Seed Hunt report: 2014

[blueadzuki]

Hi,

Based on some comments in thresds in the other fora, I've decided that, starting now, with the dawn of the new 2014 hunting season; all reports of any interesting seeds I find will be posted in a single thread here; for ease of finding. As this marks the beginning of the period when I switch from prowling Manhattan's Chinatown and start prowling Flushing's Chinatown, it seems a good time to start.
Only real problem is that I don't really have anything to report this week find-wise, except a lot of bad luck. I couldn't find the right brand of rice beans (the one that has the multicolored adzuki's. No, actually worse than that, I found the right brand of them, but they have 'flipped" over suppliers as well just like the rest, and so will no longer contain them. I bought two bags just to double check, and my whole sum total of finds were maybe a dozen or so non-red rice beans (another thing I have notice, the percentage of non-red, non-mottle-free rice beans in most of the brands has PLUMMETED. Maybe I'm wrong and they actually ARE trying to rouge them all out.) and two or three of that bindweed family seed I haven't been able to get to full term yet, with the little white dots all over the seed coat. I haven't totally given up on finding any (Chinatown Flushing is a big place, with lots of little grocery stores, so you never know what you are going to find in an odd corner. but it looks like, once again, I'm back to "check every bag and hope you find a good one.)
The second source of the non red adzuki's (well of one kind), namely that paticualr supplier of mung beans to one of the herb shops, is likewise basically dry (not that it was ever rich). Most of the herb shops that used that supplier last year have gone over to the other one, whose mung beans are boringly pure. And the only place that DID seem to possibly have the right kind is staffed by a elderly gentleman who 1. speaks very little english (and I speak no Chinese dialect) and 2. Even if I could, will not sell to anyone who is not ethnically Chinese (I watched people who could speak Chinese try and buy thing, and he turns them away as well. There are people in Chinatown like that, you just have to suck it up).
The other places I went today were washouts as well. The Indian gorecy store did have lablabs, but none of the bags had any grasspea seeds visible in them,or any lablabs with interesting enough seedcoats to be worth playing with. I also saw a few bags of a brand of senna seed I used to get a lot of odd weed stuff from in another shop, but there's nothing those bags produce I'm actually short of at the moment.
So on to next week, and another section.

[blueadzuki]

I've thought long and hard as to whether I wanted to add this update. Originally I was planning to do only one report per week; after the weekly Wendsday trip. However it occurt to me now that if I do that, I will invariably forget some key info from the more local trips I do at other points in the week. So I'll post here whenever I've gotten back from one of these trips, assuming I have anything to really report and probably excuding trips to the bodega except when I find something out of the ordinary (repeatedy saying, "went to the bodega, poked around the bins of cancha corn, found a few more colored kernels, bought them , came home." is going to get a little boring after a while.)

This last trip took me to two markets I frequent, Bhavik (Indian) and Ninjiya (Japanese). Reports as follows

Bhavik, really very little. As of this point they have not gotten any more of the odd little mixed bean bags I was buying back in (the ones that were so rich in those odd desi type chickpeas with the skins that stick to your clothes like velcro) Doesn't actually surprise me; based on how they were kept (in a different section, buried under a box of metal ghee lamps, I tend to think what I was seeing was old stock that they had no plans to replace (the removed the box they were in as well, which is more proof.)

They were out of bags of white lablabs this time. Not that it really matters all that much; by now I have more than enough lablab seeds of interesting aspect from previos bags to give me a nice growing sample in the spring, so I'd only be buying bags if I could see they had something interesting in them, like a really old field pea or a grasspea seed. And I haven't seen any of those in many months ANYWHERE, so they may finally have rouged them out (I never forget the fact that the things I am looking for, while of interest to me, are considered weeds to whoever is packing the bags, so while I am busting my butt to find these things, they are busting their collective butts just as hard to make sure there isn't anything to find.)

