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Post by blueadzuki on Sept 28, 2018 21:42:31 GMT -5
Years ago I bought a punnet of mixed heirloom tomatoes at a gourmet supermarket. In there were two VERY white functionally transparent (I could see the veins AND the seeds through the flesh) tomatoes. One night I decided to eat them and put my usual splash of cider vinegar on them. When I took a bit I almost retched. It was like putting vinegar on GRAPES, the tomatoes were so sweet and un-tomatoey. I think I still have seed from those tomatoes somewhere in my files.
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Post by blueadzuki on Sept 20, 2018 19:14:39 GMT -5
Okay so we've established that the green cots ARE a heritable trait, not due to unripeness.
Good
I'll try and do a bigger grow-out myself next year (with my supply of Owl's eye all but exhausted and no longer replaceable, I'll have the space.). Assuming the rabbits LET me.
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Post by blueadzuki on Aug 14, 2018 21:45:45 GMT -5
For my own use on small lots of seeds, I love extracting tomato seeds with a blender. It's quick and easy. My blender tends to damage about 40% of the seeds so I can't do it for seeds that I sell, but for my own use and for gifted seeds it works well. I never had that happen. Different blender I guess. Different speed. Different blade sharpness. Might be good for people trying a blender for the first time to try on expendable seeds first.
The tape on the blades idea sounds good if your blender does eat seeds.
If the tomato is soft and squishy, you can sometimes get around the seed loss by using the "beater" blade a lot of blenders/food processors have (the plastic one you use for mixing as opposed to chopping). One thing though the beater wont dice up the skin, so you have to be careful to check it for stuck seed if you want to get all of them (or peel/scald off the skin before you start) I usually give tomatoes about a week in fermentation before trying to rinse them, as opposed to the month some people here are suggesting but then again I am usually only putting one tomato per contained. If you are doing a mass save maybe you need a month to get through that much.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jul 30, 2018 19:08:04 GMT -5
Well, if you can keep track of what color the flowers are (might be tricky I know as if I recall the flowers usually only open in daylight if it is cloudy) that would be a help (the normal is a sort of two to three tone with a yellowish outside to the petals when they are closed and a pink standard (flat petal) and purple keel (pointed petal) when they are open,
Down the road, keep an eye on pod color (based on what I did you could get green, red, white or anything) and diameter (some will look at lot thicker and "jucier" than others.
And, of course, at the end of everything break a little seed coat off a few seeds to see if the green cots passed along.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jul 19, 2018 17:22:16 GMT -5
Cowpeas for dry eating also a favourite. I grow a Nigerian one, Jan Wake, most often. I’ve tried a few over the years but our season is often too short to get any sort of decent crop. The Nigerian one is an exception, as is the Black-eyed Pea. This one might work for you as well. If they can plant it in May-June and harvest in August, it must be pretty short season. And I THINK they will ship to you. link
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Post by blueadzuki on Jul 15, 2018 21:42:34 GMT -5
The barrier would break down very quickly if the farmer growing non-GaS1 plants (at the beginning) saved their own seed (as the allele spreads into that population from yours and then starts to flow back). I agree with your conclusion. My miniature non-popcorn seed is probably proof of that (they said they basically let everything pollinate freely and then re-plant the seed.)
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Post by blueadzuki on Jul 1, 2018 21:53:26 GMT -5
Updates
I just bottled the next round, and BOY did it take a long time I don't know whether I put too much honey in or it was the weather, but the jugs sat around for MONTHS doing nothing. I finally had to open them, pour a good portion out (to make room, I had all the containers occupied so I couldn't just expand more) dilute and re yeast with a MASSIVE overdoes (half a packet a bottle which is somewhere between 3 and 6 times the recommended dose). In the case of two of them I wound up dumping the whole thing (they were getting an off taste) and starting from scratch.
But we are back on track. The unnamed one (Mexican coastal honey) is bottled, the one in the jug (Greek fir and thyme?) is freezing down (too weak) and Bushmans Holiday II (Australian Coastal honey)will be going in for its freezing as soon as the other one is out.
The now empty jugs are filled with more Algo Doce (Brazilian Rainforest) and the Bushman's jug will be getting local pine (I screwed up and though the pine made the sherry one, not the bamboo). And there is still the Mesquite and Rata ones bubbling away.
Those may be the last ones for a few months as I haven't really gotten in any other interesting honeys. I guess it's the wrong season (odd to think about honey having a season, but given it comes from flowers, I guess it does.)
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Post by blueadzuki on Jun 12, 2018 8:35:21 GMT -5
Didn't plant any of the orcs (they got lost in my seed bin) And the peas I DID plant (a handful of marmorated ones) were all chomped down by critters.
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Post by blueadzuki on May 19, 2018 7:59:35 GMT -5
Reminds me of one of the time my dad had a bad low blood sugar reaction and we had to call the paramedics (which around here, are usually also police officers) as soon as he was stable I went down stairs and stood in front of the pot of kenaf plants (which again have cannabis like leaves) and the line of sight of anyone coming in, lest confusion ensue.
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Post by blueadzuki on Apr 10, 2018 16:49:15 GMT -5
Anyone have any experience with this pea/pea like legume?
