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The theory: we never saved seed before. It is just something we
always wanted to do! There are many advantages in saving seed. First of all,
it's cheap. Why spend money on seed packages, when it's all there in your
garden, and all you have to do is harvest the seeds and save them for the
next planting? The other great advantage is that you can pick the seeds
selectively. The theory here is that -for example- seeds from individual
plants which mature early, will grow into plants themselves which mature
early.
The test: Even though red kidney beans are a main food source for
many people, their seeds are very difficult to buy in Tasmania. We had to
mail order seeds from Brisbane! And these seeds may have been ideally suited
to a warmer climate, but here in Tasmania they did poorly. A third of the
seeds never germinated and many that did grew into small plants.
Rather than buying red kidney bean seeds again, we decided to save all the
good seeds from our crop. These 300 seeds are the "survivors" from
the first crop and hopefully will grow into plants better suited to our
climate than the initial 45 seeds we bought. If we seed save the best seeds
year after, we should end up with a strain of red kidney beans ideally
suited to our environment here.
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A few problems
Top left: a few red kidney beans which were too wet at time of shelling.
They will probably still germinate, but they don't look as good as the main
batch.
Top right: seven year beans from the kitchen garden. A good example of how NOT
to do it. We harvested the pods and shelled them without drying them in
storage. They were way to wet and became mouldy. Seeds like these have to be
thrown out!
Bottom: seven year bean seeds from the vegie garden. The pods were
harvested and hung up for drying, but not long enough. They didn't become
mouldy, but if they will germinate remains to be seen.
Conclusion: harvest the pods and hang them up for drying. But be more
patient than we were. Good seeds seem to come from well dried pods (we will
test this theory next planting season!).
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