Saving Our Seeds.

I mentioned on Sunday that I had picked most of the drying bush beans I planted as an experiment. I bought a packet of mixed beans from Diggers (I think it was called the 'Magic Bean Mix'), and it included a few each of Borlotti, Red Kidney beans, Yin Yang, Cherokee and Flageolet beans. I think I ended up with about five plants of each, and I note that even though they were supposed to be bush beans, the Yin Yang beans were definitely climbing beans. With normal beans, picking them constantly promotes flowering and therefore more beans, but since these beans are designed to be dried for cooking later on, I left them on the bushes. I don't know if picking a few might have increased they yield, but I got perhaps 5-6 pods per plant? The Yin Yang beans (which ended up being climbers) wound their way up a nearby garden arch and produced by far the most pods of the five types of beans (you can see them below).

The plants themselves grew as quickly as other beans, didn't take up too much space in the garden and weren't subject to any pests (other than the usual snails and slugs) which is a plus.

The girls and I had much fun with them all anyway, bursting the dried pods open and then sorting all the very differently coloured beans into ramekins. Aren't they all pretty? As you can see we would have harvested barely enough for one meal of them if they were all combined LOL (although what a pretty meal it would be!). Therefore, these will all be carefully stored in labelled envelopes for sowing again next season.

Hopefully next year I might get enough out of those plants to store away for eating! I suspect that with my limited space however, growing enough drying beans to supply anything more than a couple of weeks' meals will be out of the question. Still, I'll be interested to see what we do end up harvesting next year.


I also mentioned on Sunday that I picked some of the celery I had left to go to seed. I needed the space to plant out a couple of tomato seedlings, so I had to pull the celery out before the seeds were really ready. The Seed Savers Handbook suggests to either clip individual seed heads from the flower stalk as they brown, or wait until the entire seed stalk is brown. Since I didn't have that long I just clipped the browned heads from the stalk onto some newspaper. The Handbook recommends leaving them to dry for a further two weeks in the shade before storing, so this is what I will do.

I also took the opportunity to separate the coriander (cilantro) seeds from the bushes I have had drying in my garage. I pulled up the coriander bushes when the seeds were all fully formed and lightly browned a couple of weeks ago. I used the roots freshly chopped in a curry (yum!) and hung the rest of bushes upside down in an airy out-of-the-way spot to finish drying. Dried seeds will drop of at the slightest touch LOL, and I've seen it suggested that you hang them over a paper bag or some sheets of paper to catch the fallen seeds, but my bunches were too big for any of my paper bags so I just crossed my fingers that not too many fell off.

I shook the bunches over a paper bag to catch most of the seeds, then snipped off the remaining heads and gently squashed and rustled the bag to separate the seeds from the stalks, then threw the stalks into the compost bin.

Coriander doesn't seem to self-seed around here for some reason - although many of my herbs do - so I've stored away some of the seeds in the paper bag for sowing when the weather cools. The rest, I will use - ground in my mortar and pestle - in the kitchen (we do love our curries around here LOL).