Seed Screens/Making Sun-dried Tomatoes

It's seedy season. I'm in the midst of harvesting Lettuce seed, and something I've been lacking for a very long time is a good set of sieves for separating out leafy trash from the seed. Not just for Lettuce seed, but everything else, too.

Tomatoes drying on the roof. Fine seed-screen aft.

There are manufacturers of seed-cleaning machinery who would be happy to sell me a set of seed-screens, but they're very expensive. I've made do with something much simpler.

I made up a couple of wooden frames and scrounged around for various sizes of plastic mesh. Lettuce is a particular challenging when it comes to Right Sizing a screen. 1mm mesh is just a tad too small, but I've been unable to find anything with a (say) 1½ or 2mm gap.

Cleaning Carrot seed has proved to be  too hard on the plastic mesh, and tore gaping holes in the mesh, so I swapped it for a metal Mosquito mesh - also about a 1mm gap. But even that can't take the pace when it comes to Carrots. I clean the Carrot seed heads by rubbing them (gently!) around on the mesh, and the seed falls through, mostly leaving the burs and stalks behind. I quick threshing in the breeze gets rid of the dust, and Carrot seed is done.

I find it funny that people who have never saved their own Carrot seed don't realise that the seeds are prickly. They've only ever experienced machine-cleaned Carrot seed which has had the burs rubbed of in the process. I was there, too, once upon a time. In fact when I tried to send some seed to a friend in Australia some years ago, they never arrived. Instead he received a short note from the Aussie customs to say that the seed was "contaminated with unknown weed seed" and had been burned. I guess we can't really expect customs officials to be seed-recognition experts, too.

Like everything else in a self-sufficient permaculture setup, we aim for "every design element to support multiple functions," and so it is, too, with the seed-screens! We're presently using a couple of the screens to sun-dry our surplus Tomatoes on the roof during hot days. A wide mesh supports the Tomatoes, keeping them off the roof, and the fine mesh forms a lid to keep bugs off while the Tomatoes dry. It takes about 2 or 2½ good, hot days around this time of year to get the Tomatoes good and leathery, though we're experimenting with slightly thicker slices, so this batch might take a little longer.

Help Wanted: Mystery Eggplant

Call them Aubergine. Call them Brinjal. Call them Eggfruit. Call them anything you like, but I love Eggplant. Especially when they're from my own garden! Organically grown, they just taste hugely better than shop-bought.

This year I have 3 varieties growing. Or maybe more... (and that's where I need your help!)

I planted Black Beauty (common locally), Japanese White (which I've grown before and loved) and (new to me) Korean Long Black. The Korean Black has been a start performer. By far the earliest, and really trouble-free. We had the first pickings for supper the other night, and the flavour is beyond my abilities to describe. I don't believe I've ever tasted another Eggplant that can compare!

Trouble is, there's a Fly In The Soup. A couple of the "Korean Black" plants are clearly not. Korean Black, that is. Even quite early in their growth it was apparent that they were not true to type, lacking the darkness of stem and leaf that the rest of their bed-fellows show.

So here presented, for your delectation and my edification, some rogue Eggplants. The seed all came from the same packet as the Korean Black, so I guess there was a mixup by whoever packed the seed for Baker Creek Seeds (the supplier I bought them off). Not a problem for me - I'm equally happy to have some new varieties, even if I don't know just what they are. They may or may not be the same variety, these two rogues. Your guess as good as mine.

There is, of course, a chance that they may have cross-pollinated with the surrounding Korean Blacks, but hey... life's full of random! So I'll be saving their seed separately towards the end of the season (all gods willing!)

Can't wait to taste them!

But if any of you, Dear Readers, are able to put a name to them, please, please drop me a line and let them know.

It's a funny thing... many gardeners are pretty casual about the names of varieties and will casually call a variety something new. Me, I like to honour the gardener who first bred the variety by trying - as best I can - to keep the name given it by that gardener, though they may be a thousand years passed-on!

Plant Breeding Ideas

Plant breeding projects I'm interested in tackling...

Carrots:

I am interested in a wider, more interesting range of Carrots. More colours, more flavours. I am particularly interested in one or more varieties that are specifically grown for juicing. They would need to be juicy and somewhat sweet; colour would not matter very much, but a touch of anthocyanin would be a good thing for its nutritional advantages. On the other hand, people might be put off by a "Carrot Juice" that is not orange... (People are funny that way.)