The only things I did buy this trip around were a handful of valor (vegetable lablab beans) and another handful of ripish looking parval melons Tricosanthes dioca And those really didn't yield much to speak of. NONE of the lablab pods yielded seed mature enough to be savable (I got the fattest pods I could, but lablab seed matures late; you really don't have much chance of being able to dry and get the seed to grow again if it hasn't already started to turn color inside the pod. And long before then, any store owner worth his salt has long since found such pods and tossed them out (valor is sort of like snow peas, you eat them before the seeds have really developed) The parval was not much better. Despite picing out the most overripe ones I saw (somewhat sqishy, green beginning to turn yellow, only four or five had seed mature enough to even make extraction worthwhile and probably only ONE was far enough along the seed will ultimately be viable. They're drying upstairs now, though after last time, when I lost my whole supply to mold (becuse I didn't realize that the near spherical shape of parval seed means it takes a LOT longer than it at first appears for the seed to dry down to the core) I wont be bottling them up for quite a while yet (actually I may NEVER bottle them up, I'm sort of inclined to put them away in a net bag, jut to be sure they stay drying.) Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with the things. I run myself ragged trying to find overripe ones, getting my hands soaked (parvals are usually kept in a big tub of water when they are sold, I don't know why) hiding my finds under other, less ripe ones (ripe parvals are not considered good to eat anymore so the checkout people often will not let people buy them.)go through a very messy extraction process involving a LOT of paper towels (the guts of a ripe parval look like mustard colored slime and the seed is unusually slippery for a cucurbit, so I usually have to wrap the guts in paper towels, squish them then tear a little hole and pop the seeds through it one by one to clean them. And since I actually do not know if that slime is poisonous, I cant simply suck it off, like I do for the bitter melons (that red goop is not only safe to eat, it's delicios!) dry the seeds for ages with the constand fear of knocking them over and sending them rolling every which way (spherical seeds again) and toss out 90% of whatever I do extract for being not ripe enough. All to wind up with a handful of seed I probably can't grow (it's super tropical, I'm very temperate)and that no one who wants the melons would want as seed if I could (unlike nearly every other cucubit, parval is fully dioecios, so those who want them for food tend to plant them as full grown plants, so they don't wind up with an overabundance of males.)

Ninjiya was even less productive than Bhavik, though to be fair I expected it to be. There really are no usable beans I can get from them (it's too high end and modern to stock any brand that would be so slipshod as to accept anything less that 100% product purity) But it IS a decent place to get some of my more exotic produce, and that is why I go there. So it is not suprise that this trip yielded some surprises vis a vis my most commony bought, and most troublesome item, fresh yuzu fruit.

This trouble is going to need a little back story. I LOVE fresh yuzu as an ingredient in my cooking, I turn excess peel into extract (so it will keep) Problem is I also make equally heavy, if not heavier use of the juice, so I need my yuzu's to be full and juicy. Back when I started using them, this was no problem; the yuzus I could get were nicely balance, good peel, decent amount of juice. Recently however all of the markets have begun carrying a new type of yuzu (or more accurately several new types). These new ones are bigger, easier peeling.........and bone dry inside. I found a juicy one about a month back, so I know they still sort of exiist, but all my attempts to figure out how to tell before I buy are going nowhere. I've tried weighing them before purchase, but even that doesn't always work, a yuzu with a lot of seeds (and some of the strains are seed stuffed). will feel pretty heavy as well. This is also why I'm not simply buying a yuzu tree for inside the house (they produce indoors, and in any case are probably cold hardy enough I could plant them outdoors if I covered them in the winter) I had just about given up when I went in this time, and to my suprise found still another strain being sold, a smooth skinned type so tiny that, if it wasn't for the color (yellow) and shape (sort of flattened, like a mandarin, which in fact the Yuzu half is, genetically)I'd have though they were selling caldomin fruits one by one. Unfortunately I couldnt get many of these, as nearly every fruit was moldy and rotten. And it's hard to say if this version is a solution either. The insides are nice and full, but are so small the actual juice content per fruit is minimal (and a $5 a fruit I can't really afford to up my purchases even if I could. I got one pit, which promptly went into a pot (yes, I know most citrus don't come true from seed (and yuzu's have some quirks of gene that make them lousy seedling trees from the get go)but until science reaches the point where a Joe Shmoe like me has acess to tech that would allow a person to clone a tree from a scrap of fruit peel cheapy, planting the pits is the best I can do.)And that's where things stand now, the pit in the pot, the peel in the fridge waiting for tomorrow when I have the house to myself and can get out the processor and the bottle of Devil's Spring, what juice there was in the freezer. Not too bad, I suppose (though I am kicking myself for not asking them if they were going to throw out the spoiled ones, and if so, if I could pop them open and see if they had any pits.)

