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Thursday, September 11, 2008

Saving Rutabaga Seeds

Remember when I posted about my friend giving us 2 rutabagas in early Spring this year? She had extras and thought we might like to feed them to our 3 Little Pigs....
Instead, they sat around here in a bucket for 2 weeks. I'd look at them kinda ashamed every time I walked past them, muttering "I really gotta do something with them" but I was in too much of a hurry and had 14 million other things to get done.....
In the end, I thought ah heck, let's just plant them and "git'em outta here". If they set seed, they set seed, if not, who cares? So I planted them down in the animal garden.....and began promptly to totally ignore them.
Actually, that whole garden was pretty much ignored. It maybe got watered a total of 6 times, Only if I remembered while I was down there, giving da Pigs their daily shower when the weather got hot.

But the rutabagas didn't need me....they just went along doing their own thing, flowering and then beginning to set their seed. A lot of the root plants will go ahead and set seed the Second Year after being seeded.
The other day, we snipped the tops off the rutabagas. Brought them up to the house, and I got a start on snipping off all the pods. Some of them burst open and seed went everywhere, so Yeah, I guess they were ready to be dealt with!

Here's the seeds in the pods.......






I snipped as many as I could and then, because I still had 56,764 more bloody pods to do, I shoved the rest into a paper bag (boy I love paper bags, lol) and shoved them in a corner. When I have time (read, after the snow falls) I'll finish threshing them, put them in a seed envelope and put them away for next year!


It's quite easy to save your own seeds this way, give it a try!
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Never eaten a rutabage, not sure I'd want to, sound too much like a motor home:). Tho I do save seeds. Like to deal with them when I watch the telly.

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