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You made goals or resolutions for 2010. You have life-long goals, ambitions, hopes, dreams… So no more excuses - I challenge you to follow through and DO IT!!
10,000 Steps Challenge
That's the general number of steps needed to maintain a healthy cardiovascular system and help keep your weight in check. With environmental and emotional benefits to boot, let's start walking!
The Green Your Insides Challenge
For your family and our planet, start greening your own home!
Alright, I’m flat out admitting it: I took on a bit too much the past few days! So in light of our new Growing Challenge Evangelist Edition, I thought I would syndicate an oldie but goodie here. Which reminds me that I never did write a How To Save Vegetable Seeds – Part 2. I’m on it… Next week!
Since those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are beginning to order our seeds and plan our gardens, here is a list of things you need to know about each of your crops if you’re planning to save seeds this year.
Species
This is probably the most important bit of information you need to know when seed saving. Generally speaking, cross-pollination can occur between different plants from the same species.
What confused me in the past was that within a Family, there may be several species. For instance, in the Leguminosae (ie, Legume) Family, there are 12,000 different species. So I can simultaneously grow pigeon peas, runner beans, and lima beans, for example, and save seeds from each of them – they will not cross-pollinate because they are different species! As you can imagine, learning can considerably widen the breadth of what you can plant at the same time.
Pollination Method
Insect-pollinated plants are generally plants that have male and female flowers on the same plant. Squash plants are easy illustrations of this: you have the female flowers that have a mini-squash (“ovary”) at their base, and male flowers that do not. Depending on the species, these crops can be pollinated by honeybees, bumblebees, other bees, moths, butterflies, wasps, flies, and/or hummingbirds.
Self-pollinating plants have male and female flower parts within the same flower – these are called “perfect” flowers (ha, if only we were all so perfect!). Generally you only need one plant to create seeds from these plants. However, some of these are self-incompatible, which means they can only be pollenized by an insect or wind that carries pollen from another plant. And some of these, such as tomatoes and peppers, are greatly aided by wind- and insect-pollination.
Wind-pollinated plants are plants that rely on wind for pollination, such as corn, spinach, and many grains.
All three of these have the potential for cross-pollination. This means if you want to save seeds from these plants, you must isolate them from other plants in the same species.
Isolation
Physical isolation. Isolation distance is the distance a plant needs to be away from another plant of the same species in order to keep from cross-pollinating. However, in many instances you can isolate plants artificially by putting one plant in a greenhouse or wire cage, or covering the flowers with plastic, cloth, or wire mesh. In this case you must hand-pollinate any wind- or insect-pollinating plants.
Temporal isolation. If you want to grow more than one variety, plant the first one as early as you possibly can. When that plant starts to flower, you can sow seeds for the second variety. This works only if the second crop reaches its flowering stage after the first crop has already set its seeds and stopped shedding pollen.
Population Size
Always attempt to grow as many plants as you can in your garden, in order to preserve a wide range of genetic diversity within each crop. If you can only plant a few plants, you can hand-pollinate between your most vigorous plants in order to maintain maximum diversity within your crop. Make sure that when you are saving seeds, you save seeds from several different fruits.
Even if you are selecting for certain characteristics that you’d like to bring out within your next crop, a good rule of thumb is to focus on the plant, not the fruit.
Annual, Biennial, or Perennial
Annuals produce seed within the same year that they are germinated. Once the seed is produced, the mother plant dies.
Biennials produce seed the year after they are germinated. Once the seed is produced, the mother plant dies. These can be the most difficult seeds to save – particularly in the North, as the plants have to be overwintered. Mulch can protect them, but if your area is particularly cold you may have to bring your plant indoors, cover it in a cold frame, or dig, store, and then replant the roots in the spring.
Perennials generally produce seed every year, and live several years before the mother plant dies.
Important Books
How do you learn all of these qualities of your seeds? Read. Read the packets of seeds, read nursery websites, read Master Gardener information, read blogs and forums, read your gardening books, and read seed saving books. It’s an incredible experience to save seeds and grow them the following year, but it’s only incredible if you do it with the knowledge you need!!
