Gardening From Your Kitchen Scraps And Saving Seeds

Do you throw away the seeds from vegetables that you buy from the store?  Did you know that you can actually grow new vegetable plants from them?  You can!  And it's super fun and easy!

Check out these tops that I saved from bell peppers.  I usually throw them away, but I figured I might as well run an experiment and dry them on the windowsill.  Once they were good and crispy dry, the seeds fell off easily.

Here are my nice, dried seeds.

I planted them into soil, watered well, and...

Holy moly!  A whole bunch of little sprouts popped out today!  I am now eagerly waiting to see how these new bell pepper plants will turn out in my garden this year.  Maybe I'll grow my very own bell peppers, maybe I'll just have cool plants.  Anyhow, it's pretty neat!

I have also been saving other seeds from plants.  Last year, I planted a bunch of kale and brussel sprouts.  They survived over the winter and have now gone to seed.  

The dried seed pods pop open very easily and drop two rows of small seeds.  

These are dark kale seeds. 

These are brussel sprout seeds.  The greener looking seeds are the ones that are not dried well yet.  Once they are all dried and brown, I plan to drop them onto the soil to grow new plants.  If you do this yearly, you'll never have to buy brussel sprout and kale seeds again!

These are various kinds of pea and bean plants.  They are all grown from seeds that I have saved from last year's crop.  See?  No need to buy new seeds.  You just have to make sure that you save a lot of beans and peas each year so that you always have lots of seeds to plant for the next year.  My mom ties colourful twist ties onto beans/peas throughout the growing season to mark those as seeds so that we don't accidentally pick them to eat.  

All beans/peas that have accidentally over-ripened are also kept for seeds.  Seed pods should be allowed to completely swell and dry up before you pick them for seed stock.  If it looks like it might go moldy, pick them sooner once the pod is overly swollen and plump (big fat seeds).

Other vegetables that I have tried to grow from seed successfully:

Tomatoes - harvest the seeds from your ripe tomatoes with all the goop and juice.  Put them in a cup with a little water and let them sit for about 2-3 days so that they can ferment.  Rinse the seeds clean in a sieve.  Let dry well on a windowsill for a week or more, well spread out.  Once well dry, you can plant them or store them for later use.  There's a pretty good tutorial on this here.

The best tomatoes are those overly ripe, rotting ones so make sure you try this out on those tomatoes you forgot in the fridge instead of throwing them out.  I suspect that an overly ripe, rotting tomato on your soil will also eventually yield usable tomato seeds that will grow where they fall.  

It's worth a try if you plan to throw out the tomato anyways  :)

Potatoes - If your potatoes grow roots and sprouts, just pop them into the soil and let them keep growing.  In late Fall, you can harvest the small new potatoes that grow from the one you put in the soil.  You can save any potatoes that are too small in Fall to plant again the next year as your potato seed stock.

Green onions - save the last 1-2 inch with roots from your green onions and plant them into the soil.  New green onions will grow from this base.

Shallots/Garlic - if your shallots or garlic bulbs sprout, plant them and eat the green onions that grow from them.

Squash/Zucchini/Cucumber/Pumpkin/Etc - Save the seeds from ripe squashes and dry them on a windowsill.  When very dry, plant them in the soil and grow new squash plants.

Persimmon - Save the seeds from persimmons, rinse them, dry them well on a windowsill, plant and they will grow small persimmon trees.  They will probably not grow persimmon fruit unless you live in a hotter climate, but the trees are short with shiny pale green leaves and look very nice.

Raspberries/Blackberries - My raspberry bushes at home drop raspberries each year onto the soil because I can't always find all the ripe fruit and eat it in time.  This means that lots of tiny new plants emerge each year all over the bottom of the original bush.  In the same way, you can basically let a raspberry dry up and then break it up to plant the seeds.  You can also smush a fresh raspberry up through a strainer (being careful not to destroy the seeds), rinse off all the fruit material, and then let the seeds dry on a windowsill.  Once the seeds are good and dry, plant them to grow new raspberry bushes.  You might want to just discard a rotten raspberry on the soil and see what happens.

Other random fun:

• Plant the tops/bases of everything you discard from your kitchen such as carrot and beet tops, the base of different cabbages/celery/etc.  Some of them will grow roots and some of them will just rot away (and become compost).  It's fun to see what will grow and what won't.  In some cases it won't grow you a new vegetable to eat, but it will amuse you for a while.
• Dry and plant any seeds you collect from your produce.  It's fun to see what will grow.  You might be pleasantly surprised.
• Plant any fresh herb stems that you don't plan to use, such as rosemary and basil.  Sometimes they will actually grow roots and become a new plant.

