After a week of heavy rain, the garden was about as soggy as it gets--just right for extracting tenacious parsnip roots from the earth. So between showers I put on my muck boots and tackled the row. Last year's foliage has all died back now. Little fresh green shoots are just thinking about sprouting from [...]
Tag: seed saving
Bean Genes
The mysterious black beans continued to play on my mind last week. Two things still needed more clarification. First was the question of origin of my purported Gramma Walters variety, and the second was how bean seed colors work when you do a cross. I talked with Andrew Still a bit more last weekend, and he is [...]
Mystery from the Tunnel of Beans
This story starts a few years ago when I picked up a few pretty bean seeds at a seed swap. They were colorful oval beans with maroon and white splotches and were labeled as pole "pea beans." Three years ago I planted the seeds and discovered a bean with a very vigorous habit, happily bounding the poles and [...]
Squash Seed Saving
Now is the time to be eating all those winter squash harvested in the fall. For squash seed savers, this is the opportunity for quality control and seed selection. Easy control over the selection process is one reason squash seed saving is so much fun. Squash eaters know that there can be large differences in quality from [...]
Parsnips as High as an Elephant’s Eye
The parsnip seed project looks to be a success this year. Plants left in the ground over winter are happy to turn the energy stored in their delicious roots into vigorous growth in the spring. The parsnips were one of the first things to green up in the spring, and now they have the record [...]
Spring Seed-Saving Surprises
On the last day of May, I just harvested the first seed of the season. Last fall, I planted some mache (aka corn salad or lamb's lettuce) but it was too late, so there wasn't anything for the fall, and I forgot about it over the winter. This spring, I was cleaning up that section [...]
Dessert Squash
Last week we cooked up one of the last big squashes that were still sitting on the kitchen table. This was a nice big pale green squash that looked a little like a sweet-meat / kabocha cross. It came from plants raised from seed I saved in 2005, from the original very tasty squash that [...]
