You don’t need a big shaking scary machine to save pepper seeds. When I’m dealing with pretty small batches of peppers I’ll often save seed by hand. This is my hi tech technique to split open peppers. It’s all about splitting the fruit open to get to that seed I cut the pepper in half … More Saving pepper seeds can be easy
Sugar Magnolia peas throwing a flower party with their friends the Mighty Mustard Mix. It can be hard to remember that this is what the field looked like only a short while ago. Before things turned to pods and seeds. And cleared fields and cold feet. But each of these seeds has a little flower … More Remember This Summer’s Flower Parties
These are some pictures of the latest stuff coming out of my winter radish breeding projects. You can see where these radishes all began in this post. I’ve been working a lot more with long radishes lately. They’re producing all kinds of beautiful things. It’s hard to keep it all though. This is the radish … More More Radishes Coming Out Of The Breeding Plots
We drove out the seed thresher to the field and threshed some beans. Note that we are processing whole plants rather than individual pods. (That’s probably obvious from the video.) The seed thresher is actually a Soil Shredder that has been modified to run on DC current so we can easily change the threshing speed. … More Threshing seed beans in the field
Last year, I had a favourite sunflower. I watched it at every stage through the growing season and through the winter. And the stalk lingered long into a second year. It’s been hard to find a new favourite flower this year. Much harder than I expected. There was a mullein that I really liked. But … More A Zinnia in the garden
Each bucket has the seeds from 1 lettuce plant. These were quickly cleaned in the field and then put in separate bins. These are the seeds of our 7 favourite lettuce plants from an F2 population of a cross between Jericho Romaine and Deer Tongue lettuce. The seeds I collected are the F3 generation. We … More Saving F3 lettuce seeds
Bins as tables and bins as bins. When we’re screening seed lots in the field we use what we have on hand. This is a big brassica lot that we just stomped and I’m screening out most of the chaff to reduce the amount of matter we bring indoors. The screen is just ¼” hardware … More Bins and seed cleaning
Bringing in the pea seed harvest. We let the plants mostly dry down in the field then cut and remove the trellis At this point you can easily pull the whole plants out of the ground and stack them on tarps. We bring them back to the greenhouse where we’ll thresh them in the next … More Bringing in the pea seed harvest
Crop planned last December Seed received in January Seed sown in June Transplanted in July Weed free and healthy in August Going to be harvested in October It’s nice to have a spreadsheet on hand that can keep track of the thinking in the time between making decisions and all the actions. After a quick … More Three rows of Radicchios
We’re going to shake, shake, shake those lettuce seeds out! And wiggle our waggles away. ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? We used to mostly pull lettuce plants full of seed and and spread them out on tarps. We’d then let them keep maturing before seed extraction. This is how we manage a lot of … More Lettuce seed harvest – shaking method