A Seed Saver's Garden

heirloomgal said:

Exhausting couple of days but I finally got my all my seeds in a better state of organization using shallow totes that are not all in odd shapes, as my last system was, for the tomatoes. It was all alphabeticalized , but the letters were a bit scattered - there are so many tomatoes that start with G, T, B and S. So I had all those letters separated out which was awkward and had me always looking all over the place for stuff. Feels great to fix that tomato system error. A-Z now and simple set up: 4 totes all matching and stackable. I made the mistake of filing this years tom seeds into large long form envelopes then into large ziplocs so now those won't fit with all the others - bit of a problem there, not sure what I was thinking doing that, but not much I can do short of unpacking all those envelopes and repacking them which I'm not doing. So 2023 tomatoes will be set aside in a different box and I go back to small envelopes next year. Sheesh it's a lot of seeds and I can't help wonder if I'm a little nuts.

It occurs to me now at this stage of the seed saving process that putting sllightly more thought into my storing system may have been a good idea. Now I'm up to my neck and it's not as easy to maneuver with set ups. I guess things built up quickly. I really shot a cannon through my bean harvest this year because I only had so many jars (from tomato sauce, salsa, passatta etc. stuff we ate) and matched the bean volume per variety to the jar sizes. Very, very, very bad idea for storage purposes. Now I have all sizes of jars in each shallow box, all the jars are numbered but can't be placed in perfect ordered rows as I prefer. Can't stack 'em either, and they're not in perfect numerical order in the boxes because of the mismatched jar shapes. I created quite a disaster with the beans. Now I'm running out of floor room in the basement! I never really liked the idea of stacking for the bean jars because it stays so nice and cool on the floor, but spacewise I have no choice at this point but to start going up a bit.

I will need to make a project of this seed storage situation. Everything else has always been the priority, and the putting away at season's end the last consideration!

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Plastic milk crates? You could store and stack them. Jar size is irrelevant bc they stack.

I "rescued" 4 milk crates that had been thoughtlessly stored in various places for storage of my broth in the basement. Cardboard boxes don't work bc in the summer the humidity downstairs destroys their bottoms.

Zeedman said:

Perhaps the Vignas too? I was thinking about the Asian yardlong beans, and wondering not only how long they have been cultivated (I've never been able to determine that) but whether those beans ever traveled the Silk Road. Cowpeas from Africa certainly could have found their way in from the South. I doubt though that either of those would have done well enough in Europe to be widely cultivated there.

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I also assume that the ancestors of the yard long beans, as well as of the other Asian cowpeas probably traveled up from Africa, as did the lablabs.
With regards to Europe, however, I'm not so sure many, if any Vignas traveled far enough West to reach Europe. I know mung beans are now a common crop in parts of the Middle East (possibly brought down from India) but I don't think any others made it any farther West. And I'm almost SURE Bambara Groundnut never made it out of Africa until very recently.

One big problem with this whole thing is that NO ONE knows where Favas originally came from, their wild ancestor is more or less nowhere to be found. So a lot of breeding questions, such as how it became so different anatomically from the other vetches (thick and upright instead of a climbing vine) is murky (back in college, I found two seeds that LOOKED like what I imagine a wild fava would look like (black, about the size of BB pellets, but with that "hammerhead" seed shape that favas have and other vetches don't) but I never got back results (one was cracked and never germinated, and a bird bit off the other when it was still a seedling.)

ducks4you said:

I "rescued" 4 milk crates that had been thoughtlessly stored in various places for storage of my broth in the basement. Cardboard boxes don't work bc in the summer the humidity downstairs destroys their bottoms.

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There was a time when those crates could be found everywhere, and now it's like they've all disappeared. You just never see them anywhere anymore, even though they used to be standard moving and storage for everbody. They woud solve the stacking issue due to the different jar heights, if I could find some of them.

Pulsegleaner said:

One big problem with this whole thing is that NO ONE knows where Favas originally came from

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I don't really know much about favas and thier origins, they are virtually never eaten where I live. I was over twenty by the time I tried them (peer pressure!), and they were canned too. They were also in the mid East section of the store labeled ful medammes. I'm not even sure those are exactly the same as the ones I've grown the last few years, or if they're classed differently somehow, because these ones were very brown. Mine have all been mostly green and probably a different size.