There are actually whole books on this fun process of growing foods/plants from kitchen scraps.  Have you ever grown food from your kitchen scraps?  Let me know how it went!

 

Good luck and happy gardening!

Goldfish Babies Day Nine

The baby goldfish are now 9 days old.  As you can see, some of them have plumped up quite a bit with round little white bellies.

Some personalities or individual characteristics have also started to become visible. 

For instance, the largest and strongest fish tend to stay at the top section of the water.  They get first pick of the egg yolk that I feed them, eating big gulps of it at a time.  As the yolk starts to settle downwards, they follow it down, but tend to still stay towards the top section.

 A few of the babies lurk among the plants.  They tend to be less visible and they tend to pick at the plants or pick egg yolk off the plants to eat.

 On the ground level, you will find the smallest fish.  When one of the bigger fish swim down to the bottom to pick up food, you might notice that the ground-dwellers are almost half the size and much skinnier. 

The ground level is also where you will find some fish with birth defects.  For instance, this particular fish shown above has a spine that is curved in a spiral fashion.  As a result, this fish will actually spin as it swims upwards in a jerky manner.  This fish is not very strong and tends to swim in short spurts and not very far.  Most of the time, it lies on the gravel.  It is one of my favourite fish to look for and watch.  I hope it survives.

There is one fish with a back that is bent less and it is able to swim to the top in a much wider spiral to get food.  It is still much skinnier than the others, but it is clearly much stronger than this one since it can swim all the way to the top.

 Even at the top, there are a few fish that seem unusual.  There is one fish at the top that is very long, but very thin.  It tends to just float at the top of the water, not really eating.  I am not sure if it is sick, if it doesn't store food in the intestines much, or if it eats very little at a time.

It is fun to watch these little fish growing up.  I am still giving them both the green water and the drop of egg yolk 2-3 times per day.  They don't react much to the green water, but I can visibly watch them eat the egg yolk.  I use a wooden chopstick to just poke at a raw egg yolk that I have stored in the refrigerator.  Then I stir the chopstick gently in the water and the egg yolk comes off in tiny slivers.  I can watch the fry chase the slivers of egg and sort of suck it up as they eat at it.  It's pretty neat.

Have a great day!

Goldfish Babies Day Six

The baby goldfish are now six days old. 

Almost all of them are swimming about and have good control of staying still and controlling movement in the water.

 As you can see from the photo, food is clearly moving from the stomach to the intestines and out.

 The swim bladder is still visible as a bubble on the fry.

 The baby goldfish have a more rounded body shape now as the body is starting to fill out.  You can also see fins now!  See the little tuft at the end of the tail?

 From a bottom up view, you can see those little fins on the sides.

 In terms of length, the baby fry are now easy to see compared to when they were first born.  I would estimate that they have doubled in length.

 You see that the spine arches a little bit over the stomach area.

 This fish looks okay, but I have noticed at least two babies that have very crooked spines.  They are bent about 45 degrees or more.  One of them is so crooked that he/she swims in a spiral.  The other one is on the gravel and just hops from one area to another instead of swimming.  I think these are the babies that would normally be culled, but I want to wait and see if they can survive.  The one that swims in a spiral looks well-fed, but the one on the floor looks skinny.

I feed the babies some of the green water and a drop of egg yolk swished about twice a day.  When I am home in the day time, I give them a feeding in the afternoon too.  Their bellies look full so I think they are eating enough. 

I hope you are having a great week so far!

Baby Goldfish Day Three

The baby goldfish are three days old now.  

You can pretty clearly see what I meant yesterday about the little air bubble in their midsection that helps them float.  Notice also that their eyes don't look as big now compared to their body since the body is gaining some girth.

  See the little air bubble in the middle?

 More of the babies are swimming about now and you can see that many of them are now horizontal instead of vertical.

 Sometimes they are not used to the air bubble and they will slowly float to the top like a bubble instead of swimming.

 Many of them still dart about with their heads upright.

 See how small they still are compared to a measly bubble on the surface of the water?

 I expect that there will be even more swimmers by this evening.  

 I have not noticed any babies in the other two aquariums with the guppies or goldfish parents.  I have a feeling they have all been eaten, but I will likely find out soon once all of the babies are mobile and swimming faster, more purposefully around.

I fed the babies some of the green infusoria water today.  I don't know if it actually makes a difference since all the organisms are so microscopic that it just looks like cloudy green water.  Also, the baby goldfish tank has lots of gravel and plants that should be creating the same kind of aquatic life as my infusoria jar.

Have a happy day!