A Few Words on Saving Seed

Our garden space is usually fully employed growing produce, so we only save seed from one or two varieties a season. The reason being that plants that are developing seed occupy the ground for a long time. We grow year round so we need the growing space and it can take more than 100 days for seeds to be ready for harvest. But we do choose at least a variety or two to let go to seed.

For this post I am just going to talk about saving seed from vegetables that produce seed pods like peas and kale. They are easier to work with than those plants that bear fleshy fruits like tomatoes.This year we are saving seed from the shell pea, Wando and Lacinato Kale. The shell peas mature pretty quickly and once they start to yellow the vines can be pulled up and hung to dry until the pods are very dry and begin to split open. The Lacinato kale takes a good bit longer to mature. It is not necessary or desirable to save the seed from all the plants of a kind that are being grown, instead choose the strongest, most prolific plants and save their seed. The reason being the strongest and most prolific plants will produce the best quality seeds.

If you plan on saving seed from a vegetable, you should only grow one variety so that your seed will come true. If you plant more than one variety of the same kind of vegetable, you will have cross-pollinated (hybrid) seed. So if you want to save seed choose an open pollinated variety of seed so that the seed will reproduce like seed. Make note of the strongest plants. You can harvest from the chosen plants for awhile, but before the quality of the produce tapers off leave the produce on the plant until it has gone to seed. Once the seed pods yellow, the plants can be pulled up and hung to dry for several weeks. Then once they are completely dry the pods can be threshed to get the seeds free of the pods, picked over, sifted and winnowed. Then they can be stored in glass jars in the freezer or in mylar with an oxygen absorber if you are storing for more than 6 months.

Lacinato Kale Flowers

Kale pods are ready to thresh

A close up of the kale seed pods

For many seeds, I just put them in the freezer, since most seeds germinate better if they have a cold "season" and then I plant them again in the next season that is proper for the plant. For example, the kale was allowed to bloom and go to seed, then mature on the plant and hung to dry when completely yellowed. Once threshed and sifted I store the seed in 4 oz. mason jars with a little silica packet to control moisture, label the jar and put the jar in the freezer for a month or two. I will harvest seed in late June/early July, freeze until mid to late August and then start the seed in flats for a fall planting. I will do the same thing with the pea seed I am saving.

Threshed seed pods are now empty seed lies underneath

Sifting out the chaff

For short term storage I store in 4 oz. glass jars with a silica packet to control moisture.
I save mine from shoe boxes and other packaging and store them in a drawer until needed.

Label with kind of seed and date harvested.

Some seeds I will store for the long term in small mylar bags and oxygen absorbers, but I have to be more selective with seeds that will be stored for more than a year since not all seeds remain viable for the same amount of time. I rotate seed that I store in mylar so that it gets used within 2 years. I do not risk the possibility of germination failure by letting it go longer than that even though it is possible to save it for longer. It would be bad to count on seed that had been store for years only to discover that the seed is no longer viable.

Wicked Weeds. Part One: Two Weeds That are Down Right Evil

Here at Heart's Ease Cottage, Still Waters and I employ the "Square Inch" gardening method. Every square inch of ground that isn't occupied by our house and outbuildings is earning its keep in some way. We have so many gardens that in order to keep track of where we are talking about in conversation we have a name for every garden space.

Since we have so many gardens, weeding and watering could be a full time job for at least one of us. So we have made life easier by establishing an automated 24 hour irrigation schedule and keep a deep mulch in all our garden beds to discourage weeds. This is a tremendous help, but even with the mulch, we still have to weed.

I could go on at length on the subject of weeds and our weeding methods, but that is a blog post for another day. Today I want to talk about two wicked weeds; weeds that are just down right evil and should be eradicated with no mercy; Couch Grass and Nutsedge.

Couch Grass- Here in the south people often have a lawn made of couch grass. Not because they wanted to, but because Couch Grass is so invasive that once established, no self respecting fescue would be seen growing with it.  Actually, it choked the life out of the fescue and took its place as King of the Lawn. Couch Grass is sneaky, devious and not to be trusted. It will creep under or or just above the ground and pop up many feet from the main plant. It sets down roots all along the trailing side shoots, making for a strong new plant that can live without the mother plant if broken off from its life source. It sneaks up under the mulch only to appear once tangled up in the roots of landscaping and bedding plants where it is difficult to remove without digging up the landscaping.