I will continue to leave these challenges open, so anyone can join either challenge at any time. I’m thinking up a new one for 2010 – please leave a note in the comments if you have an idea.
Participants of The Growing Challenge From Seed to Seed are listed below, and participants of The Original Growing Challenge are listed here. Thanks everyone for joining together and supporting one another as we each learn and grow!
I’ve added everyone’s name, blog, location, and hardiness zone. And again, The Original Growing Challenge participants are all listed here.
In case you’re curious how I did with the challenge, I wrote about one of my seed to seed experiences yesterday: Amaranth, The Wonder Crop. (I still have to work on the seed saving part, but I’m still hopeful!)
Chat Away
Please let me know how it went, everyone, so I can try to make this a better experience in the future!
How did it go? Did you keep up with the challenge?
I’m thinking next year there will be a monthly check-in, since I’m clearly not keeping up with the updates more often, and we all need time to garden!! I’ll try to set up a way for bloggers to more easily include their blog posts as well. How does that sound? Any other suggestions, thoughts, ideas for what to do next year?
And most importantly, will you plant seeds again next year?!
This year I grew amaranth, a crop I’ve never grown nor seen grown before, in the hopes of planting it from seed and harvesting the seed to plant next year. I’ll let you know how that went in a moment. First…
Why Grow Amaranth
I received the seeds back in the spring, in a beautiful care package from Botanical Interests – they asked me to try out some of their new organic seeds and write about it. This particular variety is Burgandy Amaranth, Amaranthus hypochondriacus. As many of you know, I am incredibly busy starting my new business, so I’m always looking for low-maintenance things to grow and cook. Ah, amaranth, I love you so!
Salad Green: When it’s young, and the leaves are just a few inches long, it adds a wonderful color and flavor to salads.
Cooking Green: When the leaves are more mature, they are a very nutritious spinach, often used in Indian, Chinese, Indonesian, Laotian, Malaysian, and Thai cuisines. I’ve seen them called “Chinese Spinach” in our farmer’s markets here. The leaves are a good source of including vitamin A, vitamin K, vitamin B6, vitamin C, riboflavin, folate, calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper, and manganese.
Whole Protein Grain: When the plants are allowed to go to seed, the seeds themselves are one of the most complete proteins you can find. And they’re free of gluten. The seeds are 13-18% protein, according to Seeds of Change, with a high level of the amino acid lysine, an essential amino acid that is usually deficient in plant protein. Amaranth is also a good source of calcium, iron, potassium, zinc, vitamin E, and B vitamins. You prepare it much as you would quinoa.
Popping Grain: According to Botanical Interests, you can also pop the grain like popcorn.
Dye: Apparently the leaves are also a good red dye, used by the Hopi Native Americans.
How To Grow Amaranth
Did I mention it was easy?
Sow the seeds 1/4″ deep, 4-6″ apart in well-aged compost. You can plant them directly in the soil after danger of frost has passed, or plant them indoors 4-6 weeks before your average last day of frost. Germination is best when soil temperatures are 65 to 75 degrees.
The seeds will germinate in as little as 3 days if your soil is warm and moist but not wet. Every single one of my seeds grew, and grew fast!
Plants should be thinned 6-18″ apart eventually, before they start to compete with one another for light. (Eat the thinnings in a salad!)
This particular variety reaches 5-8 feet tall, no kidding. You can interplant small greens or other shade-loving crops beneath them.
Amaranth is drought-tolerant, heat-tolerant, and disease-resistant. You don’t need to water them more than about twice a week, even in high summer heat.
Seeds Forming in July
How To Harvest Amaranth Seed
Each head of amaranth holds tens of thousands of seeds, and will yield anywhere from 1 to 8 ounces of harvested seeds. In warm, dry climates, harvesting amaranth is very easy.
