SOME SUBVERSIVE IDEAS: BUY NOTHING. SAVE YOUR SEEDS.
Due to my total inattention, my first attempt at a garden was a remarkable success. It grew to twice its size by the end of its second year. I just wanted to replace the city lawn with culinary herbs and a few tomato plants. Nothing ambitious or imaginative. But my weariness with work and baby number three allowed the small garden to mutiny, revert to a more natural state, and teach me a few invaluable lessons. The parsley was the first to seize control, going to seed the second year and creating colonies all about the garden. The prostrate rosemary expanded to three times her size; her lower limbs on the earth where they took root and began to walk about. The oregano, mint, and thyme also sent out explorers from the base; so many that I dug them out, popped them into pots and sold them. The fallen and neglected fruits and flowers left their progeny on the ground. They returned as robust seedlings the following year. Then the weeds arrived—chickweed, purslane and lamb's quarters, bittercress, dandelion and chicory. I had a free salad far more nutritious and vigorous than anything out of a seed packet.
It is tomato planting now for all of us who start our seeds indoors. So here are my thoughts and odd ways on saving tomato seeds and planting them out. When the winter broccoli and cauliflower go to seed I will post self-seeding with photographs.
SAVING TOMATO SEEDS
My first conscious choice at saving seeds and growing my own was an impulsive reaction to eating my first black tomato. After one bite I had to have this tomato plant in my life, in my garden. My spur-of-the-moment approach has defined my technique ever since... if you could call it a technique. I took a slice of the tomato and squeezed out the seeds and gel onto a paper napkin—which was all I had at hand... literally. I separated the seeds from one another, folded the napkin in half and stuck in my purse. That night I left the open napkin in the kitchen window. It dried overnight. I stuck it in an envelope over the winter and left it in a closet. In early March, two months before I put my tomato plants in the ground, I set the entire napkin (one ply) in a small paper ice cream container filled with soil, covered it gently with more soil, watered it well, and set the container in a sunny kitchen window. In a month, I transplanted the most robust seedlings into individual pots. I still do this with many of my seeds. I can also direct seed into the garden by popping off each seed but I like to vet them first. Once they have two sets of true leaves, I select only the most robust of the group, eliminating the small, weak or leggy ones. I do this with 'wet' seeds: squash, cucumbers, zucchini, melons, anything surrounded by goo. With cucumbers and zucchini I take the seeds from fruit when it is overly mature, yellow but not yet rotten. The liquid gel around the seed glues it in place on any absorbent paper. Can I plant an entire field of vegetables this way? Probably not. But I can plant hundreds of tomato plants; enough to feed my family and pot many to sell.
Reading about collecting seeds on the internet is crazy making. Its too obsessively clean for me, which hardly fosters resiliency. I want strong, disease-resistant seeds from robust plants which have been challenged by pathogens and survived. And really... what's to know? Folks have been collecting seeds for millena. We have forgotten what our great-grandparents knew. THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. Look at any forest, any park or the weeds coming up between the cracks in the supermarket parking lot. Robust plants are everywhere, even with increasingly severe weather. Mother Nature doesn't clean her seeds, dry them or store them in jars in a cool dark space. Seeds fall to the ground or are wind dispersed. Some are eaten by an animal and find themselves far away from the mother plant, lying joyfully in their own pile of fertilizer. They go through desiccation and rehydrating over and over, perhaps endure a snowfall or hard freeze or even a flood. They go through a dormant period—wet or dry, hot or cold—and send out a primitive root and shoot to feed when the sunlight, temperature and moisture are just right. Those seeds didn't need a greenhouse or cold storage or a bleach wash.
Resilient heirloom plants are survivors which don't need pampering. And the information of how to support them is all around us—the magic of setting seed, dormancy, and germination is all in the natural world. And here's the wonderful part, the lessons are free; we can learn the magic. Unless it has been genetically manipulated to be sterile, every plant growing has the ability to replicate itself. The old wisdom is all there. Its not complicated. The seeds are all within our grasp.
Right now the very last plants of winter cauliflower and broccoli are going to seed.
I will photograph the stages and publish them next.
© Bella Terra Assisi 2023
