I've been saving my own seeds for a decade now. It all started with some lemon boy tomatoes and it's just grown from there. After those first tomatoes came peas. And with those peas I learned something, plants can adapt to their environment very quickly. You see that year I had nothing but a greenhouse and I wanted to grow peas. As you may or may not know peas do not like the heat so that season my peas look like the victims of torture. Growing in the heat of the greenhouse mangled and sparse. The seeds I gathered from those Laxton Progress that I had tortured performed surprisingly well the next season in the greenhouse, and the next generation performed better yet and the children of those plants better yet still. I was really impressed at how fast the peas learned to cope with the new growing conditions. I suppose that's why the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel, worked with peas, they sure seem to learn fast. Of course as time went on I started saving more and more varieties of more and more vegetable types. I'll save anything I can get my hands on, seeds from grocery store heirloom tomatoes that magically appear on the shelves, seeds from my own plants, seeds from starts I bought at the nursery. I don't take seed saving as seriously as some, primarily I just save seeds so that I have a large stock pile to experiment with and because it's fun. I'm not conserving heirloom varieties or selling my seeds, my approach is relaxed and simple, as is much of my gardening. I do reap the benefit of the adaptation of my plants saving my seeds year after year though. If you're new to the idea of seed saving you can start with the information I present here and grow with your own experience to a point where you may choose to conserve heirloom varieties, sell true seed types, or even breed your own varieties. My relaxed approach is simply, a save it and see what happens style. I don't worry about random crosses or whether the plants that result from my efforts breed true. I enjoy my random accidental squash hybrids, garden surprises are great, because usually you can eat your mistakes. Here's the basics of what I do, I see seeds as either wet or dry and process all the wet seeds in the same way and I process all the dry seeds a similar way.
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There are a lot of ways to compost and a lot of options if you're looking to purchase or build a composter. The best thing you can do is just think about what you want out of your compost or why you want to compost and start from there. Do you want a nutrient rich additive for your garden? do you it want it fast? Maybe you're looking to reduce your carbon footprint, make less garbage, maybe you want to grow killer tomatoes. Whatever you're looking to do there's a composting method or system that will fit the bill. No matter what system you end up choosing composting is about harmony. A balancing act of temperatures, ratios of carbon and nitrogen, moisture and beneficial bacteria. But it's also as simple as letting things rot and allowing nature to take it's course. Let's say it's an uncomplicated complicated subject. You can go about it simply or you can fine tune it into an artful science. Here are some of my favourite composting methods, how they work and how they can help you achieve what you want out of composting, I say help because most types of composting require some effort on your part. |
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March 2017
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