Next report day after tomorrow

[copse]

This is interesting, but can you add some empty lines in there between paragraphs? Without them, it's a wall of text and kind of hard to read. Thanks!

[blueadzuki]

Corrected, though a few paragraphs are still a bit on the long side. Blame it on my upbringing (I'm the son of two lawyers, terseness is never a skill I got all that good at).

Incidentally, while on my errands today (mostly getting a haircut and returning a computer cable) I popped into an Italian deli to see if they had anything interesting of a beverage nature (they didn't). For a moment I actually thought I'd have a new postive seed report to come back with, as one of the shelves had a large piles of bags of beans with the Bartolini label, and Bartolini was the brand name of the bags of Ciciuna (Edible grasspea, and yes I am spelling the Italian from memory so I am probably spelling it wrong)and thiers still has a decent amount of older DNA in it, so it is possible to find seeds that can produce plants that can make a decent show visually (Between the taste, the yields I get and the possible risk of lathryism should I ever make it a staple crop means I tend to think of grasspea as an ornamental first and a food source second.) But it was a no-go, for all the bags they had, ciciuna were not among them. Just as well I suppose, the amount of damaged seed I end up tossing out whenever I DO buy a bag always gets me so mad (the seeds are a bit bigger than what should really go in a bag of that size, so they really get mangled in packing; I doubt more than 1 in 10 makes it through with intact cots, less than 1 in 50 with an unbroken seedcoat.)

[steev]

I'll try to remember yuzu when I'm at my produce market; it's in North Berkeley and serves a very upscale and international market; they get very uncommon stuff on occasion.

[blueadzuki]

That's kind of you, but I rather doubt you'll have any better luck finding good ones than I do. My problem isn't that I can't find them; it's that the ones I can find suck. BTW opened another one this evening, another bust (all seeds).

[blueadzuki]

WENDSDAY, January 15

Okay I'm back from my second week and this time I have a little better seed news to report

1. My first find was the semi expected one. I went to a certain little convenience store where I had bought some bags of black cowpeas last time I was in that area, to see if 1. they had anymore and 2. there were still any bags with rice beans as contaminants (the contaminant beans are normal red, and so would not normally meet my criteria for being saved. Bit I make an allowance for them beacuse the cowpea bags are Thai, not Chinese, so they are worth testing to see if rice beans from other areas of Asia are better for my region than the standard Chinese. There were 2 bags that were so I bought them got them home and pulled out the rice beans (maybe some week when I have gone over everything, and have a little more disposable money [I also test any new resturants that have opened in the area since the last time, and there were 3 this time around (possibly 4, I need to compare a menu to one in my files)I go back and buy the rest of them, in case there is anything else of interest hiding unseen (one of the bags last time had one seed of ANOTHER cowpea that looked interesting, a small one with a black and white speckled skin.)

This brings me to the Cowpeas themselves, which while Thai, I suspect to be similar, if not identical, to the “Che Dau Trang” black cowpeas currently in the Baker Creek Explorer Series seed section (This is not by any means meant to be a disparaging of Joseph Simcox's work (I deeply respect what he does and am intensely grateful he does it) but I suspect a lot of the Explorer series is only "rare" or "unusual" if you mostly get your seeds from seed catalogs, or live somewhere where you don't have acess to large ethnic communities. If you live somewhere where they are plentiful (like the NYC metro area) and have the eye to see seed sold as food as gentic stock, a lot of this stuff is pretty easy to find in bulk. This is also why I haven't ordered the “Beh Pien” lablabs yet even though they sound interesting; I'm just not sure they are different from the "giant" lablabs I find in Chiatown already (the picture sure looks the same)I haven't really done the full sort yet to pick out the few cowpeas I'll want to keep (mostly those with red mottling on the skin that isn't damamge related) but I'll have plenty of leftovers so if anyone wants any, just PM me


2. Later while wandering around the other side of town I picked up 6 bags of rice beans that looked like they had usable stuff in them. These bags were of 3 brands, Green Day (4bags), Golden Lion (1 bag, and the commonest brand one sees) and Mejili (1 bag).

