Finally, farmers markets are over and the field is cleaned up. It’s time to kick back with a seed catalog and start choosing what to grow next year. It’s always fun to dream of all the new varieties you’re going to try and the new tools you’re going to buy and how they will make … More A good crop plan starts with a good sales plan
I used to get so frustrated with my Nigella seed when it was germination test time. We would test 100 seeds but barely any of them would sprout. But I knew that if I were to sow these seeds in the field, they would all germinate. One year we tested Nigella germination at 15C instead … More The Best Temperature To Run A Germ Test
Good old Cyperus esculentus. This sedge produces a crunchy little underground tuber.Those tubers are Chufa Nuts. (You might know them as Tigernuts, but I learned about them as Chufa and my brain still thinks of them that way!) You can eat Chufa nuts and you can plant them to get more Chufa. At Tourne-Sol, we … More How To Harvest & Clean Chufa Nuts
In last week’s Build A Better Crop Plan workshop, Katie asked this question: Any thoughts on best practices for crop notes? Tracking observations about disease, pests, weather, etc. Do you keep very technical notes about that, or maybe just a simple running journal of observations At the moment, I didn’t have as detailed an answer … More Best practices for crop notes
As the season transitions from outdoors work to indoors work, it’s also time to bring in all that roughly cleaned seed you have sitting in buckets and bins throughout your seed workshop area. At Tourne-Sol this means moving seeds from the greenhouse where we dry and extract all our seeds to our warehouse where we … More From Seed Extraction to Seed Storage
This is a shop-vac full of squash seed. The seeds got in the shop-vac because we chop-chopped some squash in half, then we vacuuscooped the seeds out of the seed cavity. This is so much easier and quicker than scooping away with a spoon. It also separates some of the pulpy fibers from the seed … More Vacuuscooping Squash Seed
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
Eggplant seed is one of the seeds that gave me the biggest headache for the longest time. It’s one of the few cases, where if we didn’t have seed extracting equipment, I might not try to grow bulk amounts of the seed. This is how we get the seeds out of the eggplant the Millet … More Eggplant seed has always frustrated me.
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