This is very interesting about the unknown origin. I recently heard about a fellow named Graham Hancock, I think he had some netflix hit called Ancient Apocolypse, though I've never seen it (but plan to seek it out). The little bit I've seen of his information makes for quite a convincing case that there are huge chunks of history that remain unknown to us. The modern world would like to think it's got a grapple on all things past & present. I personally think that history contains many, many secrets yet to be revealed. Including the origin of favas! And the true story of P. vulgaris origins. Maybe even Tartaria too??

heirloomgal said:

I don't really know much about favas and thier origins, they are virtually never eaten where I live. I was over twenty by the time I tried them (peer pressure!), and they were canned too. They were also in the mid East section of the store labeled ful medammes. I'm not even sure those are exactly the same as the ones I've grown the last few years, or if they're classed differently somehow, because these ones were very brown. Mine have all been mostly green and probably a different size.

This is very interesting about the unknown origin. I recently heard about a fellow named Graham Hancock, I think he had some netflix hit called Ancient Apocolypse, though I've never seen it (but plan to seek it out). The little bit I've seen of his information makes for quite a convincing case that there are huge chunks of history that remain unknown to us. The modern world would like to think it's got a grapple on all things past & present. I personally think that history contains many, many secrets yet to be revealed. Including the origin of favas! And the true story of P. vulgaris origins. Maybe even Tartaria too??

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Well, they do say that something like 93% of human history is unknown, since it occurred before someone invented written language. It's why I'm quite willing to believe in things like the Ancient Sea Kings and other pre-Sumerian civilizations. There were large swathes of land even during the Ice age that were ice free, and to imagine people congregated on those coasts and built some pretty decent sized settlements is perfectly reasonable, only for them all to get lost under the waves when the Ice Age ended and the oceans rose again.

I'm quite willing to accept the Bagdad Battery COULD be an early electric cell. The Abydos bird could be a toy glider (I mean it comes from the period when nearby Alexandria was the center of learning and scholarship. If Heron could work out things like hydraulics, steam power, and how to make a vending machine, the idea some other mechanic could work out how to make a toy glider seems pretty reasonable. Mesoamericans worked out how to smelt platinum, the pieces are proof in and of themselves. There's nothing magic about the Ashoka Pillar in Delhi, it just shows Indians of the time could make really good steel.

Going back to plants, there are quite a few where we don't know the center of diversity yet. Often, the domestic and wild forms have now so intergrown with each other that any "pure" stands of wild have long since been drowned out by domestics gone feral. We don't know where grass peas come from, and we're not totally sure for English peas (We THINK it's probably Pisum roxburghii, but are not sure.)

Pulsegleaner said:

Well, they do say that something like 93% of human history is unknown, since it occurred before someone invented written language. It's why I'm quite willing to believe in things like the Ancient Sea Kings and other pre-Sumerian civilizations. There were large swathes of land even during the Ice age that were ice free, and to imagine people congregated on those coasts and built some pretty decent sized settlements is perfectly reasonable, only for them all to get lost under the waves when the Ice Age ended and the oceans rose again.

I'm quite willing to accept the Bagdad Battery COULD be an early electric cell. The Abydos bird could be a toy glider (I mean it comes from the period when nearby Alexandria was the center of learning and scholarship. If Heron could work out things like hydraulics, steam power, and how to make a vending machine, the idea some other mechanic could work out how to make a toy glider seems pretty reasonable. Mesoamericans worked out how to smelt platinum, the pieces are proof in and of themselves. There's nothing magic about the Ashoka Pillar in Delhi, it just shows Indians of the time could make really good steel.

Going back to plants, there are quite a few where we don't know the center of diversity yet. Often, the domestic and wild forms have now so intergrown with each other that any "pure" stands of wild have long since been drowned out by domestics gone feral. We don't know where grass peas come from, and we're not totally sure for English peas (We THINK it's probably Pisum roxburghii, but are not sure.)

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I had to google all these references, but I learned quite a bit doing so. The battery, wow, that's actually pretty incredible. Makes me even more curious to dive into this subject of lost or hidden history. I did find something about an Abydos helicopter? Cool stuff. Saw a picture of the fortress in Yemen, Mount Shaqroof, while hunting all this stuff down. I've seen some wonders, but that really is a puzzler if it's real. How on earth did they get supplies up there?

The history of plants is quite related to all this, to me. Intertwined histories. Being a beagle owner and having researched the breed, I initially assumed of course it was an English dog. When you go down the rabbit hole it looks like the beagle was resusitated as a breed in England, it's not necessarily from there. I've read everything from Ancient Greece to Egypt as to where they originate. The recorded history is in England, but it seems they were elsewhere before but it isn't clearly documented. I think much the same can be said for plant origins in one way or another. It's those small clues that poke holes in theories and fill them with water.

heirloomgal said:

I had to google all these references, but I learned quite a bit doing so. The battery, wow, that's actually pretty incredible. Makes me even more curious to dive into this subject of lost or hidden history. I did find something about an Abydos helicopter? Cool stuff. Saw a picture of the fortress in Yemen, Mount Shaqroof, while hunting all this stuff down. I've seen some wonders, but that really is a puzzler if it's real. How on earth did they get supplies up there?

