One good thing to come from last year's garden was the bean harvest was not large enough to eat, but the seed harvest from those same beans was good enough to replenish next year's garden.
This is the tray full of seeds and pods that I shelled this week.
I grew a couple of heirloom beans: Christmas Beans and Tiger Stripe Beans. they are quite lovely to look at. I am told they make great soup, but that I am hoping will be part of my experiment for this year.
We are getting a new plot, but we are going to try for one that was unused last year so the ground was fallow and the diseases may be less prevalent. We will have to go through the lottery for this but it will be worth it to move from the patch with too much disease.
The gardens will not be moved this year, probably because the Park District did not vote yet on giving the land to the City of Elmhurst, but I have not followed the papers much this winter and the Website for the Park District is not the easiest to navigate.
In addition to the heirloom beans, I saved herticote vert (thin green bean) seeds as well as sweet pea seeds. I got the original sweet peas from Seed Savers so I know that I can save the seed and use it this year it was not a hybrid.
I was unable to save melon seed because the plant never gave a viable fruit, but I do have some seed left from last year and I may try to use that and see what happens. Much seed is only good for a year after harvest and I have to check to see if Melon falls into the category.
It was easy to shell dried beans. The seed coat split open easily allowing access to the seed. The hardest to harvest were the green beans as the coat shrank as it dried gripping the seed tightly. I had to smash the coat between my fingers to extract the seed.
Since all of these beans were harvested in September they were quite dry and most had opened before I even began shelling.
For now I have placed them in seed envelopes I made myself. I got the seed packet template from a vendor on Etsy. I just print them in various sizes, cut and glue them. Then I label and stuff them with seeds. I use the smallest ones for herb seeds mostly. The package size is about 1 1/2 inches square and I place them inside greeting cards.
The packet has room on the back for growing info, like sunny and seed depth for growing, etc. For these I transferred the information from my garden journal from last year. Now I remember why I kept that journal with all the info about the plan and the planting! Over the winter months I created my own colorful garden journal filled with pictures from my gardens and you can get a digital copy on Etsy.
This is the tray full of seeds and pods that I shelled this week.
I grew a couple of heirloom beans: Christmas Beans and Tiger Stripe Beans. they are quite lovely to look at. I am told they make great soup, but that I am hoping will be part of my experiment for this year.
We are getting a new plot, but we are going to try for one that was unused last year so the ground was fallow and the diseases may be less prevalent. We will have to go through the lottery for this but it will be worth it to move from the patch with too much disease.
The gardens will not be moved this year, probably because the Park District did not vote yet on giving the land to the City of Elmhurst, but I have not followed the papers much this winter and the Website for the Park District is not the easiest to navigate.
In addition to the heirloom beans, I saved herticote vert (thin green bean) seeds as well as sweet pea seeds. I got the original sweet peas from Seed Savers so I know that I can save the seed and use it this year it was not a hybrid.
I was unable to save melon seed because the plant never gave a viable fruit, but I do have some seed left from last year and I may try to use that and see what happens. Much seed is only good for a year after harvest and I have to check to see if Melon falls into the category.
It was easy to shell dried beans. The seed coat split open easily allowing access to the seed. The hardest to harvest were the green beans as the coat shrank as it dried gripping the seed tightly. I had to smash the coat between my fingers to extract the seed.
Since all of these beans were harvested in September they were quite dry and most had opened before I even began shelling.
For now I have placed them in seed envelopes I made myself. I got the seed packet template from a vendor on Etsy. I just print them in various sizes, cut and glue them. Then I label and stuff them with seeds. I use the smallest ones for herb seeds mostly. The package size is about 1 1/2 inches square and I place them inside greeting cards.
The packet has room on the back for growing info, like sunny and seed depth for growing, etc. For these I transferred the information from my garden journal from last year. Now I remember why I kept that journal with all the info about the plan and the planting! Over the winter months I created my own colorful garden journal filled with pictures from my gardens and you can get a digital copy on Etsy.
