Post by Yoris on Mar 23, 2019 22:48:56 GMT -7
Okay, so, I've developed some seed-saving and seed-starting processes. This spring, I found some things to save a lot of time and effort:
1. Use cut portions of plastic straws for seedling labels (written on with industrial Sharpies).
2. I have to explain my seed saving process to tell you this next idea.
Okay, so, to save seeds, I get the seeds out of the fruit, make an effort at removing the gel sacks (of tomatoes ), put the seeds in empty herbal tea bags (which I label with a permanent marker), tie up the bags, put the bags in a jar of water, zap them in the water with three frequencies of my Z4EX (I usually do 15 minutes per frequency, but I don't think that length of time is required for my purposes), remove the water, put the herbal tea bags on brown paper bags in a small room with a fan going. Let them dry. Now to my idea. Before, I would ideally cut open the bags and transfer the seeds from the empty herbal tea bags to plastic bead bags (since those are reusable and the herbal tea bags pretty much aren't). However, almost an hour ago, I got the idea to just cut the herbal tea bags open and stuff the whole bag, seeds, herbal tea bag and all, into the plastic bead bag, and label it. No sense taking the seeds out of the herbal tea bag.
Anyway, that idea saves me a lot of hours of work when it comes to tomatoes, since they stick to the bags. The straw idea does, too (much faster than my other methods, and less expensive, too).
Most people just ferment their seeds and dry them (well, tomatoes, anyhow). I zap them instead since it seems to be effective at keeping the seeds disease-free (in my experience, so far), and it's a whole lot faster than fermenting them. I can zap maybe 15 kinds of seeds in one jar in 45 minutes—instead of one kind of seed in one week, as some do with fermenting.
I planted 45 pepper plants and 3 ground cherry plants a few days ago. I planted 48 tomato plants, today (I have about 22 tomatoes left to go; I'll probably gift a number of those to friends; I'm growing extras on purpose). I'll probably plant strawberries, summer savory, melons, watermelons, tomatillos, burr gherkins, and other stuff next. EDIT: I planted another tray with tomatoes and wonderberries on 25/26 March 2019.
[HASH]seedsaving [HASH]seedlinglabels [HASH]electroculture [HASH]tomato [HASH]pepper [HASH]groundcherry [HASH]wonderberry