test. So far about 5 of the romaine seeds sprouted, 13 of the mustard seeds and 2 of the kale. So this was out of 14 of each of the seeds showing 35.7% of the romaine sprouted, 92.8% of the mustard and 14.2% for the kale. I'll try the kale and romaine again to see if I can get a better germination rate.Allrighty I also harvested about half of the okra seed pods so far and got some sorghum seeds. Here's a few pictures of that, left to right, okra seeds and pod, okra seed up close, sorghum seeds. Thanks for reading, have a good day!

Saving Seeds

Here's a quick post about saving seeds from the garden. So far we have mustard (right), kale (far right) and romaine seeds (below) and later we'll get some tomato, watermelon and okra seeds. One thing to watch out for when saving seeds is cross pollination of plants from the same families. So since we have bell peppers and jalapeno peppers (of the Solanaceae family) planted in the same plot, the seeds produced may be hybrids which will produce fruit different from non-hybrid pepper or jalapeno. This could make an interesting plant with perfectly edible fruit, but is generally undesirable for serious seed saving.


And to test the germination of these seeds I took 14 of each seed (plus 2 romaine pods) and put them on a wet paper towl and tossed them in a zip bag. Within a few days at least some of them should have spouted, I'll post and update when that happens.All in all saving seeds is a handy skill to practice, if you're interested in reading more about it visit http://www.seedsave.org/ for some useful information. Thanks for reading!