The bags of Green Day yielded some off color rice beans, most notably a smattering of mottled creams tans (what I had seen through the package that made me buy those bags) Oddly there was also a decent quantity of little brownish mung beans, which I normally associate with the "good" stuff. This isn't really worth active pursuit (there are a few weeds and other seeds that can be found in either type, this could just be one of them. But it IS notable

The Golden Lion bag also yieled a few suprises. I bought that bag because I thought I saw a tan adzuki in it. I did (in fact there were two) but both were the kind of tan that you sometimes get when a red is short of pigment. I may go through those again later however, while all red, there were a suprising number of adzuki's mixed into the rice beans, and I AM planning to use reds as "sacrafice seedlings" in the spring (I'm going to plant flats of red seeded adzuki's I have pulled when I THINK the weather is warm enough. If they die from the cold, I start another flat, When a flat survives 3 weeks outdoors, I'll know it's right for them and set the non-reds (that I actually care about) up.

This brings me to the Meliji bag, which was the big surpised. Again, I bought the bag beacuse I though I saw a Tan adzuki. Well first the tan rolled out.....and then a green, and a black and a tan mottle. Yep, I FINALLY found a bag of the "good stuff"!!!!!! This doesn't neccecarily mean that the rest of the Meiliji bags (there are several stores carrying that brand) are going to be "good ones", I've already established that the brands tend to swap around thier sources so can't be counted on to be one or the other year to year (actually, I seems like once a brand does switch back, I don't see it switch again). And I have been checking, and don't recall seeing any others with anything. Though these bags are MUCH less rich than the ones last year (5-6 more seeds is nice, but the bags last year would have had 20-30, and probably a wild soybean seed to boot.) It DOES mean I should probably go back next week and see if there are any other Meliji bags AT THAT SPECIFIC STORE since those were probably from the same shipment (it was obviosly a leftover on the shelf, so I honestly don't know if there were more).

3. Finally near the end of my trip I found and bought seed I have NEVER seen before, some BLACK pigeon peas from the Phillipines (all the one's I have seen to date have been silver, brown or a combination therof. Not a lot else in the bags (one had a rice grain and another had something unidentifialble that looks a little like a microscopic olive pit.) But the cowpeas are a great find. Again I haven't done my final sorting (I want to pick out some ones that are an alternate color, almost black with white dots) But I will have plenty of black peas to spare, so again, if anyone wants any PM me

Next update next week (at the latest)

[nicollas]

Jan 13, 2014 14:09:52 GMT -5 copse said:

This is interesting, but can you add some empty lines in there between paragraphs? Without them, it's a wall of text and kind of hard to read. Thanks!

Sorry for the off topic, but for these kinds of texts difficult to read i use a really cool Firefox extension :
addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/column-reader/?src=userprofile

[blueadzuki]

WENDSDAY, JAN 22

Not all that much to report this week. I had to go back to the same area for food as last week (missed a few spots)so I picked up two more bags of the black cowpeas, that yielded a few more Thai rice beans (also one seed of a smaller, red skinned cowpea I will plant seperately

The rice bean situation is even worse. The store I got the good bag at last week had no more of that brand (I thought the one I bought last week was the only one they had, but went back just to be sure.) So I took a little detour to the mall by the subway (which I tend to leave to near the end, since it is so close to where I get on and off which makes adding it a sort of impulse trip. to see if the market in there had the brand. They did,lots of it, and I bought eight bags. However when I went through them, it is clear that they got thier shipment at a different time, and that thier bags are most likey of the other type. In fact I am SURE they are, since the weed profile I got, besides three bindweed seeds (two spotted, one regular) included a seed of Sunn Hemp (Crotalaria juncea) and spurred butterfly pea, both of which are only found in the other sort. So no more adzukis this week. I'm not totally out of the running (there are at least three other markets to check) but it may be just as slim pickings as I thought.

[steev]

Dude! You're blurring the line between farming versus hunting/gathering.