Pulling Couch grass is counter-productive, it just pops off at a node under ground and sends up new shoots from the central root system as soon as your back is turned. If it waits that long.... We cut a 6 inch deep x 6 inch wide trench around all of our landscaping beds, kind of like a moat around a castle. This we keep bare ground and then past that point on into the beds we mulch deeply. We maintain trench with a sharp machete. If we must actually remove it from a bed, which we had to do for many years until we made some headway eliminating it from our beds, we pull back the mulch, loosen the soil with a pitch fork and then work the entire root system and plant network out of the ground with our hands. This is time consuming, brain burning labor but it is effective. Once the roots have been removed to about 6 inches down, taking care to leave not even the smallest piece behind, a thick mulch and weed moat are enough to keep the Couch grass out. If any remnants remain and pop up again just fork it out carefully and move on. Never, never put weeds in your compost. Some of the roots will survive the composting process and as soon as you dress your beds with it, you will have a fresh crop to deal with in your garden. We take all weeds wa-ay back in the woods and let them die where there is no sun, or if it is a good time for burning (mid summer is definitely not a time to burn where we live...) we add them to a bon fire. There are chemical ways to eliminate Couch Grass, but the health risks to man, beast and bees is far to great to resort to them. Our method works quite well if you stick to your guns and do the hard work up front.

For eliminating couch grass in our veg beds we used to fork to loosen the soil then remove by hand careful to take the entire plant and its roots, then mulch deeply on top of the soil and 18' deep in the path ways. It has been many years since we had any in our vegetable beds. We use 3' by 25" mounded raised beds and 2 foot wide paths so there is no Couch Grass in the garden and then the perimeter of the garden either has a stone wall or is trenched to prevent grass from the yard getting in.

Couch grass creeps along both above and below the soil surface. It sets down roots, sends out shoots across the ground which connect with the soil and grow new root systems at the nodes, and it sends out runners below the soil level that can go for several feet before popping up to get some light.

Roots grow at any junction or node that comes in contact with the ground. Once it grows even a few  roots it can live without the mother plant and breaks away if the mother plant is pulled. 

Roots will grow at every node and the plant will also break away from the main plant at the same locations.

Shoots will run just below the ground.

Number two on the "Weeds Least Wanted" list is Nutsedge. Actually for me Nutsedge is a bigger problem since we have found a way to reduce our issues with Couch Grass. This weed is absolutely evil. It is almost impossible to get rid of, even if you use chemical treatment. It looks like fescue or even Monkey Grass (Lily Grass) but it is far more troublesome than either. It grows tender plump roots that detach easily when pulled. Even the smallest piece that remains in the soil will produce a new blade of grass in a few days. Until this point Nutsedge and Couch grass are on equal footing, but Nutsedge deviously goes one step further and sends down into the soil 6-8 inches deep or more, a long wire-like root that grows a tuber on the end of it. If you manage to pull the Nutsedge blade up and find all the little white roots and remove them, there is still this little tuber way down below that will send up new growth once the top growth has been removed!

We deal with Nutsedge in our veg beds and in the mulch in the veg bed pathways, but very little of it in the flower beds and other landscaping. I have my suspicions that it originally came here in some manure that we got from a local farmer many years ago before we had goats. How ever it got here it has been difficult to eliminate.  We must stay vigilant and fork it up as soon as a blade pops up.  Periodically, I will go through the top 8" of soil and find the little tubers and remove them. That sounds like a lot of work but staying ahead of the stuff is difficult if the tubers are allowed to to establish themselves in the soil.

The fleshy soft roots break away easily  and any left in the soil will grow a new blade in no time

Not only does this plant have surface roots, but it send down a root that grows a tuber 6-8 inches deep to inure its survival

This little tuber hides deep in the soil and will send up a new blade if the surface plant is destroyed.

We have used black plastic to cover areas that got out of hand, leaving it there during the hot months to bake in the sun. This works pretty well but even after baking for months, as soon as the sun hits the soil some survivors will pop up. If we can get them before they send down their deep root, we can keep it from establishing again. We fork periodically and sift through the soil looking for the tubers to and eliminate them. This takes time and but it is possible for us to do because our soil has been amended for 30 years and is very friable and easy to work through our finger. This would not work with the dense clay since you would never get the clumps apart to find the tubers. But for routine maintenance, we carefully pull the blades as soon as they come up, before they are mature enough to send down the deep root. We just make sure to keep pulling as soon as there is enough blade to grip and remove roots and all. then we check to make sure we leave no little white roots in the ground. If consistently pulled, eventually the tuber will be weakened and die.  Just be sure to firmly pull the blade from the base. Not just pull off the green blades, since it will regrow practically right before your eyes.

Having perfectly weed free gardens is every gardener's pipe dream, but the reality is that weeds happen. The best you can do is be aggressive in your elimination of the truly wicked weeds and choose your battles with the rest.

What measures do you take to control weeds? What weeds are your biggest problem?

Next time on Wicked Weeds Part Two: Bind weed and a mystery weed that I have not been able to identify. I have searched through 1,000's of photos and done hours of searches, looked at every weed identification book I can get my hands on and still can't identify it. Maybe you can help me figure out what it is... Whatever it is, it gets a place on my naughty list... The stuff gets into everything.