Saving Seed

Lavender, just for how it looks

The house is festooned with bouquets of dried flowers. There are bunches of seeded lettuce in the office, you have to battle past them to get to the loo, there's long strand of rainbow chard seeds hanging beside the umbrella like carrot seed heads, there's Romanesco broccoli and parsley coriander and kale.

Apart from adding a farm house look they're actually there for a practical reason.  They're drying out further till a rainy day when I'll spend time saving their seed.

I've saved seed from our first successful rockmelon variety, Mountain Sweet after a seasons experimentation. Hopefully we can keep adapting a variety to our climate and get bumper crops. The watermelons have not been as successful. It took me way to long to realise the ducklings were slipping through fences and eating the fruits even before they set. So now I have good fruit set about the time we're expecting our first frost.

   Coriander seed

Parsley seed

We should have enough seed to start a market garden next year. We've even been setting a few things up that it might even be a distinct possibility.











Eliot Coleman is the US author of The Winter Harvest Handbook. While we're not has cold as it is in Maine we are going to adopt some of his strategies to try extend our summer/autumn harvest. The images of his immaculate market garden are inspiring. We don't currently have the water for it, but... we may well do very soon.

Do you save your own seed?