[blueadzuki]

As far as I am concerned that line DOES NOT EXIST in cases like that. After all presumably, the original cultivator of any plant was a hunter; he had to find his start seed out in the wild. And EVERY improvment of that seed was utimately a hunt, soneone seeking out (or at least, noticing) something they thought might be better.

Though personally I've always thought of what I do as more of a cross between prospecting and detective work. Prospecting, in that I find some likely material, take a sample, pan it (literally, I tend to sort in one of those plastic takeout containers, and the motions I use are basically IDENTICAL to panning for gold)see what comes up, and if I like what I see, go back to my "claim" and keep digging.
Detective work, in that I use the traces in those bags (the weed profile) to work up an image of what was going on in the field at the time the crop was harvested, and therefore, what else I can expect to find. Like I said above, the presence of Sunn Hemp and Spurred Butterfly pea tells me the most recent batch is not from the area I'm looking for, and so I should not go back to that store if I am looking for what I am looking for. Or back in college, when I worked out that, in spite of the labels on the bag, the presence of Horse Tamarind seed in the lentils I was working with meant they COULDN'T be being grown in Canada, Canada doesn't have a long enough season for horse tamarind to make it to seed producing age.Now I just have to get a firm theory as to why horse tamarind shows up at all (it's in the rice beans too, sometimes) since one would assume the growers would notice TREES popping up in thier vine fields (my best guess is that some of the growers plant the trees around on purpose, to provide, shade, fodder (animals can eat the leaves and young pods) and cheap firewood (horse tamarind grows very fast).

[blueadzuki]

FRIDAY 1/24/14

I had to run an errand that took me to my local branch of H-Mart (Korean). So I picked up two bags of senna seed from thier herb aisle, just to keep myself busy.

Finds are pretty normal for the stuff. The Korean version isn't all that different from most of the Chinese packages I usually do. There are a few things in them that aren't in the other (like something I think is from somewhere in the Zygophyllacae and the ratios are a bit different (there is a lot more Sesbania augustifoliain the Korean material and a lot less of the stuff I think is some sort of Tephrosia but on the whole not that different.

Besides the above, there was mostly the usual assortment; a little horse tamarind (Leucaena leucocephala), some assorted bindweeds, a few errant wheat grains (white wheat, unusually, most of the extraneous wheat I see is usually red wheat,) a seed of muskmint (Hyptis suaveolens)another Sunn Hemp seed (Crotalaria juncea),

The only real suprised was a seed of what I think is puffpod licorice (Glycyrrhiza inflata) which I normally only see in rice beans, and not all that often even there.


And of course, there were one or two things for the "X vial" (the place where I keep all of the seeds I can't even identify down to the genus)to sit and wait for the spring and the growout pot.

[blueadzuki]

WENDSDAY, Jan.29

Good news and bad news today.

The good news is that, by running around like a beaver trying to build a dam in a waterfall, I was able to secure three more bags of "good" adzuki beans (and 10 of "bad" ones that had other things I wanted to play around with.

