I am no expert in the garden or homesteading in general. I'm a learn as you go and learn from your mistakes kind of lady. It's always fun to not know what to expect and to have something to google about (when DO I harvest my potatoes?).
This kind of gardening is super fun for me, as I can get hands on learning and I see something I haven't seen before almost every single garden day! For example this year my potatoes grew berries! poisonous berries!! But still how cool, for a moment I thought I had gotten something besides potato sets. Turns out it was just the insane amount of rain we got in such a short time.
So now that I have had a garden for a while, I find my favorite thing is to see how big I can grow my produce!! The good news is they make for some awesome seeds, the bad news is they lose the good flavor when over ripened.
Yesterday, I went out and collected some green bean pods. I let them grow and dry on the vine and I'll show you why!
In the blue corner weighing in as far too heavy to be a nice dried seed, is a over ripened green bean. This is well on it's way to turning into a good seed pod. In the pink is a ready seed pod. And in the green is one about halfway between. I did not include a photo of the rotted seed pod as it's pretty gross and most people have the common sense not to use rotted seeds.
Here we have the pods I pulled green about 2 weeks ago. They are on the napkin. I wanted to show the difference in letting the beans dry out and harvest or harvest straight from the vine.
Here is the difference. The seeds from the dried beans inside are much smaller and a lot of them were still attached to the bean pod. The other is the bean that dried on the vine. It split in half easily and offered up much larger- fully dried seed.
And we are done! There were a few seeds that were not quite done drying so I will be leaving them out on top of the refrigerator for about a week, then storing them with the rest of my seed collection!
Thanks for checking out my seed story and I hope you all enjoyed it.
What is your favorite part of gardening and why? What is your favorite plant to grow?