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More seeds

I was given some 'purple flower seed' (delphinium, salvia, cosmos, cornflower, scabiosa, phacella, nemophila), and emptied out the 'old' rocket box into which to plant it -- transplanting the rocket into a deeper pot, although it's mostly bolting. The new rocket is just about starting to develop.

Pricked out a few of the rudbeckias from the coconut compost tray, where I noticed that after coming through en masse in the hot weather they have been damping off in patches. However there is no shortage of them as yet...

Sowed some more sage seed, a lot more thickly this time on the assumption that it has very limited viability.

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That sounds awesome.

I like color-themed gardens. I have a white one, a purple-and-white one, and a fire-colored one. :D

Mine tends to be largely yellow and white, so I'm all in favour of boosting the blue component ;-)

Although to be fair I do weed out most of the forget-me-nots, which would be blue if I let them...

It might be a bit late to be sowing annuals, but we'll see. It was certainly too late to re-sow outdoor tomatoes, and I did that all the same!

Timing depends on variety. Some flowers are slow, others really fast. Some tomatoes are slow, but anything marked 'early' will be faster, while cherries tend to fruit fast and just keep going.

Tomatoes are on the edge of their range here, so without a greenhouse it's normal for about half the crop to be harvested green at the end of the season after the plants die off -- they just don't have a long enough summer to flower and then ripen fully most years. Likewise chillies; they are only barely viable outdoors (which is why mine, that were started several months ago, still only have a single pair of true leaves each!)

Edge gardening is so interesting! That's definitely a place where a landrace or even a grex or hybrid swarm would help -- selecting for the earliest and hardiest plants.

The closest I know of is the Heirloom Survivors Grex, but the original page is down.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250126122714/https://wildmountainseeds.com/product/heirloom-survivors-grex/

https://app.seedlinked.com/en-US/seeds/vegetables/Heirloom-Survivors-Grex-Tomato?id=5604&species_id=2

Well, that's one reason I'm saving my own seed year after year -- having stumbled upon this random variety that seems to cope with the local conditions rather better and be much more productive at a smaller size than all the others I've been given, I'm hoping to evolve my own landrace from it ;-D
It's just a pity the lady who originally gave me a spare plant from a batch that were given to her has no idea what variety it might have been...

But the great thing is that it seems to breed true, at least for all the qualities I'm interested in; the plants are low, bushy, reasonably hardy, surviving extreme heat, limited water supply and chilly nights, and produce plenty of fruit that mostly ripens before the end of the season. I can be self-sufficient in fresh tomatoes for a couple of months a year, and the rest of the year I just don't eat them :-p
I learned at my mother's knee that there are some things one should just never buy out of season, because they are not only expensive but flavourless, and tomatoes and strawberries are prime among those. A ripe tomato is a summer treat. A generic 'salad tomato' eaten in February because English salads have tomato in them by default is generally not worth having.

>> But the great thing is that it seems to breed true <<

Awesome.

>>I learned at my mother's knee that there are some things one should just never buy out of season, because they are not only expensive but flavourless, and tomatoes and strawberries are prime among those.<<

True of most supermarket tomatoes, not necessarily all. If it smells like tomato, it will taste like tomato. The small ones that come on a vine are often good. Also the mixed carton of cherry tomatoes tend to be excellent. Strawberries, it's a lot harder to find fragrant ones out of season.

Chilled produce never really smells of anything (and 'handling the stock' in the supermarket is strongly discouraged: you might be putting your GERMS on it!)
Of course supermarket tomatoes, like pears, tend to be sold underripe because they don't travel well otherwise, which exacerbates the problem... and of course the predominant varieties sold tend to be those grown for tough skins and long shelf life rather than any other quality.

But to be fair I hardly ever buy greengrocery at the supermarket anyway, so things may have changed of recent years.

>> Chilled produce never really smells of anything <<

It smells less, but to me still has a smell -- or at least, it will if it's ripe and has flavor. Otherwise it's just sort of a flat green smell.

>>the predominant varieties sold tend to be those grown for tough skins and long shelf life rather than any other quality.<<

True for commercial varieties, but sometimes there are heirlooms.

I don't know what variety these tomatoes are, because I grow them from saved seed (hence all the heartache last year when the fruits were coming out seedless!)
They are a dwarf bush variety with fruits a little larger than cherry tomatoes, and they generally stop flowering and successfully ripen their fruit before the end of the season, rather than continuing to attempt to produce a straggle of new flowers.

Fascinating.

Some hybrid tomatoes are seedless. It might've picked up pollen from one. Heat is another possibility, as it can cause failure to set fruit, so it might also affect seeds.

It definitely got better later in the season. At the end of July, I couldn't find any seed at the point when I wanted to start saving it.

A couple of weeks later, I managed to get a couple of 'normal' fruit (from which the current batch of seedlings have been grown) but was still seeing seedless ones. By the start of September it was no longer an issue: https://igenlode.dreamwidth.org/362379.html

I'm glad the seeds developed eventually.

Yes, it had me really worried for a while; I thought I'd accidentally selected in favour of early-developing but seedless fruit ;-D

(Since I'm only saving seed from a couple of fruits a year -- two just in case I accidentally pick one that turns out to be sterile or to have other undesirable qualities -- there is always the chance that by some fluke I do end up saving from a decidedly non-standard tomato.)

It would probably be prudent to save some seeds from each plant you grow that meets your standard. It'd reduce the risk of mishaps and improve diversity.

It would, but there are limits on how many seeds I can germinate per year and how much storage space I've got (one small airtight box).

I generally only sow about a quarter to half of the seeds I harvest as it is; the rest are just held in reserve for a couple of years in case of catastrophic failure, then cycled out.

I should probably try to remember to add a few extra seeds from some extra random fruit to each year's 'towel', but that requires me to remember which of all the plants I harvested the previous saved seed from! (I do try to take my two seed tomatoes from different plants...)

>> It would, but there are limits on how many seeds I can germinate per year and how much storage space I've got (one small airtight box).<<

You don't have to save ALL the seeds from a given tomato. Save 2-3 if that's what you have space for.

>>that requires me to remember which of all the plants I harvested the previous saved seed from!<<

Options include:

* Save seeds from the first tomato to ripen seeds, mark that plant with a string or a label stuck next to it, then mark the other plants as they set seeds.

* Save one tomato from each plant at the same time.

Yes, that is what I was thinking: harvest a few extra seeds from extra tomatoes throughout the 'season', rather than drying a whole batch out at once...

Save seeds from the first tomato to ripen seeds, mark that plant with a string or a label stuck next to it, then mark the other plants as they set seeds.
I already have a piece of wool tied around the flower-stem of my rogue white California poppy so that I can remember to segregate its seed-pods separately :-)

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