Did you ever buy a packet of, say, pepper seeds and then continue with your shopping to the vegetable isle and buy a pepper?
Then, for the sake of this post, did you go home and want to make a salad?
Did you scoop out all the seeds, throw in them in the garbage and continue with your salad making?
Well, did you?
I know, grocery stores don't really sell seeds and no one "makes salad" anymore, so the whole premise was silly - especially the part about throwing out 25-40 seeds in a pepper and buying "real seeds" in a store.
Well, last season I tried a little experiment with peppers that I got from the coop. The pepper was orange and organic. I dried out the seed and eventually germinated them, planted, transplanted and transplanted again and eventually got peppers from those seeds! All this is the topic of future posts, I just wanted to tell you I've done it before so its not a totally crack pot idea.
Well, check out these photos:
The process was simple: remove the seeds and take out as much plant-matter as possible. I dried these out in two ways: one I laid out on a napkin and put in the sun (inside a window), the other I put in the small ceramic bowl you see there and placed it on top of the toaster oven when it was toasting something.
Hopefully there will be a part 2 to this post, and then a part 3, then 4, 5 and however many it takes until I have grown peppers from them and do a post about saving the seeds.
Which, not to brag or anything, I've already done - it was just pre-LLTNA blog (that is a terrible acronym). But hopefully this year I will be planting first with my second-generation seeds which I harvested from a pepper grown from seeds which I harvested from a pepper which I bought from the coop. Other seeds that will be second generation this year: cucumber, cilantro/coriander, and maybe others - we'll see what survived the move.
So much for a quickie,
-Mark
this sometimes works/sometimes doesn't. certain fruits/vegetables are eaten when the plant/seeds are not mature yet (i.e. most green bell peppers mature to red/other colors when they are mature) so seeds saved from immature fruits may not be viable. Also, many vegetables are F-1 hybrids and because of the nature of heterosis/hybrid vigor is present in the first (F-1) generation, but won't be true-to-type in later generations. Anything open-pollinated won't have this problem. Spices and stuff (dill seed, celery seed, whole mustard) usually have some viable seeds.
ReplyDeleteThanks Andy - you've got a wealth of knowledge in that noggin of yours. If you want to write a post on this or any other similar topic - we'd be honored and excited. Keep us in the back of you mind in case something comes up.
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