The history of plants is quite related to all this, to me. Intertwined histories. Being a beagle owner and having researched the breed, I initially assumed of course it was an English dog. When you go down the rabbit hole it looks like the beagle was resusitated as a breed in England, it's not necessarily from there. I've read everything from Ancient Greece to Egypt as to where they originate. The recorded history is in England, but it seems they were elsewhere before but it isn't clearly documented. I think much the same can be said for plant origins in one way or another. It's those small clues that poke holes in theories and fill them with water.

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The Abydos Helicopter is something different, and is now considered definitively a mistake. Someone engraved one hieroglyphic on a temple wall, covered it over, engraved another one, and then some of the cover flaked off revealing part of the original. The combination looks a bit like a helicopter (just like the one below it, that has had the same thing happen, looks a little like some sort of flying car/hydrofoil.) It's a bit like the Dendera Lights, which a lot of people thought looked like people using gigantic lightbulbs and some sort of generator, but is now assumed to simply be a mix of very common Egyptian motifs (snakes, Lotus Flowers etc.)

The Saqqara Bird (I got the place mixed up) is a little wooden statue of a falcon (more or less) with oddly straight wings and a flat tail with a notch in it. It already looks a lot like a toy areophane, and it files like one when thrown (if you stick another piece of wood into the slot in the tail for stabilizing, which believers think just got lost on the original. )


I've already mentioned that Araucaria chickens seem to have been in Peru before Europeans got there (which indicates possible earlier contact, probably from China). There's an engraving on a Mayan temple that looks a little like an elephant (of course, it also looks a bit like a tapir, which are local to the area, a Chinese book from around the 1500's that seems to show maize (which hadn't gotten to China, yet according to most researcher's) Egyptian mummies that have tested positive for tobacco and cocaine (though it is just as possible those were simply contaminated by the 19th century people who handled them), a Roman ship in an area of Brazil known as the Bay of Jars (due to being filled with amphorae) a roman statue head found in Mexico (possibly related to the ship, ship wrecks, head washes ashore someone picks it up, and it gets traded north. Similar to how the Maine Penny go traded down to Maine from Newfoundland where some Viking left it.) Some claims of Middle Eastern coins being found in Australia, and Roman ones in Japan (that IS verified, we know the coins are Roman we just don't know when, or how, the got to Japan. Direct contact between Rome and Japan seems unlikely.) And there is a carving on one of the walls of Angkor Wat that seems to show either a moa or a cassowary (probably the latter, since it is known they were sometimes brought from New Guinea up to Malaysia, and could have gotten to Thailand from there.
There is also some evidence that the Phoenicians may have made it to New Guinea, and that the legend of the phoenix is actually related to a trade in skins of birds of paradise. One of the brightest and commonest ones looks has two sprays of red-orange feathers under its wings, and does a hopping dance while mating, so it does look a bit like a bird dancing in flames. And the common way to prepared the skins for shipping at the time was to encase them in resin and then cover that with burned banana leaves which creates an egg shaped parcel (the Phoenix taking the ashes of it's predecessor/old body, making an egg out of them, and depositing it at the Temple of the Sun.)

heirloomgal said:

There was a time when those crates could be found everywhere, and now it's like they've all disappeared. You just never see them anywhere anymore, even though they used to be standard moving and storage for everbody. They woud solve the stacking issue due to the different jar heights, if I could find some of them.

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we had some in the garage used as a stackable spot to put some shoes and gloves, but they shattered between the cold and age, plastic just doesn't hold up - i'm also sure the bowl of decorative rocks on top didn't help...

Pulsegleaner said:

...One big problem with this whole thing is that NO ONE knows where Favas originally came from, their wild ancestor is more or less nowhere to be found.

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there's rather large sections of Africa and the Middle East that used to be more hospitable to life that are now pretty barren. this is mostly due to poor animal husbandry combined with land use practices which allow the topsoil to be washed or blown away. because it can happen so gradually many peoples just didn't know what was going on. this has also happened to much of any of the ancient empires (Rome, Greek, Egyptian...) and is happening to much of the agricultural lands of the USoA.

well anyways, due to how long they've been available as a food crop they probably originated in the Middle East or Egypt.