Seed Saving

My little world of gardening grows each year, what I learn and what I am willing to take on. Many of us start a garden by buying plants from a nursery and eating the bounty as it comes in. Done. Then we get into preserving, canning, trying our own seedlings and... It just keeps going if you find you love it. This year as my outdoor garden dwindled I gleefully pulled out the plants, hellbent on saving all the seeds. This Spring, I ordered over sixty dollars worth of native flowering seeds from the wonderful Strictly Medicinal Seeds. I am not a big spender of money and this seemed like a lot of money to me, especially for seeds that were not going to be consumed by us as fruits or vegetables. But I did it for the bees. Those sweet creatures...  Today Soren is building them a windbreak to help them make it through the winter. We have so carefully taken care of them this year and are hopeful they are strong enough to come out charging in the Spring. (In the foreground on the photo are the twenty Rosa rugosa plants I planted this year and along the left side of the bees are the fruit trees and wood chips that I hope to establish into a booming orchard guild in the coming years).

 

At the end of the season, I realized I had thousands of seeds on each plant I could make use of and set to task saving as much as I could. I saved laitris, lobelia, common milkweed, blue vervain, goldenrod, anise hyssop, bergemot, scarlet sage, echinacea, tulsi, calendula and daikon radish. It was such an easy process to let the seeds fully dry out on the stalk, snap them off and bring them inside (and label them before I forget what they are!). And then you know... Let them sit until I just couldn't stand it any longer!
The only difficult ones are the radishes. The daikon radish seeds are contained in rigid pods (shown in the basket on the right) and I will need to do a little research to find a good way to quickly extract the seeds. I will use daikon radishes for many years because they are good nutrient extractors and break up the soil. I simply cast them on the ground where they drill into the soil and bring up nutrients from the depths. If you let them rot in place, those nutrients and the drilling of the soil can do so much to disrupt heavy clay soil. It is a battle to leave them in the ground though because three sweet little ones know that they taste good raw with a bit of salt and butter!

 

Thankfully I can keep them busy helping and finding cool treasures down by the ocean!

  Beautiful purple, star-shaped bud bursts of joe pye weed once we emptied it of its seeds.

 These past few weeks I have been putting to bed the 500 plus trees I planted this year. I went along each hedgerow (between our house and the neighbors and along the road) and blanketed each tree with a bit of straw. It was a proud moment going over those trees which can now clearly be seen with their little ring of straw at their base and really see all the hard work I have done. Today I set out with laitris, goldenrod, milkweed, blue vervain, and joe pye weed and seeded them in amongst all the trees. Last year, after the hedgerows were plowed, I planted winter rye and moved 100 conifers from the "blueberry field" down to the rows. This spring I planted clover (nitrogen-fixing) over the winter rye. And now, the native flowering plants are being threaded back in.
A black locust seedling and a tamarack (transplanted from our property).

  The hedgerow between our neighbors house and our field. I cannot wait to see what it looks like in a few years. I really hope I am around to see it in twenty years!

 Sand cherry seedlings pushing out amongst the straw and weeds in the hedgerow I am establishing in the field along the road. Someday the birds will be thankful...

 And now just a bit more to do in the garden. My friend Becka gave me garlic that I put in and I want to do two more rows of it, her bulbs are insanely huge and garlic is just so beautiful coming up in the Spring.

As I finished my work and gazed around, two bald eagles dipped so very low over the field right next to me. I took it as a thank you. I am hopeful it will be a mark on the world that is good and right. I need that now. Don't we all?