My Father-In-Law bought marigold seeds
once, years ago. He plants them every year in our garden but he uses seeds from his own previously grown flowers. He showed me today how he gets the seeds from the flowers - it was far more simple than I had thought.
Marigold Seeds:- take an old, drying marigold blossom, and remove the outside petals.
- pull the seeds out from inside the base of the flower.
- Once you remove the seeds, leave them out to dry before putting them away for use next season.
My Father-In-Law usually plants his in June
(we're in Zone 8). He even showed us an ice cream bucket full of seeds he has stashed from last year.
He has also grown tomato plants from seeds taken from a store bought
tomato, by simply
removing them from the fruit and inserting them in the soil, without drying them or doing any other prep first. I haven't tried that yet, but I plan to!
Potatoes are one of the easiest foods to grow from your grocery cart - I've done this many times myself.
You simply select a few potatoes with eyes sprouting, cut them in pieces ensuring that each piece has at least one eye, and bury them in the soil. They can take over your garden though, so watch out ;) They also can come back year after year, if any potatoes are not harvested and left in the soil.
One day I was turning the soil in my compost pile and I found an
avocado pit that I had composted which had sprouted a new plant. I transferred it to my garden and watched it grow, only to have it die over the winter. I wonder now if I had brought it indoors, would it have survived?
What about you - what's your experience with growing new food and flowers from old?
Clip art courtesy of www.artvex.com
This is my second attempt to root a Rosemary cutting. The first time was successful, only to eventually die after it was planted in soil (not sure why - it might have been too small to survive the winter outside?).
I purposely left my peas planted this year, long after I'd finished picking them, so that the leftover peas could dry out enough to be saved for next year's planting. (This took longer than I thought it would, as interestingly enough the pods were the last part of the plants to stay green - the plants seemed to direct most of the water and nutrients they absorbed to the pods and peas).
I was turning my compost pile with a shovel one day last summer when I saw what looked like a tall weed. I pulled it out from the earth only to discover it was a sprouted avocado pit! Intrigued, I planted it in a pot where it thrived, until the cold of our BC winter killed it.
I am becoming more and more interested in obtaining my own seeds directly from the plants I've grown. My Father-In-Law has shown me how with marigolds, and when I saw these dried peas still on my aging plants (see pic), I wondered if you could with peas as well.
My Father-In-Law bought marigold seeds once, years ago. He plants them every year in our garden but he uses seeds from his own previously grown flowers. He showed me today how he gets the seeds from the flowers - it was far more simple than I had thought.