Instructions from Seeds of Change:
Cut the seedheads just before they become dry and brittle. Lay the seedheads on a cloth or place them inside paper or cloth bags with heads down and leave in the shade to finish drying. When the seedheads are dry, the seeds can be removed in several ways: by rubbing gently with your hands, by enclosing the seedheads between two cloths and treading on top without shoes on, by beating the seedheads inside of a bag, or by beating seedheads together over a cloth.
Instructions from Salt Spring Seeds:
Amaranth keeps on flowering until hit by the first hard frost. Seed will often ripen many weeks before that, usually after about three months. The best way to determine if seed is harvestable is to gently but briskly shake or rub the flower heads between your hands and see if the seeds fall readily. (Numerous small and appreciative birds may give hints as to when to start doing this.) An easy way to gather ripe grain is, in dry weather, to bend the plants over a bucket and rub the seedheads between your hands.
Unfortunately for me, harvesting in wet climates is not as easy.
According to Salt Spring Seeds, “the best time to harvest amaranth commercially is in dry weather three to seven days after first frost.” Since our amaranth fell over in the wind and rain of a typical Seattle fall, my mother and I harvested the seed long before it was dry, and hung it in the basement to dry. I wish I had read the Salt Spring Seeds article before we did this: “Cutting and hanging plants to dry indoors does not work very well: the plants become extremely bristly and it is difficult to separate the seed from the chaff.” Ooops. We can verify that this is true. Apparently until a killing frost, the plants have too high of a moisture content to be able to dry them before they become moldy.
Next year I think we’ll need to stake up the amaranth and continue to let it dry, and then hope for a drier fall!
Fallen Amaranth in November
Threshing The Seeds
The hulls of the seeds are in no way poisonous, and they are a fine source of fiber in your diet, so there is no need to get every last bit of hull out of our seeds. We did save one head of amaranth in the ground, that is still waiting for the killing frost. So there is hope for us yet. Since we haven’t successfully harvested the seeds yet, I’ll thank Seeds of Change and Salt Spring Seeds for providing the following excellent instructions.
Instructions from Seeds of Change:
Once the dry seeds are removed they can be placed into a shallow bowl and swirled around until the large pieces of flowers rise to the top where they are easy to remove. By tipping the bowl you can rake out much of the chaff that is left. Any small particles of flowers, chaff, or dirt that remain can be removed by shaking the seed through a small mess screen about the size of window screen. Winnowing the seed in a light breeze will also remove the flower and chaff effectively. The seeds are very light so it is important to winnow carefully in light breeze only.
Instructions from Salt Spring Seeds:
My own preferred threshing method is to rub the flowerheads through screening into a wheelbarrow and then to blow away the finer chaff using my air compressor. Cutting and hanging plants to dry indoors does not work very well: the plants become extremely bristly and it is difficult to separate the seed from the chaff…
Here are two short videos that help show what this looks like:
Storing The Seeds
Instructions from Seeds of Change:
Once the seeds are dried and cleaned, it is a good idea to keep the seeds for several days at the temperature at which they will be stored, before putting them into a storage container. If the seeds do not feel damp and do not stick to each other during this time they are probably dry enough for storage. The length of time to dry seeds varies greatly depending on the air humidity, drying conditions, seed size, and how clean the seeds are. Store quinoa and amaranth as you would any type of cereal or grain in a sealed, airtight container out of direct sunlight and away from sources of heat.
Instructions from Salt Spring Seeds:
After harvesting, it is important to further dry your crop to ensure it won’t mold in storage. It can be left on trays in the hot sun or placed near an indoor heat source. Stir occasionally until it is as dry as possible. Store seed in air-tight containers in a cool dry place.
Will I Grow It Again?
Yes! Not only is it low-maintenance, nutritious, and tasty, but it is the best community-builder in the garden! Almost every gardener wants to know what that gorgeous plant is, so it was a great conversation starter in our community garden. Plus the Asian gardeners were excited to see us growing, and told us when to start harvesting the leaves for cooking greens.
