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Post by diane on Mar 31, 2020 11:13:56 GMT -5
Dried beans will give you protein.
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Post by diane on Mar 31, 2020 11:12:04 GMT -5
I do soak my difficult or old seeds in cold tea. It works well, but I haven't done a comparison with plain water.
I've been using tea leaves, but I have some teabags, and the leaves inside have been finely chopped - or are the sweepings from the floor, which we used to say. So a used teabag could be slit and used like a wee growbag. I'll try that.
The French chart is easy to understand. It is funny to see that a lot of the long-lived seeds are from red vegetables - beet, eggplant, pepper, radish, tomato, watermelon.
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Post by diane on Mar 31, 2020 0:25:05 GMT -5
I have seen several lists of seed longevity. They vary, depending upon the % germination the author thinks is best, though the vegetables maintain their same relative positions.
I have not yet seen the ultimate list - the one that lets me know that I can get 2% of my 20 year old seeds to germinate so I can grow a few plants and harvest some fresh seeds.
Does anyone know of such a list?
Diane
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Post by diane on Mar 29, 2020 10:45:36 GMT -5
What a good idea to develop all those sample beds. You could run tours, though maybe YouTube is the easier way now.
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Post by diane on Mar 28, 2020 10:32:51 GMT -5
My four plants are almost as tall as I am, and now have flower buds which I'm eating. Three plants taste good, but the fourth is horribly bitter so I removed it from my fenced vegetable area and put it out for the deer to eat. They must have different taste sensors than me, because it proved popular with them.
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Post by diane on Mar 17, 2020 13:55:05 GMT -5
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Post by diane on Feb 16, 2020 0:56:59 GMT -5
The four-angled beans (what they are called in Malaysia) are called winged beans here. I bought them from both Baker Creek and Richters, and they are the day-neutral Japanese ones. They were growing in my greenhouse but died back in the fall before flowering. I can't remember when I sowed them, but wll try again this year.
What do you mean "the seeds are developing under the ground"? Are they rhizomatous?
I have two packets of Bambara beans, Burkina and Butterfly, both from Richters. I will grow them in the greenhouse also.
I have a long season here, but it seldom gets hot (maybe a couple of days per summer of 28 to 30 C. (80 to 85 F). My greenhouse doesn't get hot - I keep it well-ventilated - with the second-storey doors and skylights open. And evenings cool off quickly - we don't sit around outside at night.
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Post by diane on Feb 14, 2020 11:58:30 GMT -5
In 2018 a bean collector on Vancouver Island gave me three kinds: CO49956, CO49957 and an unnamed daylength neutral one.
Two kinds rotted and didn't germinate. CO49956 did germinate, but I don't think I got any beans from it.
Next thing I tried unsuccessfully - four-angled beans.
Now I have seeds of bambara beans to try this year.
It's fun to try different things, but I'm glad that scarlet runners and various common beans grow well enough to provide sustenance.
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Post by diane on Jan 20, 2020 15:03:29 GMT -5
I have never seen Sandwich Slice seeds for sale, and Carol did not mention it in her next two books.
In her third book, The Tao of Vegetable Gardening, she again was trying to develop a bigger Sugar Loaf, which was her aim when she grew Sandwich Slice. Instead, she developed Candystick.
She wrote: a cross between a delicata and a big pumpkin with poor eating quality would involve dozens, perhaps even hundreds of genes affecting fruit size and quality, with nearly all the genes for poor quality being dominant. I would likely have to grow hundreds or even thousands of plants for generations in order to recover a plant with good delicata flavor and quality. I wasn't up for it."
In the spring of 2000 Carol was planning to sow the selfed seeds of Sandwich Slice, but that is the last heard. I guess it didn't work out.
Gold Rush was a 1980 AAS Vegetable Winner
This is what was written at the time it won: Gold Rush hybrid squash is a bright waxy golden-yellow squash with the shape and taste of zucchini.
There are no details about its parentage, though.
I guess I'll buy seeds of all the yellow zucchini I can find, and see how they taste, then cross some with Costata Romanesco.
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Post by diane on Jan 19, 2020 16:41:08 GMT -5
Carol Deppe wrote about creating several squash, but only a couple made it into commerce - Sweet Meat - Oregon Homestead, and Candystick Dessert Delicata.
Two others are not available, but I think some of us could attempt to re-create them.
Sandwich Slice rated an entire chapter of her first book, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. She developed it in 1998, trying to develop a large version of Sugar Loaf. Her description of her planning is very interesting, but her plans were thwarted by bad weather, so Sandwich Slice was an accidental result of crossing Connecticut Field (a large pumpkin) with an F1 of Sugar Loaf X a bush acorn. One plant produced delicious fruit that she ate raw.
The other is Goldini which has been pledged to OSSI. There have been quite a few queries about where to buy seeds, but none seem available.
Carol describes how she developed it here: osseeds.org/goldini-zucchini/
Seeds of the two original parents should still be available. I already have seeds of Costata Romanesco and will just have to buy Gold Rush hybrid zucchini (Seminis).
Diane Whitehead
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Post by diane on Jan 17, 2020 20:42:44 GMT -5
Maybe you could take a few scions and keep them in the fridge till you find someone to graft them.
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Post by diane on Jan 17, 2020 17:53:42 GMT -5
Seeds of Diversity lists all the varieties sold by Canadian seed companies. www.seeds.ca/diversity/seed-catalogue-indexI am one of the volunteers listing them all. Today I am doing Atlantic Pepper Seeds, which sells only pepper seeds - about 1500 of them. Diane
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Post by diane on Jan 12, 2020 22:51:18 GMT -5
I don't know anyone who has Goldini. I ordered from Carol a couple of years ago but received no seeds and no reply. I think we could all try to develop a similar one - She describes how she developed it here: osseeds.org/goldini-zucchini/Seeds of the two original parents should still be available. I already have seeds of Costata Romanesco and will just have to buy Gold Rush hybrid zucchini (Seminis). Diane Whitehead
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Post by diane on Dec 13, 2019 19:45:34 GMT -5
Does that mean members would have to pay?
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Post by diane on Dec 11, 2019 14:39:13 GMT -5
. It would be a shame to lose all that information. I have been copying information that I want to keep, though I didn't manage to save the private messages I received before they all disappeared.
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