I bought a pack of seed of this from Baker Creek this year, since it was listed as a grasspea, and I was short of those and wanted more of their blue flowers. However looking at the seed they really don't look much like grasspea seed the hila are too long (they look more like overgrown vetch seed). So I went online for more info, and found more or less nothing.Plenty of recipes for soup using them next to articles on why you shouldn't eat them. The commentary on baker creek is a generalist quote on grasspeas from a book (the poster said as much) where it is clear they have never actually grown them.
So does anyone out there have actual experience.
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Post by blueadzuki on Apr 10, 2018 12:09:21 GMT -5
Actually, I don't think I have Dead Man's Finger anymore. At some time after that, someone came to me demanding cow peas, and given that 1. I only had 2 at the time 2. With may garden, even a good plant only has maybe 12 seeds before the animals eat it and 3. I wanted to keep Coals in the Candle (of the two, wouldn't you) I ended up giving all the Dead Mans Finger away.
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Post by blueadzuki on Apr 9, 2018 18:13:41 GMT -5
Basically, it means taking each seed in hand and using your thumbnail to break a piece of the seed coat off (or if you are more conformable with it, a knife blade) making a window to the cotyledons. These cow peas have pretty loose crackly seed coats so it isn't all that difficult. It IS however rather time consuming if you are doing a large amount of seed, and possibly cramping to the hand after a while (since you have your fingers together so closely).
If someone happened to have a de huller for beans that could do the job instantly. Problem is, most devices that remove the skin from a bean also split it in half so making the seed non-viable.
Oh and I should have mentioned you have to do the flicking while the seed is DRY. The green color is not as intense as a green pea, and if you soak the beans first both will get so pale it is hard to tell white from green.
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Post by blueadzuki on Apr 9, 2018 17:23:56 GMT -5
Hi all
After so though last night I have decided I am willing to stick my emotional neck out again and let some other people give me a hand with one of my plant projects, if they are willing.
The project I am thinking of is my test of some black skinned cowpeas of (probable) Vietnamese* origin that appear to have an odd trait, namely that a large number of the seeds appear to have cotyledons that are green instead of white. This is, of course, a common enough thing in English Peas and soybeans (and I know it occurs in a lot of other legumes as well, like chickpeas, lentils, Siberian peas and so on) but I was not aware it could occur in cow peas. So I feel it is of interest to do a variation of the chickpea trial** and try and plant these to see if this is in fact genetic (as opposed to shipments of slightly immature cow peas getting sold).
So here is the deal I am proposing. As of the last time I checked it will be a simple matter for me to get more of the cow peas in question; enough to share with anyone who wants them, and I am willing to do so.
Now here is the catch I mentioned. What I DON'T think I will have the energy to do is flick a bit off each seed's coat to check whether it is green or white inside (I did that for my own seed, but that took me the better part of a week, and I was just doing a handful). So If I send out seed, it will be raw and unsorted, and flicking will be up to the recipient. And the flicking is important to the project since I would request that those who are trying ONLY plant the green inside seed (or, at least, plant the green and the white in different places). If the green is like pea green, it is recessive and I don't want the results getting messed up by being covered up by dominant genes.
If it sweetens the deal there might be another benefit to doing this besides finding out about the green. If these cow peas are anything like those the first time I did this, they are diverse in more ways than seed innards color. I only got two plants to produce the first time, and both of those were white inside (but since that was a mixed planting and we are talking two seeds out of hundreds, I don't think that sample size is big enough to provide accurate results) but they produced wildly different pods. One (which I called Dead Man's Finger) was constricted, hard and reddish purple, so not of much interest. The other on the other hand became "Coals in the Candle" a thick podded, hyper juicy WAX cow pea. In other words there are probably good snap pod genetics hiding in this population, as well as some really weird stuff.
Oh and if anyone tries to cross them it appears at least some are black eyed as well as black skinned, so that would transfer.
*The current ones come in scoops out of a bin with no note as to country of origin. However as the last batch were Vietnamese and the otherwise similar Thai cow peas do not appear to have this trait I am working under the assumption that the bin is also Vietnamese.
** Someone had told me that most green chickpeas were simply brown ones that were picked young and dried in the shade. So I decided to do some growing tests to see if there were legitimately genetically green chickpeas too, by planting some green seeds and seeing if their full term progeny were also green which would prove it was genetically green. I did, they were and it does.
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Post by blueadzuki on Apr 9, 2018 17:22:06 GMT -5
It has to do with the fact that a lot of Cow peas as just too darn long season to work up here, or we're too cold for them (all cow peas like it hot, but for some of them, "hot" means bloody tropical)
But if it's a cow pea you want I have a growing out project I'm trying to accumulate growers for I'm running on my other gardening site. I'll PM you the details. If they are acceptable, you're in.
Actually why don't i just start a thread here so ANYONE who wants in has a chance.
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Post by blueadzuki on Apr 9, 2018 7:23:22 GMT -5
One might want also want to look into Purple Calabash. That is legitimately a shade one could call purple (though probably not the shade you are looking for) Compared to standard tomato purple (which is more along the lines of dark pink with a bit of green thrown in) PC is a color that could only be described as "half healed bruise". And on the fact that given that PC is possessed of a lot of other atypical tomato traits (like seed tricomes that are bizarrely short and think) and a very murky history (no one seems to know where it comes from, and it's similarity to tomatoes in paintings from the 16th century lead some to theorize it is an original native Aztec variety) means I would not be surprised if it had a bit MORE diversity from the general tomato population than most others.
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