Thanks, Botanical Interests, for pushing me to grow this fabulous plant. There are 70 varieties of amaranth, so there are lots of varieties to try!
Hope you’re having a lovely weekend, everyone. I received an email this morning from a reader having trouble with her potatoes, and I was wondering if any of you potato experts could help her. I haven’t had troubles with potatoes – ours just grow and produce lovely scrumptious potatoes – so I have no idea what it is!
Hi, I have grown potatoes for years and every year I have the same problem. The literature doesn’t seem to define it well. The problem is small dark brown or black spots on the surface of the potato which are approximately 1/16th to 1/8th inch in diameter. The spot travels into the potato for 1/4 to 1/2 inch with a sort of rope or dry string-like material also dark brown or black. I always remove these with a knife before cooking. Sometime there are 5-6 of these spots on a potato. But sometimes many more. Although I expect to find an insect or burrowing creature, I never have. Any ideas?
You can plant from September through mid-January, as long as the soil is not frozen. Fall planting, when the soil is around 60F, will yield the highest quality bulbs; and generally speaking, the later you plant the smaller the heads will be. However, don’t worry too much if you plant it late – you can even plant it in late winter/early spring and still get a nice fall crop.
Types of Garlic
There are two types of garlic: hardneck and softneck.
Hardneck Garlic tends to have dramatic and distinct flavors, is easy to peel, and has generally bigger cloves. These also produce edible garlic scapes at the beginning of the summer. These are my favorite, but they generally don’t store for as long as softneck garlic. Can be stored 3-6 months.
Softneck garlic is what you’ll find in most supermarkets – it generally has a milder flavor and smaller cloves. However, it can be braided, and generally stores for much longer. Can be stored for a year or more.
Elephant Garlic is actually a member of the leek family so it’s not really garlic, but tastes similarly. It has much larger cloves, with a milder taste than garlic, and it keeps well. Elephant Garlic is wonderful baked: slice off the very top of the head so that you can see the tops of the cloves, pour a bit of olive oil on top, and bake until soft and browned. Then you can eat it by scooping the cloves with a spoon, or adding the cloves to other dishes.
Soil
The looser the soil, the larger the garlic. It will grow in most soils, but garlic prefers sandy loam (as most plants do). Make sure any compost you use is well aged.
How To Plant & Grow Garlic
Simple, simple, simple, and so low maintenance!
Separate the cloves (but you can leave the skin on, it doesn’t matter).
Plant the cloves 1-2″ deep, 4-6″ apart.
Water, and don’t water again until spring.
Mulch – in warm winter areas, a light layer of mulch is enough; in colder winter areas, mulch with 8″ or more. We mulch with straw, you can also mulch with leaves.
Remove the mulch in spring, once danger of frost has passed.
Water. Continue to water whenever soil is dry.
When the leaves begin to turn yellow (in the summer), stop watering for 2 weeks.
Pull up the plant.
Place the plant in a warm, shady spot to cure for 2-3 weeks (4 weeks for elephant garlic); if you have soft neck garlic, you can braid it and hang it in a dark place with good circulation. (Ideal curing temperature is 70-75F.)
Store in a cool, dark place (50F is ideal, with less than 60% humidity).
Where To Purchase Garlic Bulbs
You can grow organic garlic bought in a Farmer’s Market or natural foods store – anywhere that has well-stored, organic garlic. Try to find out as much as you can about the garlic when you buy it, so you know how to store it the following year. You can also buy certified disease-free garlic at an organic seed supply like Seeds of Change, Peaceful Valley, or Territorial Seed. Generally these portions are large, so I highly recommend getting a few to try, and sharing them with a friend.
Every fall since I began gardening, I work to dispel the myth that the growing season is over, and that frosts will kill anything remaining in the garden.