The bad news is that, in all likelyhood, those will be the last three "good" bags I see, at least for this season. I have now literally been EVERYWHERE (or, at least everywhere I know) in Flusing that sells rice beans, and checked over pretty much every bag. In fact the only market I haven't been to is the malaysian one down one of the blocks (that's on next weeks interary) and they don't sell rice beans. Well not in the manner I am looking for (the odd one does sometimes show up in there bags of cowpeas, but that would be like the ones I've been saving from the other cowpeas, seed to be tested for it's usability because it isn't from China. I may revisit the place I got the three good bags from down the road, just in case I missed one or two, but I'm fairly sure I didn't by now I'm pretty good at reading the signs of what type it is, and when I err, it's usually mistaking a bad bag for a good one, not vice-versa (for example I thought I actually had four good bags this time, but the green adzuki I saw in the fourth turned out to be a mung bean)And it's manifestly clear from the other bags I bought today that the bin where I got the good ones isn't "pure" good; there are bags of both types in there. Theoretically, I might also cull a bean or two from the mung bin at that stand I mentioned in the fist post in this thread (if I can convince the guy there to actually let me buy.) But in all likelyhood, what I have is all I'm going to have to work with come spring.
And actually there may be even less of it than appears on the surface. Over the last few weeks, I've been sorting through the red adzukis I pulled out of the first good bag and testing them for percent good seed (the red are less important, so I can afford to sacrafice some to check things like that). The results are not good. When I first looked at the reds it looked like about 20% were spoiled and non viable. However once I started actually breaking a few open and looking at thier insides, the number proved to be MUCH higher, near 80% And if you remove the "normal" looking ones (a good proportion of which actually came from other sources, and got mixed in when I put the original sample away, the results got to nearly ALL being spoiled. This sort of bears out my theory that the adzukis may be being used as green manure to grow the rice beans (no I can't think of a reason why someone would use a legume to make green manure for another legume, I'm just going on observations). A lot of the spoiled ones have the kind of damage one would expect from seed under those condtions, like squishing (of the kind you'd get if a combine ran over undried seed, and crackly coats and yellow/brown insides (the kind you get if you didn't bother to dry the seeds right, and they rotted/fermented before they dried down. But it does call into question how much of the off color is in good condition. Most of them look healthy, but so did a lot of the spoiled stuff. I'm glad now I'm planning to start them indoors; I'd rather waste a few extra peat pellets than plan outdoor space for each and every seed and then wind up with 4/5 of them never actually germinating and leaving huge gaps.)
Non rice and non adzuki finds were pretty sparse again (they're cleaning machinery must be getting a lot better) The "bad" stuff yielded one bindweed seed, two small black cowpeas, one mung bean and one seed of Cajanus scaraboides. The "good" stuff had a few white soybeans (a lot of which are however withered "tombstones" that probably won't grow. one small mung bean of the mottled type I save and one speckled seed that is either some sort of cowpea, some sort of wild soybean or something else leguminous (probably the first).

[12540dumont]

Blue, I live near the citrus grower and though it's been a terrible year for citrus, I had already ordered a Yuzu! I love Ponzu sauce.

Ponzu sauce:



Roughly 3 parts each of good dark soy sauce (none of that kikkoman crap) and citrus juice (yuzu would be the ideal, Meyer lemon a good backup), to 1 part mirin/rice vinegar. Let sit overnight with kombu (2” piece for each cup of the liquid). If you want to add dashi, do that the next day and let it sit for just a few minutes. Strain. Enjoy.


Well, if I get good fruit, I'll mail you some. It could be awhile. I have found that during drought periods the citrus is very dry inside. When it gets really cold, they put on extra skin. So it may be a weather thing.

Good Hunting!

[blueadzuki]

I look forward to hearing your results. One thing, you may need to have some little clippers on hand. Yuzu trees, like a lot of citrus, can develop pretty nasty thorns if you let them.

While I do not doubt your guess with regards to the weather affecting juice qunatity, I still maintain that there are multiple strains out there as well, with varing internal natures. Some strains are juicer than others, just as some are seedier than others.
Speaking of seeds, I never mentioned that the VERY last Yuzu I opened from the mixed batch (the green one) had it's own suprise. When I popped it open before tossing it (i had hoped it would yellow up, but instead the thing basically mummified, I saw something I hadn't in quite a while, this one had the old style yuzu seeds, which most of the more crossed ones don't. (in some yuzus the pits form without a seed coat, so they look pre peeled) The taste of what juice was left wasn't of interest (it was very bitter)so I didn't bother to plant any of them. And actually it might not have made any difference if I had, there might have been sometihng wrong with them, went I went to toss them a week or two later, I found they had puffed up like baloons before drying down (when I squoze one they actually popped so loudly that it scared Cassia (my cat). So I think they must have fermented which I think citrus seeds shouldn't be able to do (at least not to that level.)
Oh and I have one more interesting piece of citrus news. A week ago I finally realized that, as I now have TWO lemon trees growing in my house (the weird one, and a varigated) I could finally find out myself if what the weird one does ( produce citrus PEEL compounds in it's leaves so the leaves smell like lemons) is normal for a lemon. turns out it isn't; the other lemon trees foliage just smells of petitgrain, like any other citrus tree's leaves should. Now I guess I'm going to have to be REALLY careful keeping that wierdo alive!