Our rhubarb is feeling seedy. It's sending up great flagrant spires of seeds, almost as high as my shoulders. I should pick them off so the plants put their energy into making more rhubarb stalks, but the seed heads are too gorgeous to cut back.
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This is seed collecting time. Any of last year's carrots, parsnips, parsley, lettuce etc. that you left in the ground over winter will now be going to seed, often giving hundreds of seeds per plant. There may even be dried beans or peas left over from last year's crop.
Saving your own seed is cheap i.e. free. It's also a way to preserve old varieties that are no longer sold. Even more importantly, you will slowly be breeding plants that do best in your garden, instead of ones that do okay anywhere.
Seed saving links you directly to the earth, with no garden centres or commercial transactions, just you, the soil and the seeds.
Or possibly, you, your garden, and your chooks. The best way I know to get excellent tomato seedlings is to feed surplus or fruit fly-infected tomatoes to the hens. If you don't have hens then you'll need to ferment the tomato seeds with the tomato pulp for a fortnight to kill any viruses before sieving out the seeds, drying them thoroughly and storing in an old envelope for next season. But seeds that pass through into the chook droppings seem reliably virus free, as well as perfectly suited to a heavy diet of hen manure, which will mean enormous tomato bushes and a gloriously massive tomato harvest.
The easiest way to save pumpkin and melon seed, too, is to throw the rotting remnants into a not-too-hot compost in autumn, then spread it lightly over the vegie garden in spring and see what sprouts. Sadly there is no guarantee that you will get chook or compost-bred plants, but if you've fed enough ripe veg to both chooks and compost bin, there is an excellent chance that you will.
Vegie seed may be free for the taking, but the taking is more difficult in some cases than others. If you want your veg to come true to type and not produce weird shaggy monsters instead of well-behaved cabbages, you need to know what you're doing. First of all, remember that many seeds sown today are hybrids, and their offspring may be very different from their parents, resembling grandparents or even further back - a bit like humans.
Secondly, your plants might have cross-fertilised. Plants have sex lives, too. The pollen from the stamen (male bit) is transferred to the stigma (female bit) of flowers. Some plants need bees, birds, various insects or even the wind for pollination. Others, like lettuce, beans, peas and tomatoes, pollinate themselves. When this happens (and if the plant is not a first-cross hybrid) the seed will probably produce a plant that is true-to-type. But if you or your neighbours are growing several varieties of cabbage, watermelon or corn, for example, they may cross pollinate, and once again the offspring won't be like the parent.
Usually, though, for the home garden this doesn't matter - the 'kids' will still be good crops, just not quite what you were expecting. But one year all our sweet corn turned out to be inedible unless ground into flour - it had cross pollinated the year before with a crop of ornamental corn, with hard kernels in blues, reds and purples
I always let some seed self-sow, too. Choose the best carrot, lettuce et al, put a stake next to it so you can tie up the tall seed head, then leave it to supply the seed for next year. The ripe seeds will scatter on the soil below. All you need to do then is then thin out the seedlings that pop up in late spring/early summer. This system works well with carrot, silver beet, radish, beetroot, parsnip, celery, daikon or long white radish, spring onions, foliage turnip, parsley, leek, Chinese cabbage (not true-to-type), Italian parsley, red and green mignonette lettuces and cos lettuces. But it's a good idea to store some of the seed for the next year, too.
Plants with fleshy fruit, like capsicums, melons, pumpkin and eggplant, should be picked when ripe or over-ripe. Scoop the seed out, wash it to clean up pulp, then dry it. Dry seed, like beans, peas, corn, silver beet, spinach, carrots, lettuce and parsnip, should be allowed to dry on the plant. In wet weather, pull up the whole plant and hang it upside down under cover until the seed has dried out. Store all seeds in old envelopes or any paper to hand to be reused.
It sounds complicated, but once you've saved seed two or three times it'll become second nature. Because that is really what it is - something deep in us that needs to be part of the rhythms of the garden and the earth: just you, your garden, the plants and the soil.
This week I am:
- Asking visitors to lug a bucket of our recycled shower water out to the few veg I've planted this year.
- Discovering two of the perennial capsicum I planted five years ago have not just survived the cold and drought, but thrived and are beginning to bloom already.
- Watching the oldest of our native lime trees sprout hundreds of tiny pink flowers and an extraordinary abundance of green caterpillar-like fruit.
- Trying to remember when we last had an abundance of butterflies. A decade ago? Two decades? Spring used to be filled with butterflies, one hatching after another. Now we are lucky to see two or three butterflies a week. When did all the butterflies vanish? We don't use pesticides here, and we're sheltered from spray drift. Our valley should still be breeding thousands of them.
- Gazing at the bare spaces on the banks below the house and dreaming of planting orange and cherry trees there. All we need is rain....
- Muttering at the weather bureau every time they offer us 70 per cent chance of rain in a week's time, which dwindles to 5 per cent by the time we get there.