Not all plants are the same. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, corn, and other crops that thrive on hot temperatures are from hot climates. They didn’t need to survive the cold – instead, they needed to protect from heat. However, broccoli, carrots, garlic, rhubarb, and many other crops came from cool climates. Their systems work differently in the cold – not only do they survive cold temperatures, but they taste better when they get cool in the fall and winter!
It’s Not Frost That Kills, It’s Freeze
The night the first frost comes around in the fall, many people rush out to yank their tomato plants and bring them inside. After that night, it often gets warmer and sometimes there isn’t another frost for several weeks! It’s highly likely all those tomatoes hanging from rafters after that first frost would have been just fine outside through the first frost. The reason is that the first frost is often not a killing frost.
What kills the plants is not frost specifically, but is the internal temperature of plant tissue – once it freezes, the plant dies. Have you ever put a bottle of beer or soda in the freezer to cool it down quickly, and then forgot about it, until you heard a loud crash in the freezer several hours later? The loud crash is the glass breaking because the liquid inside the bottle expanded as it cooled. This is essentially what happens to the cells in a tomato plant when it gets cold.
Generally the first frost doesn’t quite freeze the plant because it happens at just barely 32F, and doesn’t stay long. However, the first freeze – or hard frost – often rolls in with much lower temperatures and stays cold much longer, usually killing the cells of tropical plants.
However, many plants do not have the fragile cellular structure of these tropical plants.
Frost-Tolerant Plants
Deciduous trees, bushes, and vines go dormant in the winter by losing their soft tissue (leaves), and waiting until spring before producing them again.
Root crops (beets, carrots, radishes, parsnips, daikon, rutabagas) store all of the energy from their leaves into their roots as it gets cooler, and the ground gives them protection against the freezes.
Cole crops (broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collards, kale, kohlrabi, mustards, turnips, watercress) can often survive temperatures below 20F. That means those of us in temperate climates can generally grow them throughout the winter (they don’t grow a whole lot in the winter, but they don’t die and you can continue to pick fresh crop), where others can often grow them with a row cover for protection. These biennial plants are made to last through the winter, so that they can bloom and produce seed in the spring.
Alliums (leeks, onions, garlic, shallots, scallions, chives) can survive very low temperatures (-30F). These perennials are generally planted 2-3 weeks before first frost, and rely on the spring warmth to start putting their energy into bulbs. Garlic in particular can benefit from a layer of mulch over the winter, to keep them protected through cooler temperatures.
Other perennials (asparagus, rhubarb, oregano, rosemary, sage, jerusalem artichokes, citrus) – there are many perennials that either continue to produce over the winter, or that go dormant over the winter to produce in early spring. I highly recommend checking out some of these, as they are incredibly rewarding when the rest of the garden is sparse.
Other crops I’ve had success growing in winter (parsley, cilantro, dill, spinach, endive, sorrel, lettuces, fennel, fava beans) – the key for many of these is to get them growing before it gets cold, as most plants don’t grow very much in cold weather. Thus, plant them 4-6 weeks before frost, and then harvest throughout the winter.
For More Information
There are many other plants you can continue to grow or store in the garden with often just a bit of protection. Check out “How To Grow A Four-Season Garden” for many tips on how to do this effectively!
Anything To Add?
Avid gardeners, what else would you add here? Other crops you’ve had success growing in winter?
The slips are basically mini plants. Plant them after the last frost, in rich soil with some well-aged compost, 12-18″ apart (we planted them far closer, but some of our potatoes were pretty small).
3. Do Virtually Nothing.
Water regularly, but otherwise they need almost zero weeding, and we didn’t have any bugs or disease. You can stop watering them during the last 3 weeks before harvest, so the roots are dry when you pull them out, and so that they don’t develop any molds.
To those of us in the northwest US, note that they are related to morning glories, so we can be assured they’ll grow very well!
4. Pull Them Up!
They’re basically on the same schedule as Irish potatoes: when they start to yellow in the fall, it’s about time to pull them. You can also feel them beneath the soil and get a sense of how big they are.
Seriously, that’s it. No excuses now – if you like them, grow them!
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