Seed Saving - Tomatoes

Tomatoes are in full swing now and we have more than we can use ourselves. Next week I'll probably try to make some sauce, but this week I'm saving the seeds for next year.

1. Select the best fruit which will carry on those good genes to the next season. Free of cracks, good shape, good color, and plants that have a lot of fruit are all things to look for.

2. Slice open the tomato and put the seeds in a small bowl. Cover the seeds with 1/2 - 1 inch of water and place the bowl in a warm, dark place. Let the bowl sit there two to three days until it starts to ferment. That little sack around the tomato seed is there to keep it from sprouting inside the tomato and this process will remove the sack.

3. Skim off any junk which float to the top of the bowl.

4. Gently rinse the seeds under running water.

5. Spread the seeds on a dry paper towel to dry. Throw out any seeds which are brown, green or otherwise look odd. Let the seeds sit for a few days until completely dry. Store them for next year in a cool dry place.

3.

Mid Summer Planting

Last year I got a copy of Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long which is an excellent book, but I got it too late in the year to actually do anything with it.

This year, the very rainy June knocked out a few plants with root rot and the peas and the lettuce, both of which are early season varieties, are drying up and going to seed leaving me with a decent sized empty space.

Seeds of Change had some good suggestions on their web site for late season planting and I dug out my seed box looking for varieties that I had on hand that would be ready in 60 days or so. I planted pole beans, swiss chard, and some summer squash and all have sprouted very quickly. I also transplanted some Ramapo tomatoes which had not been doing too well in pots on the patio and they have almost doubled in size in just one week.

Seed Saving - Purple Peas

Peas are an early season crop that like the weather slightly cool. As the days are getting hotter and longer, the pea vines are now turning brown and it is time to start saving their seeds. This year I had planted Purple Peas from the Hudson Valley Seed Library.

1. Save from the best stock which will pass on their good genes to the next generation. The one that climbed to the top of the trellis first or the one that started to look like a small shrub rather than a bean bush are good choices. Make sure the plants you pick are free of disease or any other problems. Take from more than one plant to add some diversity.


2. Select the best fruit. Do you have fruit that you took a picture of to show off? Those are the ones for saving.


3. Let the fruit dry on the plant until the pod turns brown. This will usually be 4 – 6 weeks past the time you would have picked the fruit for eating. If you are doing this late in the season and the weather is turning cold or wet, pull the entire plant and hang it upside down where it is warm and dry until the pod is finished drying. Now should be early enough to let them dry in the field.


4. Shell the peas as if you were preparing them for dinner. Discard any seeds which are unusually small, wrinkly, mushy or otherwise odd. Place the seeds on a cookie sheet or paper towel and put them in a warm dry place allowing them to dry further. Do not put them in the oven, toaster or other artificial heat source as this cook them and render them useless for planting.


5. Put the seeds in a container and store them in a cool, dry place. An envelope like a seed company would use is more than sufficient or for larger quantities a jar or piece of Tupperware will work well.

Late Blight Fungus

A recent article in the New York Times explains about a tomato blight that “has quickly spread to nearly every state in the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic, and the weather over the next week may determine whether the outbreak abates or whether tomato crops are ruined”.

It seems one of the culprits is a single nursery which supplies many of the big box stores where the staff are not trained to spot problems like this. The article also explains how to spot the symptoms of the disease and references advice on using a fungicide to treat it. Given, however, that the purpose of growing your own vegetables is to avoid additives this is not very encouraging.

I’ve written in a number of older posts about the saving seeds and starting plants from seeds and here is one more example where it pays off and while my plants are not currently infected, if they do become so it will not be because I carried it home with me.

Companion Planting

Companion planting is the is the idea that two varieties of plants can do better when planted together rather than each of the plants being planted alone. One plant may repel a particular pest that bothers another plant or one plant may add something to the soil that another plant needs.

Some people will plant flowers next to their vegetable plants to lure pollinators who can visit the vegetable plants while they are there for the flowers.

Last year, I tried planting sunflowers at least a dozen times, but the groundhog would get at them every time they got to be more than a few inches tall. This year, the combination of a better fence and a cat in the yard has kept the groundhog and rabbits at bay and the sun flowers are doing very well.





I also planted some poppies although were a little too early and only a few have made it.





Here is a picture of the cat on the roof of the garden shed which is right next to the garden. No one is really sure how he manages to get up there, but no one really cares either as he works much better than the plastic owl I put up there last year.

Strawberry Jam

Now is the middle of strawberry season and today we went to Sussex County Strawberry Farm. They have 15 acres of berries, the plants were full of berries and the air smelled like strawberry jam as you walked between the rows.

It only took about 45 minutes to pick six quarts which we then took home and made strawberry jam with about four of the quarts. The jam was extremely easy to make with only four ingredients (5 cups mashed berries, 7 cups of sugar, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1 box of pectin) and even the canning process was not too bad once you got the hang of it. We ended up with nine, 8 oz jars, the jam is a light, shimmering pink and the strawberry flavor is clear and distinct. Given how easy this was and how well it turned out, we are now looking forward to blueberries in July and peaches in August.

Update On The Compost Heap

I’ve read in a few places that landfills are approximately 1/3 yard waste. In previous years, I would mow the lawn place the clippings in big, paper bags sold for this purpose and set them out by the curb for collection at the rate of 2 or 3 a week. This year, however, I’ve been dumping the clippings into a pile the vegetable garden and mixing them with leftover straw mulch and dirt. I mix the pile twice a week with a shovel although mixing is not quite accurate as I simply shovel the pile to a new location and “restack” the pile. I’m also supposed to keep the pile moist, but with the almost constant rain for the last three weeks that has not been an issue. The heat coming out of the stack is tremendous and the grass clippings are rotting away at a very rapid pace usually being mostly gone by the next mowing. The pile is also densely packed with very large worms.

The key to making compost that does not smell is making sure that sufficient air is allowed into the pile and the straw mulch and the frequent turning both provide this. Here are a good link on composting:

http://www.howtocompost.org/