Spoiled (oh, the simple things)

Went up to visit family in Ohio just over the weekend (thus no post-age) to pick up an old car that I was VERY grateful to get from my dad as my old mini-van crapped out.  My parents are very generous with giving us any old stuff they have around, and as they take care of things very well, I'll accept a '94 Toyota with 120,000 miles just fine if it doesn't mean spending thousands on fixing this stupid engine issue on my Sienna.

ANYWAYS, on top of that spoilage (I suppose that can be in the "me being spoiled sense" and the booty/bounty kind), my dad gave me a slightly better digital camera than my current one which has been crapping out and the lens got weird and not focus-y (3 years old, but like I've said, I'm not picky) and my mom gave me some Swiss chard seeds that a friend of hers harvest (red and white chards, but no specific variety name.. oh well).

(seeds my mom gave me)

The only thing about the Swiss chard seeds she gave me is that the seeds don't look like swiss chard seeds that I've dealt with before... and luckily had a few leftover as reference.  I had heard that chard and beet seeds are actually a large seed head with many teeny tiny seeds inside, so I crushed up one chard seed to see if there were any seeds within that looked like the ones my mom gave me.

(leftover chard seed I had, w/crushed up one on bottom)

Nada.


Oy.  MooOOoOOoooom!!!!!!!!!

So, may I also explain that my mom is NOT a gardener and after 10 years of owning herb plants that I planted years ago she still cannot recognize what is what?


I'mma gonna call my mom and get her to find out what seeds I have been given before I plant them because I just had a near garden blow-up experience!  (It's still too cold to have planted them but knowing me, I might have "experimented" planting some anyways as "chard" is a cool weather crop, but THIS is definitely not chard.)

I think it looks more like salad/lettuce seed of some sort or maybe even black eyed susan seed.  Sheesh.

On another spoilage note, husband and I went to my favorite store of all time, a grocery store by the name of Jungle Jim's.  If you live in the Cincy region or even around the tri-state of Kentucky/Indiana/Ohio, Jungle Jim's is your go-to destination for food.  I could literally spend the entire day there in bliss checking out all the exotic foods, vegetables, teas, honeys, international this and thats. Mmmmm.  Their okra still isn't as fresh as mine, but whatever, they had reduced red peppers at $1.59/lb (we got about 5 flats of them)!  I can't find that ANYWHERE in Memphis.

(Woot! Red peppers!)

What really excited me is when I saw SUNCHOKE roots:

and

TOMATILLOS:

there, when gave me hope because I wanted to grow these fun things this coming season as I 1) couldn't find the seed for these anywhere without resorting to going online and paying shipping which I am trying to avoid as much as I can to save costs, and 2) I like the idea of seed saving and growing from the grocery store.  Plus, now I can give them a little tasty-taste :)

My only nervousness about the sunchokes, aka Jerusalem artichokes is that they can be invasive (not always a bad thing when it comes to food... "oh no! I have too much deliciousness!) and I've heard that sunchokes can give a person massive gas.  Pleasant, I know.  The description of it in the wiki link is sort of frightening, but as I am sort of vegetarian and eat lots of beans already, well... 

Finally, my being spoiled and gratitude towards others went through the roof when a very nice fellow local gardener gave me some tomato and other plant seeds earlier last week to help me out.

He had some great varieties and I only need about 5 seeds of each kind because I have yet to find a non-viable/hardy tomato seed.  I find that I tend to grow more tomatoes than I need so this is a great way to keep my garden from becoming overgrown.  Plus, now we can see who can grow a meaner tomato as that we have the same type and live in the same climate! (I'm sure he'll blow me out of the water on this one :P)

Pod People: specifically Green tea mania

I have a great attraction to all things pod-like.  Don't know what it is specifically but it's as though pods are sort of nature's boxes, inflatable organic gifts (ok, no big surprise what the gift is, seeds of course) but still the variety of shapes and sizes of pods that are available just dazzles me.

Here are a few that I enjoy before I get to the real rarity:

I was recently bopping around my potted green tea plants checking out this green fruit thing that feels like it's been hanging out there forever when I noticed it had split!


The lovely bright green seed pod exposed a creamy white center and brown seeds.  Pretty snazzy colors there Mother Nature!

Interestingly enough the pod itself was relatively soft and spongy (much less so a couple of days later)


Germinating green tea seeds to my understanding is somewhat tricky and needs to be done when they are ripe, therefore just dropped from the seed pod and not shriveled.  Many places simply take cuttings for tea propagation, but I suppose if I plan to live until I'm a 150 years old, I have time to make more green tea plants! (It doesn't take 150 years for a good tea plant to develop, it would just feel  like that to me mentally because I'm impatient!)