Cabbages:

I'd love to see a purple-leaved Savoy or conical Cabbage. Its flavour should be sweeter than most Cabbages, somewhat along the lines of Red Russian Kale, and I'd like it to have a tender, succulent texture. More of a salad Cabbage than a cooking variety. Size should preferably be a bit small so that we don't have to keep chunks of partly-consumed Cabbage hanging about in the back of the fridge because they're way too large to use all at once. This variety would definitely be a "use fresh" type. Heat tolerance while growing would be a big advantage, because Summer is when we would want these, though I guess it might be good in Winter soups, too.

Parsnips:

Just interested in working with them, since there don't seem to be too many varieties available (at least locally.) Only "Hollow Crown", in fact.

Chiles:

I'd like to once again taste the Jalapeno x Habanero type I accidentally got a few years ago. Had the size and general shape of a Jalapeno, with the dimples characteristic of Habanero, and a flavour that was a fantastic blend of the two. If all goes well with our weather and water I'll be trying that cross this year.

Then, too, I'd love to see whether C. Baccatum "Amarillo" (Aji Amarillo) will cross with anything else. It's a pretty wide cross, so likely nothing will come of it. Crossing C anuum, chinense and frutescens at least stand a chance; according to my books they share a common ancestral gene complex that allows some of the crosses to work. I'll probably be shooting for crosses between (at least) Purple Jalapeno, Jalapeno, Sweet Banana and Amarillo.

Another accidental cross some years back resulted in a Chile I called Hot Banana: Sweet Banana with something warmer crossed into it, probably Serrano, but maybe Jalapeno. I'd like to try and stabilise something like that. The heat was not very great, perhaps about 4/10, but the Sweet Banana flavour really worked very nicely with a touch of heat.

I'd really like some thin-skinned drying varieties, but with better and more interesting flavours than the commonly-available Long Thin Cayenne. Then, too, ALL varieties could do with better UV-tolerance and drought-resistance than I have seen to date. Another interesting direction could be for better Wintering: most varieties that I have were sourced from the US, frequently from higher latitudes, and they have mostly had their cold-tolerance destroyed or diminished - mostly, I suspect, through it being unattainable under any circumstances in those climates - and I'd like to get it back in. There's no reason for Chiles to be anything but perennial here, since we have no Winter frost at all.

Potatoes:

I'd like to see more varieties, and more specialised varieties than the generic "potato" varieties available locally - fryers, boilers, mashing potatoes, salad types,... Greater disease resistance is always of interest, particularly in our climate and soil. Would also be interesting whether one could breed a good-tasting and nutritious Porcupine-resistant variety. :-O

Mostly this means growing from true seed, and few of the commercially available varieties set seed. Challenging...

Beets & Chard:

Interested in where they can go - wild crosses. I'd like to get back to some Sugar Beets, Fodder Beets, Fodder Chard, as well as new, interesting eating varieties. Chard in more colours. Chard grown primarily for its stem, which would need to be flavoursome and stringless. Worthwhile, since Chard lasts so well in the ground, and just keeps on coming while we harvest leaves. Nicely< trouble-free under my growing conditions, too.

Grains:

Maybe not so much a breeding project as maintaining some of the older
varieties. Modern agribusiness grains are very monopurpose - grain only - and terribly vulnerable in the face of anything but the Full Monty of fertilisers, supplements, and drug cocktails. Not at all suited to permaculture, organic or self-sufficiency setups. Older varieties tended to be more multi-purpose; straw was used for animal bedding, mulch, roofing material, chaff for mulch and composting, sometimes feedstock, fuel. Not to mention that there's a genetic heterogeneity there that's worth preserving, propagating and playing around with in its own right.

That's probably enough to be getting on with for a while... Anybody who can help source genetic material that might be interesting for these, please get in touch with me!

Yellow Crookneck Planting

Planted out a couple of metres of bed (S2 bed) of Yellow Crookneck Squash. Very old seed (DA03) so I've sowed very thickly -- stations about 20xcm apart each way, 2 seeds per station. I'll thin if necessary, but it probably won't be.

The aim is simply to get a few -- 4 or 6 if I'm lucky -- plants from which to keep seed, so I'll be hand-pollinating. I'll also have to tray various measures to keep the dread Pumkpin Flies away -- caging at least, maybe spatter an aromatic (Peppermint?) oil on the leaves as a distractant, maybe try CanadaMike's suggestion of using diatomaceous earth.

