A Seed Saver's Garden

[meadow]

Such a great idea. The future of our food is looking more and more fragile; it's almost as if there is a concerted effort against food production and food growers, which will result in people by necessity having to grow at least some of their own food. The situation with our farmers here in Canada and the enormous forces working against them can only result in shortages. The situation with the farmers in the Netherlands is concerning. At the the same time, the situation with seeds is also in jeopardy from the point of view that borders around the world are increasingly closing to the movement of seed - except to corporations. The EU seems to have sealed itself off, as well as other places; it's shocking commie Canada hasn't done so with all the other treachery going on. Probably just a matter of time for us. So I shall continue on as a squirrel collecting acorns. Lol

Does that mean that we in the US are allowed to send seed to Canada? I do not think we are allowed to receive it without having a certification or license or whatever.

 

[heirloomgal]

Dunno...
Stalin killed off HIS farmers.
Are they to that point yet?!?!?

I know! Its scary. China has a bad track record too. And the prime minister here says China is his favourite country.

 

[heirloomgal]

Does that mean that we in the US are allowed to send seed to Canada? I do not think we are allowed to receive it without having a certification or license or whatever.

Yes, it's pretty much wide open for seeds to come into Canada. But the US is pretty well closed up for ordinary citizens to receive from us or abroad, and so is most of Europe. You can apply for a Small Lot seed permit in the US to receive beans and peas as far as I know, but not tomatoes or peppers.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

As far as I can tell, it's a matter of WHO you are getting seed from. The U.S. issue isn't trying to keep people from having seed, it's keeping diseases out. So if the person or company you are buying from offers phytosanitary certificates and you are willing to pay the price to get one, you're fine.

The exception to this (and the one that brings me so much frustration,) is if the seed is for something with a woody stem, such as a tree. In THAT case, you also need an import license. I have toyed with trying to get one of those, but the instructions are a mix of confusing and worrying (they spend a LOT of time talking about how by trying to apply for a form, you give permission for EVERYTHING you submit to be shared with ALL branches and departments of the government. I may have misread it, but I think you even have to agree to let them have access to everything on your computer and online accounts.)

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Oh, I forgot to mention something on Friday. While driving to get lunch, me and my dad happened to go over a chunk of road we normally do not go on (we go on that ROAD all the time, but as this is the first time we have ever gone between the two points we were at on Friday, we never travel that part of it.)

While we were driving, I looked out the window and saw some grain (probably rye) growing on the shoulder of the road. In and of itself, this is not unusual; grain often shows up on the side of the road due to road workers laying down straw to help with absorption when they are doing work.

A few seconds later we saw some more. Interesting, I thought, but maybe they had done work there.

THEN when we had gone a little farther we reached a spot where the grain was not only covering the entire shoulder of the road, but the entire grassy area behind it! NO WAY could all of that have come from errant seeds in straw!

I can only assume that, for some reason, they put down actual grain seed there. Why I have no idea (I'd say to feed the wild turkey population, but they already have plenty of food, and, in any case, they wouldn't WANT them getting that close to the highway and risk getting run over (which would be bad for both parties; like a deer, I imagine a wild turkey is big enough to actually cause car damage if it is hit.)

 

[flowerbug]

Oh, I forgot to mention something on Friday. While driving to get lunch, me and my dad happened to go over a chunk of road we normally do not go on (we go on that ROAD all the time, but as this is the first time we have ever gone between the two points we were at on Friday, we never travel that part of it.)

While we were driving, I looked out the window and saw some grain (probably rye) growing on the shoulder of the road. In and of itself, this is not unusual; grain often shows up on the side of the road due to road workers laying down straw to help with absorption when they are doing work.

A few seconds later we saw some more. Interesting, I thought, but maybe they had done work there.

THEN when we had gone a little farther we reached a spot where the grain was not only covering the entire shoulder of the road, but the entire grassy area behind it! NO WAY could all of that have come from errant seeds in straw!

I can only assume that, for some reason, they put down actual grain seed there. Why I have no idea (I'd say to feed the wild turkey population, but they already have plenty of food, and, in any case, they wouldn't WANT them getting that close to the highway and risk getting run over (which would be bad for both parties; like a deer, I imagine a wild turkey is big enough to actually cause car damage if it is hit.)

maybe they got the wrong seeds (winter rye the grain is not the same as rye the grass)? anyways, it does work well as a first season quick crop to hold topsoil in place and the grain will get eaten by birds and rodents. if someone is willing to harvest and thresh it they could have some free food. alas, along a road is not a low pollution area and i'd not really want to eat anything grown too closely to a road. lead from leaded gas is all over.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

maybe they got the wrong seeds (winter rye the grain is not the same as rye the grass)? anyways, it does work well as a first season quick crop to hold topsoil in place and the grain will get eaten by birds and rodents. if someone is willing to harvest and thresh it they could have some free food. alas, along a road is not a low pollution area and i'd not really want to eat anything grown too closely to a road. lead from leaded gas is all over.

Well, under normal circumstances, I'd stop and take a sample of the seeds for trying to grow in my own yard (the idea of grain that can grow well without any human input needed is quite attractive to me*.) But, unfortunately, the patch is on a piece of road that really doesn't have anywhere convenient to park (I'm not even sure there is a pull off lane there.) so that's a no-go.

It kind of LOOKED like what showed up a few years ago a bit further up that highway (which, now that I think of it, was also very, very large, and so could also have been actual grain.) THAT I DID get a sample of (there actually WAS somewhere you could pull over there.) but whether I still have it, I do not know.

