Friday, June 10, 2011

Pictures and old seeds.

Planted the Autumn Olive today.  Right between the rose of sharon and the big hydrangea. If it survives winter it will be about 3 years before i see berries. They are supposed to have a cranberry-like flavor. We'll see.

Took some pictures yesterday.

Onion row
Tomato row, cucumbers are too small to see and the summer squash are too far off
Potatoes




Kossack kholrabi




Red cabbage

Broccoli. Praying i don't get 'chucked again this year!
Peppers and eggplant
Small herb patch. More going in shortly
Edelweiss.  This is the one i had to relocate, so it is a bit behind
Marechal Foch , going like crazy as usual.  I need to prune it back.
Marechal Foch flower buds
Frontenac
Reliance
Reliance flower buds
Edelweiss two
Edelweiss flower buds





York, Nova and unnamed edderberries
Stanley prune plum doing great
Some petunias
Blueberries

Might get a quart of berries if all these ripen




Purple smoke bush.  Its happy to see the silky dogwood gone.  I still need to train it to lean to the right

Herb seedlings. They need a bit more time to grow before going into the garden.  I was late starting them.





Now for something that i get a kick out of. Hubby accidentally threw out a collection of paper seedling trays that i was saving for seed starting next year. So he felt bad,  and then he was at the recycle station and found me a whole lot of assorted size plastic seedling pots, peat pots and paper trays in a box.  So i was digging through a box and i found a bunch of seed packets. They were all Johnny's Selected Seeds. The packets are quite old. The design has changed over the years.

I was happy to find a tomato packet among them. I looked it up and it is supposed to be a good variety for up here.
Very old seeds.  (And i have a 12 year old manicurist in case you were wondering.)
But Johnny's seeds are usually good well after their expiry date. So i'm going to do a germination test.  If the box of pots was stored someplace cool and dry i should have fair luck.
Moist paper towel
Dump out the seeds. Quite a few left. Maybe 40. I didn't count



Lined up neatly
Fold them up



Sealed up and off to a warm, dark spot.
I hope one or two are still alive. I'll definitely save some seeds from these if they germinate and if the fruit are any good.

2 comments:

Mal's Allotment said...

Cute trick with the tomato seeds! Can't wait.

Our purple smoke bush also grows at an angle. probably because it is squeezed into a dark corner.

icebear said...

I'm enough of a garden nerd that if i can get a couple seeds to sprout, it will be like the coolest thing ever! lol