A Seed Saver's Garden

[heirloomgal]

I do have a question on growing beans for seed saving. I also have beehives
that may hunt the garden and crosspollinate but the bees usually are off hunting better nectar sources. Anyway, if I grow the pole beans along my fences and change varieties every 8 feet, can I gather seed from the middle of each patch and be fairly sure of purer seeds? I am assuming that like tomatoes there are tricks to keeping the seed fairly pure. For tomatoes, we gather the earliest blooms and plant varieties with different maturity so they aren't blooming all at once. I'm not going to be able to separate different varieties 20 or 50 feet apart to get pure seed like 'google says'... So what say you bean growers? What has been your experience. I'm also going to be growing some up the outside stalks of the corn patch....

I'm sorry that I don't have much good news for you @Vanalpaca! Bees are a real problem for seed saving! There are some tricks, like you mention with tomatoes - which is mostly about saving tomatoes from early blooms, so the flowers have had less chance of bees visiting. My honest opinion is bees are very haphazard in the way they fly, and the distances they'll go. To me, the only way to reliably save seeds is to get the bee numbers down. I've gotten rid of nearly all my perennial flowers that draw bees to save seeds. Runner beans are one of the last things I won't give up, and it's worth the risk to me. But there's no question those attract too many bees.

I don't do the separation distances commonly recommended with my tomato plants, or my bean plants. What I do is manage the bees, and do everything I can to discourage them from coming here. Even with those recommended distances if you have a fair number of bees around, it won't matter, the bees will cross pollinate things. A bee can fly much farther than 20 feet to get to another plant it's interested in. I don't put much stock in those isolation guidelines.

 

[flowerbug]

the most surefire way to do tomatoes would be to use the fine mesh cover on the branch or bloom and then when the flower has developed enough to ding it well so it self-pollinates. i think @Zeedman does this for his peppers.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

One update. I may have gotten a sprout in the Miner's Lettuce pot (forgot to mention that one.) I don't see the round leaves yet, but maybe those come later.

 

[heirloomgal]

the most surefire way to do tomatoes would be to use the fine mesh cover on the branch or bloom and then when the flower has developed enough to ding it well so it self-pollinates. i think @Zeedman does this for his peppers.

It's an option for sure, but it has problems too. Hard to cover to the ground growing plants with the mesh, and determined bees can still get in at ground level. Then they get trapped in there and go a bit flower crazy in there, probably causing more crossing than if there were no mesh at all.

 

[heirloomgal]

I discovered this week that my Devil's claw plants grow to 4 or 5 feet wide. This means I'll have to throw some out, because that is way too large for my garden, and for a novelty crop to boot. I could crowd them I guess, and that would probably limit their size. I still haven't hammered in where everything is going to go so their final placement is yet to be decided...

I see a few rows of carrots are up; you can really see what seed is fresh and what isn't. Unless something in red carrots causes them to germinate more quickly, because it's 'Kyoto Red' and 'Chantenay Red' that are up first. I'm looking forward to trying my new 'Manpukuji' carrots. Nantes tends to be the most favored carrot flavor wise, so we'll see what kind of competition these are.

DH saw a huge groundhog 2 days ago, another ominous sighting. But that night we heard a small coyote group vocalizing just behind the back yard. So, good timing. Go get 'em friends. I forgot to cover my two precious collard plants, and the lettuce seedlings, the last 2 nights - and nobody ate them nor the kale plants. So a good sign, though the front yard is always more safe than the back. On that note though, I can vouch for 'Feuille de Chene Blonde' as a lettuce that will live virtually as a perennial from seed. I planted it 3 years ago and it has reliably come back from seed every year since, with no intervention from me. I love a lettuce that doesn't need me.