And, again, I'm not sure they'd WANT something to feed birds and rodents so close to the road. More animals near the highway means more animals trying to cross the highway, which means more collisions, more damage and more roadkill for the village to have to pick up.

*Actually, thinking back, if it IS the same as what showed up there, it not only is able to thrive without human help but actually able to over winter enough of its seed to come back the NEXT year, so that it becomes a PERMANENT part of the ecosystem until human intervention comes in (i.e. when they have someone come in and mow the whole area to keep the vegetation low enough for people to see.)

 

[heirloomgal]

unfortunately, the patch is on a piece of road that really doesn't have anywhere convenient to park (I'm not even sure there is a pull off lane there.) so that's a no-go.

I know about this too @Pulsegleaner ! There is a section of winding highway just out of town that's against a mountainside; it's an OCEAN of purple blue lupine flowers in early summer. It's the only place I know of that has them, I suspect they are escapees from someone's garden that somehow managed to naturalize because they are not wild here. I've wanted to get some seed from there for years but that section of highway has no area to pull off plus it's on a curve and everyone speeds. So I always drive past and dream!

 

[heirloomgal]

Few garden pics from the weekend. Getting a nice break today from sun, am enjoying the leisurely feel of overcast.

'White African Sorgum'. Not near as tall as the corn, about 1/3 the size. Not sure what that means, never grown this variety before. I had to destroy nearly all my Jobs Tears to pillage a vole tunnel, so I do hope I get at least one of my two alternate grains to seed. Those plants were from my last seed too.

Cowpeas were either attacked by delia platura or some soli borne bacteria during that mighty cold spell. Probably delia though. Went to near freezing a few nights in early summer and stayed cold. Oh well, early planting is always a gamble. The transplants look better than the seeds I put in. They might make seed yet.

Red Picotee morning glories. It's a start. Time will tell how this does. If no flowers arrive this summer it will be my final try with it. Hoping!

Tabasco peppers. Surprised they're so early. It's surprising how you can mistreat plants as I did this one and they reward you. Lol

I just can't make these go away. 1 year 's planting, stuck with it forever now.

Went for a walk with DD to a nearby area, looks like a housing development. Thought this was interesting, where 'nature meets suburbia'. There must be calcium here because a lot of the scraped area was utterly taken over be daisies, as far as you could see. I think daisies are actually an invasive species, which seems evident when it has little native competition like this.

Experiencing major tech glitches trying to post. Will try to complete this later.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I know about this too @Pulsegleaner ! There is a section of winding highway just out of town that's against a mountainside; it's an OCEAN of purple blue lupine flowers in early summer. It's the only place I know of that has them, I suspect they are escapees from someone's garden that somehow managed to naturalize because they are not wild here. I've wanted to get some seed from there for years but that section of highway has no area to pull off plus it's on a curve and everyone speeds. So I always drive past and dream!

Sounds like me and a few of the crabapple trees. Over the last few years, I have been on a sort of quest to try and gain access to, and taste, the fruit of every apple and crabapple tree I see (part of is a precaution, in case the world goes kerflooey and I need to forage, It'll help to know which trees are WORTH foraging from) that has fruit bigger than a pea (below that size, I assume there isn't going to be enough apple flesh to bother). A couple are in pretty easy to get to spots (like parking lots), so they are no problem, apart from finding some excuse to be near them (like the two in the mall in Nanuet across the river which actually make full size fruit that are edible, if a little tart. Before, it was easy to have an excuse to go there, since it was right in front of the Nanuet Casual Male XL where I would go clothes shopping. But the store has since closed, so there is no longer a good excuse I can come up with to go over there to my Dad.)

But there are at least three I have yet to sample because their spots are currently totally inaccessible. There's the one in the cow field at Stone Barns (the Rockefeller farmland). The cows are all gone now (sold) but there is still the matter of the sheep, which also sometimes graze there, and whatever farmhands may be wandering around (if I can't get them to listen to me about doing something about the mass of kudzu on the gate on the other side before it causes everyone a nightmare, I don't have a hope of explaining to them why I am wandering across their field. Maybe when and if I get employed there, things will be different.)

The second is one producing cherry sized red crabapples that is in a knot of brush on the road that runs through Ardsley-On-Hudson. There, not only is there no shoulder, but it's right in front of a major turnoff; on the wrong side of course. Plus I'm not totally sure it's still there, I don't recall seeing any fruit last summer/fall.

Number three is probably in Scarsdale or Hartsdale (when you are going by roads rather than downtowns, it is sometimes hard to tell where one village ends and the next one begins) across the street from the burnt out nursery. Cherry sized fruit again, but yellow this time. There, the problem in addition to the lack of a shoulder is a blind turn with a warning light right by it to keep people from crashing into each other (not a traffic light, a light to tell you what the actual traffic light, which you can't see from there, is so you don't wind up driving head on into another car going the opposite direction. It has something to do with a long term road repair project.)

There MAY also be one in the gully at the very end of the road between Tarrytown and Pleasantville, but it's a bit too deep to see clearly (there was a REAL apple tree on the other side once, near the horse stables, but that seems to have been removed since.) That area DOES have a shoulder, but I am reluctant to try and go down there until I can visually confirm there is something down there worth going down FOR (there are a lot of nosy highway cops at that intersection, and after the incident last year with the Korean Dogwoods, I don't want to stop until I am SURE those are apples. For sort of the same reason, I haven't tried any of the ones between Tarrytown and Millwood; as I have never seen the fruit (just the flowers) I assume they are all tiny green ones.)