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heirloomgal
Garden Addicted
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- Jan 17, 2021
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There are so many excellent reasons to save seeds @ducks4you, and you touch on one of the reasons here. When I get into my car, I generally expect things to go well on the road. But I still wear a seat belt just in case there are any irregularities that take place, and in such a case, the seat belt would be a potentially life saving measure.I love this thread!! I KNOW that old tomato seeds will sprout. IF I had babysat them, I could have had my GF's 35yo tomato plants in my garden. Instead, I discovered them dried out bc I thought the seeds were dead.
My friend saved seeds from one of my bell peppers last year and has them growing in her garden THIS year.
I REALLY want to get good at this.
I hope NOT, but I think we may need to be supplementing our food in the near future, and we have Seen how seed companies have sold out in the last 2 years.
Btw,@Ridgerunner , have you tried growing garlic next the plants that the deer like? You plant grocery store garlic. It WILL sprout. I have been playing around with grocery store garlic for 2 years now. It sprouts well, but demands some attention, but only if you start it INSIDE. This year I bought Italian garlic from a seed company. I already had about a pound of grocery store (read that CHINESE) garlic in my pantry, so I planted the Chinese garlic on the north side flower bed (E facing, front of house), and planted the Italian garlic on the south side, just for comparison.
Anyway, I really want to try the methods on this thread. I have PLENTY of storage space in my basement, where somebody put the old kitchen counter and sink, sometime in the last 100 years!
When I was growing up my mother kept a garden, but it was only for a few years, and I think to her it was a kind of hobby, like knitting or a latch hook kit. She eventually grew tired of it, and turned the space back to lawn. But my grandfather lived across the street from us, and he kept a garden too. He's probably the reason I am a gardener today. I really loved my grandpa, and I looked up to him. I saw how different his sense was toward his garden. He talked sometimes when I was a child about going hungry during the great depression, and how desperate the situation was for food. The only grocery store was a gun, and still there wasn't much to be had. To him, you gardened because you were alive, and so long as you were alive you needed food. It was a function of living. As a little girl I would sneak into his yard to watch him work the garden (he never found out about this); it was the first time I ever saw a piece of food, a potato, come out of the ground. It was magical, and surprising, at the time. He used his yard so differently compared to how we used ours just across the street. It planted in me a seed that would emerge a couple decades later.
We never know what the future holds, but I quite like the idea of even a little food independence. I would like to believe I'll never need that seat belt, but life is unpredictable. It's part of why I stay away from hybrids - I would be forever dependant on it's producers, and many of those hybrids (like 'Sungold' tomatoes), have a genetic line which is a very well guarded secret. Until I joined TEG I honestly didn't know that some people prefer to grow them, or grow them out of necessity. I do understand the importance of that, though it doesn't resolve the 'what if' part of the equation. A market farmer I spoke to once, who grows hybrids, told me that she believes OP seed and heritage varieties could possibly be made as vigorous, but there has not been much concerted effort to do it. Sort of like working yourself out of a job, because there would be no one to sell new seed to, perhaps. Also, there are varieties you can really love, and if the company decides to discontinue it, which happens, your hybrid veg is never to be had again. Your own seed, stored well, can last for SO MUCH longer than is usually estimated. It's a permanent food supply waiting in the wings, and if you've been saving for years, it's got some kind of adaptation to your growing conditions established. Many people struggle with tomato issues; hybrids seem to be the solution to that on a certain level. But if I had tomato challenges (I don't in my climate) I'd be looking at wild varieties which have loads of blight resistance built in, as well as productivity. I've experimented with many wilder crops, as they are so tough and produce so much.
My next garden goal is a true, old world root cellar. It would give me seed independence with potatoes, carrots and rutabagas. For now, I have no place to store them at the correct temperatures to keep them viable for planting.
, was to dig a root cellar. Only about 4' x 6', it went under a woodshed (next project) and a short distance from a barn, where I was a loft dweller for the first year.