Here are some sources I found on germinating the seeds:
http://www.au.gardenweb.com/forums/load/ozherb/msg0301175628958.html
http://narien.com/store/teaseeds

Malabar Spinach seed saving--- this might get a little messy (Don't forget to comment for the seed GIVEAWAY)

I was interested in documenting my malabar seed saving, as the seed is encased in a small dark purple-black fruit seed coat and wondered how involved it would get. The answer: PRETTY FREAKIN' INVOLVED.

I originally intended to just let the seeds dry out in their fruit, as I read could be done, but the chances of the fruit molding, or going bad and thus turning the seed bad was too great and I wanted to be sure the seeds were in good condition, so I decided to scrub the juicy fruity bits off.

On an earlier day, I picked a small, but plentiful basket full of malabar spinach berries(?):

(berries are tiny and encased in each is a seed)

I then took out the colander and a larger metal bowl to capture anything that might get washed out of the colander because I didn't want to lose a viable seed.

Remembering having heard that the fruit is a well know vegetable dye, and having many plain white rags around that I use for cleaning which my Aunt Louise gifts me every time I see her (Thanks Aunt Louise!), I decided to experiment and place one of the cleaner not stained rags under the colander so that all the fruit juices/dye would splash on and dye the rag, hopefully a rather pleasing purple-y color.

Yep, that's a really purple-pink (magenta I suppose?) color! I ended up getting another rag to dye  partially because my hand was beginning to get a wee bit raw from scraping fruit against the metal colander holes. Kind of like a grater. I swear no bits of my fingers will be in any requested seed packets!

Mmmmm, fruit flesh encrusted rag! But it gives you a good idea as to the color of the dye. I did have to add and swish water around to be able to move the fruit/seeds in the colander well, but the color was still pretty strong I think.

The other reason for the water was this:
The separated fruit fleshy bits float to the top so I can easily extract it from the seeds that sunk to the bottom of the colander. I attempted to use a spoon to scoop up the floating fruit bits, but ended up just tipping the bowl gently to allow the bits to drain away. The entire process was similar to panning for gold I'd say, though I haven't done that since I was 6 years old... and I think I might have been just pretending to pan for gold too after I read about it in a book on the 49ers...

Here I am still in the process of rubbing berries between my fingers and hands in the bowl to separate the seeds from flesh still.
Eventually, after doing this for a good while, and dumping the fruit flesh a couple of times after swishing with water, I am getting some clarity and the good seeds are at the bottom of the bowl. Any seeds that floated to the top were probably unripe or not viable for germination, so I allowed them to follow the fate of the fruit flesh, DOWN THE DRAIN, I mean, INTO THE COMPOSTER!
When I got everything clean enough, I dumped the seeds into the colander for a final swish and mini-scrub to make 'em squeaky clean.

I have an admission to make.... I have never dyed anything before and as I was sort of doing everything last minute and was feeling too lazy to do some real research I gleaned everything I could remember from my "wish I was a frontier girl" days (about 7 years old at that time, Little House on the Prairie and all that rot) and I chucked the malabar fruit colored water and rags into a pot and cranked the stove on high because I vaguely remember dying had something to do with boiling water. I added vinegar for good measure and realized later that maybe I was thinking of Easter eggs :(

Either way, after a while I turned off the pot of dye+rags and let it cool on its own before I let the rags drain of some of the water dye and then hung them on some metal, grated, sunroom furniture to dry.
(Note: Once dry, the color of the rags are just a bit lighter than this color and more PINK than mauve. Which I am not a huge fan of... I am thinking of attempting to try as little water as possible for the next batch of seed saving because dangit, I am NOT a pink fan. Gimme some royal purple baby).


Here are all the seeds I set out to dry on my dining room table on some newspaper... on some nice white table cloth (brill right?) Eh, tablecloths are meant to be used and abused. I would have loved to put them in a really sunny spot, but it was sort of cloudy that day/ rained later.
It appears that one of the seeds decided to sprout, possibly within its fruit coat! I sincerely doubt it was during its bath while I was handling it.
So, that was my seed saving adventure... and there's a whole heck of a lot more seeds to save... so, um, please, take them off my hands?

(UPDATE: I realized that I had forgotten to re-read this post before I sent it and there were a million grammatical and spelling errors, so my apologies... very sleepy when written)