A Seed Saver's Garden

[Moon888]

Do you fence your garden in, and do you have animals that eat your harvest? We (AU) have rats and wallabies that are eating the new shoots!

 

[Moon888]

A few opportunities have come up for saving something with unknown availability for this gardener.

An annual brassica was one of these. I bought a package of seed off the rack in an Asian market, immediately forgotten was the name it was sold under. It isn't all that special but just a mild-flavored brassica. Buying seed for what I thought it is from 3 different seed companies has broadened my experience but hasn't eliminated the need to save seed from the un-duplicated original.

I found the annual brassicas easy choices for a casual seed-saver. My grandmother's tomato, from seed given me about 30 years ago, has been an easy save and not required isolation. Only once did it seem to cross with another variety. The experience made me aware of the value in saving seed from multiple years. No seed need be collected from the "suspect" plant(s). The "suspect" seed from the previous year can be tossed. And, older seed (not too much older!) can be used again. Worked!

Steve

 

[Moon888]

Steve, saving seed because they can get crossed by other varieties, is so new to me (a newbie at vege gardening). So when the seeds are crossed, they are no longer "heirloom", I am guessing?

 

[Decoy1]

You might find this interesting @Decoy1. It isn't a direct link to peppers and beans, but a deeper look at cross pollination in the industry. No wonder there is so much speculation about it, when some cross-polli info is considered proprietary. Interesting that we've had the same experience of seeing crosses in retail packets. The most memorable for me was a Marina di Chiogga squash, clearly crossed. I knew that OSC, the company I got it from, had isolation distances by the kilometer so I was surprised to see it.

Communing with Cosmos - EFAO

Starting in 2019, Kim Delaney conducted a farmer-led research project to see about reducing isolation distance for cut flower seed production.

efao.ca

Yes, thank you. I'm lucky enough to have two separate growing areas about 100 metres/320 ft from each other which for me, not selling seeds, is very helpful and not too far from the article's suggestion that 400ft is good enough for many purposes. It doesn't help with polytunnel or greenhouse crops but I can use it for sweetcorn, runner beans, various flower varieties, some alliums etc.

 

[Decoy1]

Can you plant a garden over an area that has had the stump base ground down? Or does the stump still remain fairly close to the surface?

If you're persistent with your grinder you can go down a few inches so it would depend upon your effort. I think it would be better in the short term for shallow rooting crops and I don't know how quickly the remaining roots would decay.

 

[Decoy1]

In my experience, pepper flowers (or at least those belonging to C. annuum) are self-pollinating, and don't need insects. They might not need much if any stimulation to set either.

When growing peppers for seed, I enclose the plants in plastic cages (covered by the lightest grade of spun polyester row cover) to exclude pollinators. The pepper set in the cages is reliably heavy - often more than the same variety grown uncovered. This seems to indicate that the higher humidity in the cages is actually beneficial. I've never measured the Summer temps within the cages, but I believe that any heating is nominal, and offset by the slight shading caused by the cover.

View attachment 70651
"Pelso" paprika pepper, grown in cage. The weeds obviously enjoyed the sheltered environment too. (The peppers didn't seem to mind.)

View attachment 70652
"Bacskia" sweet pepper, single plant stripped of leaves to show peppers

Other pepper species may not respond the same way; since I never grow more than one of those, I've never found the need to cage them. Some of those might benefit from insect activity.

Heat and/or dry soil conditions might cause blossom drop. The cages tend to stabilize soil temperature, by reducing direct sunlight. This also eliminates damage to peppers from sun scald.

As beneficial as covers are, I don't recommend leaving them completely closed long term. While the cover keeps bees & flies out, aphids can get in - and with their predators excluded, the aphid population can explode exponentially. I don't close the covers until flowering begins (after removing any flowers which have already opened). The cages remain fully closed only until I see large numbers of peppers have set, which is usually 3-4 weeks. Then I open the downwind side for the Summer, to allow insect predators back in. I never cease to be amazed how quickly wasps & ladybugs eliminate any aphids once the cover is open.

I would heartily recommend the cage method for anyone who has trouble getting a good crop of peppers.

Interesting. Thank you. Those pepper plants have certainly produced!

When you say plastic, is that a plastic frame you make, over which to drape the cover? Presumably it has to allow quite a lot of room for growth, or do you rely on the plant being ale to lift the light cover?

I'm guessing that spun polyester cover is what is usually marketed in UK as fleece.

I do tend to grow my peppers crammed together. They need polytunnel protection in our climate and so space is limited. Covering entire plants would take more generous spacing I think, but perhaps that is a direction I might need to go in.

 

[Decoy1]

OK this is a moment. In 9 days it'll be December and I just ate a toasted tomato & cheese with mayo sandwich.
With my own longkeeper tomato! And it was fabulous.

One of the things I was worried about with this type of tomato was them being pasty. YICK. But these were a perfect texture, I'm actually sort of surprised that they were such a good texture. Not as strongly flavored as a fresh garden tomato, but darn good. Dang!
View attachment 70653

Which of your long-keeping tomato varieties was this?

Here we're just hanging on to our last couple of fruits. But although they look sound when picked, the inevitable blight gradually makes its presence felt in storage. Has your crop remained blight free? I'm wondering how the longkeeper tomatoes will do when there's blight around.

 

[digitS']

The annual brassica is a twisted-stem mustard.

At least, that is how I think it would be classified. After buying that seed off a rack in an Asian market, the store stopped selling garden seed. Or, seed specifically for gardening — given @Pulsegleaner 's interests and evidence .

Purchased seed from other sources didn't help with identifying what we had although we learned that different types of mustard greens certainly bring different tastes to the table. We preferred what we already had and saving was very easy. Two or 3 plants from a Spring planting produce enough seed for several years. The process: simply cutting and allowing the seed stalks to dry a few days, pulling off the pods and crushing them, and a few minutes of winnowing on a windy afternoon.

Steve