Seed Saving & Meals on Foot

Day 122 

Dinner For Billy Joe, local pasta with cheese & mushroom sauce.

This was an easy mix of local eggs, milk, cheese and flour, mushrooms & garlic form the Farmer's market, & spring onion and basil from the garden.

I have decided that for this year, this is my last community meal delivery, as I am already pushed to provide food for my own family. So sadly, I will bow out of the food roster for a while.

 ( I will make an exception for Amy when her baby is born though.) 

Self - seeded coriander well and truly gone to seed.

I just love it when plants self seed in my garden. They just come up wherever they feel comfortable and happy, and I just leave them there and enjoy their bounty. This was small but delicious, and it's seed has dried on the plant, so I pick off the few seeds to plant. I think these self seeded plants are the ones to collect seeds from as they obviously like it here in my garden, so should do well when I plant them again (hopefully).

Seed Saving

Now I see seeds and pips differently. Instead of something slightly annoying to discard, they are now a valuable resource.

Coriander

These coriander bushes were picked last summer and left to dry in a paper bag. I am a bit poorly, so it is a good time to do those time consuming sedentary jobs that never seem to get done!

this coriander is so full of seeds, last summer I was not so excited, but now I am, as I imagine the culinary uses of this seed. I think about pseudo curries made with ground coriander, monk's pepper, lemon grass, garlic, salt, and horseradish.

the task of getting the seeds off the stalks is pretty time consuming, and hard on the fingers, and the seeds tend to fly around the place. A good job to do in the garden, as the seeds that fall about might grow.

The tricky bit is getting the stalks out of the seeds. I try a few finer sieves, with some success, but some form of winnowing is probably more likely to be effective. I tried shaking the sieve about and moving it up and down in the breeze as if flipping pancakes, but the losses of seed was probably not worth it. I decided that the seed to be planted did not need to be too clean.

As for the culinary coriander seeds, I wanted to get as much stem out as possible, and could not find an effective method, so I thought I would try soaking the seeds to see if the detritus would either sink or float, leaving the seeds able to be scooped out. Well, the whole lot floated, and then I was worried about it sprouting. So I scooped it all out and spread it on an oven tray to dry in a warm oven (turned off after cooking dinner). One benefit of the soaking, the seeds were cleaner - there was quite a brown tinge to the water.

The seeds dried well in the cooling oven overnight

Into an air tight jar for storage in the pantry

Rocket

Now I am on a seedsaving mission, so here is the rocket that I also dried last summer

These seeds are much smaller and harder to see, with lots of husks. I thought I had finally found a good use for the chip fryer I found in the skip last year, however, the seeds, and lots of husks fell straight through.

On to finer and finer sieves

Rocket seeds ready for planting out.

Rockmellon seeds

I left them on the kitchen bench for a few days on a plate. They dried a bit but started to go mouldy, so I put them in a sieve and washed under the tap to remove mould and pulp. This is also a good job to do outside, as it uses quite a lot of water.

 It took a while to get the pulp off the seeds, quite fidly. Once the pulp was gone,

I put the seeds on paper towels to dry in the sun. This only took a few hours, however, it was difficult getting some of the seeds off the paper. I ended up leaving some seeds on torn bits of paper, which I guess will not be a problem for their germination.

The dried seeds can go into a labelled envelope and are ready to plant next season.

BD. Lemon Myrtle Yoghurt and strawberries - Yummm

My last watermellon, nice and ripe, thanks to my followers for the tips on how to know when they are ripe. I also kept the harvested mellon on the kitchen bench for a few weeks before cutting to allow it to ripen more. 1/2 was shared with Billy Joe as desert for her meal on foot.

More sedentary persuits - Sewing

My New Bee Keeper's suit!

I found a pair of painter's overalls in an opportunity shop, sewed in a zip down front, elasticated the ankle  and wrist cuffs, put elastic styrups on the cuffs to keep the legs from riding up, and sewed up the pockets, sleeve, and side gaps. I found the white cricket hat in an op shop too, and the net in an army disposal store. I feel pretty professional now! Apparently bees are not attracted to white, (even though their houses are usually painted white?) but they are to attracted to bright colours. The extra thick fabric of the overalls gives me good peace of mind, as the last time I went out to check the hive, I had a fairly flimsy shirt on, and one bee was trying to sting me through it. Luckily it was baggy.