Yellow Crookneck Planting

Planted out a couple of metres of bed (S2 bed) of Yellow Crookneck Squash. Very old seed (DA03) so I've sowed very thickly -- stations about 20xcm apart each way, 2 seeds per station. I'll thin if necessary, but it probably won't be.

The aim is simply to get a few -- 4 or 6 if I'm lucky -- plants from which to keep seed, so I'll be hand-pollinating. I'll also have to tray various measures to keep the dread Pumkpin Flies away -- caging at least, maybe spatter an aromatic (Peppermint?) oil on the leaves as a distractant, maybe try CanadaMike's suggestion of using diatomaceous earth.

Space: The Final Frontier

Serendipity Happens: A 48-hour power outage last week set me thinking about food preservation. Without the freezer. Today my feed-reader plunksSharon Astyk's post on Low Energy Food Preservation onto my plate.  Her blog is always interesting, packed with detailed information and deep insight.  Honestly, I don't know how Sharon finds the time for such prolific posting! 

We mostly rely on the freezer for preserving our produce, but then, as last week, you begin to wonder whether an entire Summer's harvest is going to survive and ever-lengthening power failure...  Forgetting the old permaculture principle, were we: Critical functions must be supported by more than one element.  Honestly, it's just too easy to fall into a comfort-zone and stay there.

So we're starting to look at and learn about other ways to preserve food.  The catch, of course, with all this preserving of produce, is that you need somewhere to store it all.  One of the most serious gaps in our original planning was in not providing for sufficient storage space.  Despite having added two small sheds and a garden "cupboard" to our storage, despite using chunks of the 3-car carport for storing bulk chookfood, rotovator, mower, various toolchestsfull of crap, we're still perpetually short of storage space.

Not only do you need somewhere cool and out of direct sunlight to store preserved produce, you also need to store all the empty jars and bottles (and their lids!) until you're ready to fill them up.  And you need lots of them!  Then you need somewhere cool, dark and dry to store self-saved seed; somewhere where labels and containers won't get mixed up.  It's pretty easy for conventional farmers who typically buy-in their seed, and only need to store a few varieties for a short period of time; quite another for a self-sufficient holding, where you regularly keep dozens of plant varieties.

Then there's somewhere to stash tools.  And it's not good enough to just say "tools": There are general small tools -- hammers, pliers, vice grips, screwdrivers, measuring tapes and set squares -- specialised and power tools, plumbing-specific tools, gardening tools large and small, powered and handraulic.  Some are pretty specialised to a self-sufficient setup: I am planning to make an oil-press and a solar-dehydrator, aiming to acquire a flour mill; they'll all need places to live.  Some of these more specialised tools get used only once or twice a year -- the ridging hoe is only needed a few times in Spring.

But they all need safe, dry storage space.  Turns out that the one wendy-house outside the kitchen door is not as dry as we expected it to be.  Result: a lot of hand tools furred in a fine rust needing cleaning.  Trying to be self-sufficient demands a lot more storage area than I expected.

I'm thinking of enclosing a piece of the carport...

Rub, rub, the Seedsman's Dub

Apart from being inundated by Tomatoes, and generally being in the thick of harvesting, we're also collecting Lettuce seed -- and trying in vain to separate no less than twelve different varieties!  In our last seed order from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, we got, as a nice freebie, a packet of mixed Lettuce seed labelled "Rocky Top Mix".  Definitely a worthwhile Lettuce mix to buy!

However... for saving seed its a bit of a nightmare having them all mixed-up!  I figure that, with care, I should be able to isolate at least six of the varieties.  Then I can grow up saleable quantities of each variety in isolation.  Fortunately I still have a bit more of the seed (and will, in all likelihood, order another couple of packets) so I should, in the long run, be able to keep them all.


So, having spent the morning cleaning out the chicken house (and making some minor modifications to their sleeping arrangements, which will doubtless mess with their tiny little Chicken Minds come bedtime tonight) I spent the afternoon cleaning Lettuce seed.  Rub, rub, rub, rub, rub.
Hardly a breath of wind, though, so winnowing will have to wait...

The authoritative classic on seed saving, cleaning and storing is Suzanne Ashworth's wonderful book "Seed to Seed".