A Seed Saver's Garden

[heirloomgal]

Well, the rice (well most of it) has been hulled to get rid of broken kernels, and, hopefully, my fingers will heal in a week or so (pulling the hulls off of rice does about as much damage to the skin as pulling corn kernels off of ears, with the added complication that you can't use gloves because then you don't have the tactile dexterity to grasp something that small.

The one additional thing I have now learned is that I don't have two kinds of African rice, I have at least FOUR (quite possibly more). Besides the long grain one I separated out before (which has not been hulled, as I probably won't try to grow that until a later year), and the majority short grained medium brown rice, there are also a few kernels of a VERY short grain (almost round) white grained rice, and a few of a very slender grained dark brown rice (as well as one or two white that are longer than the rest, and one or two dark that are fatter). I have separated those out, and they will get their own pots.

You got a rice crop! Awesome! Colors?

 

[Pulsegleaner]

View attachment 70169

In my supply of mead making honey, there are a couple of large jars I don't dare use, because they are manuka honey (they were marked Tea Tree honey, and, at the time I didn't know those two things were the same), and my view is that, if it has all of those extra medical properties, consuming a pound's worth at once via drinking it is probably not a great idea (which could easily happen if my cousin was to take a bottle and drink the whole thing over the course of a meal/ day*.) .

You got a rice crop! Awesome! Colors?

No I did not GET a rice crop, I got seed to TRY and get a rice crop NEXT YEAR. Like I said, I got a small package of African Rice seed from the person in Ghana I buy from on Etsy.

As for colors, as I said, most is medium brown, a tiny bit is white, and a tiny bit is dark brown. The web SAYS there is black African rice, but there does not seem to be any in this particular mix.

*My ratio tends to be 3 pounds of honey per gallon of water. From that I take three bottles (I generally toss what would be the fourth becuase by them I'm down into the sediment, and I'm not good enough at racking it to pull another clear bottle out). So it's actually more like 12 oz of honey per bottle, but even that's a lot for something that's supposed to be serious medicine.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Only remotely interesting story I have is that, yesterday at the Indian grocery store, I saw a bag of what was marked as allspice but looked darker and smaller than any allspice I know. So I bought it, thinking it might be an alternate species.

When I got it home opened it and looked at it, it wasn't just an alternate species, but an alternate genus and family! It wasn't allspice at all, it was cubebs (a black pepper relative, sometimes called tailed pepper or comet pepper.)

On the other hand, I DO use cubebs in some cooking (it's part of my chai mix, for example), it IS a lot harder to find than allspice and usually quite a bit more expensive (and the pack was fairly cheap for the size) and it seems like better quality than the last cubebs I got (a lot of them are hollow inside, so you don't get any "white" pepper with the "black" pepper,) so I suppose I came out ahead.

Update: Looks like these are going into the growing pots instead, the bag expired in February (why they had it still on the shelves then, I don't know.)