Saturday, November 20, 2010

New Harvest - and Saving Seeds

Finally - the 2010 Harvest is in and I have a whole bunch of new things to post for sale.  This year, I grew 12 varieties of tomatoes, some of them very interesting. The new ones include: Paul Robeson, Hillbilly, Japanese Black Trifle, Rutgers Space. I kept some of my favorite tomatoes:  white currant, chocolate cherry, and Black, and Orange Oxheart.  

Here's a photo montage illustrating how to harvest arugula seeds. 

 Here is a picture of the arugula in flower - it's fallen over.  After the flowers, there will be seed pods that ripen and swell, as shown below. Once the seedpods are at this stage, it is time to cut the stalks and bring them inside to dry. 

















 After the stems have dried, they look like this: 

Here is a close up of one pod, you can see the seeds - to harvest the seeds, I roll the pods to split them open, and the seeds come out. 

 Here they are!  You can see that it takes a lot of seed pods to make up packets of seeds!