Saving Seed

You can save seed from almost any herbaceous perennial, annual, herb or vegetable that grows in your garden. You'll be saving money, participating in a thousands-of-years-old agricultural practice, and learning, learning, learning.

• Take a look around your garden at the flowers you liked most. While you can harvest seed from almost any plant, it's often quite difficult to grow woody plants from seed.
• Take seed on a dry day. Wet plants and seeds invite mold.
• Take one or more entire flowers or seed pods, put them in a brown paper bag and write the name of the plant and the date on the bag .
• Allow the flowers or pods to dry for several weeks. Since we're heading into the holidays, you might forget the bags until after the New Year, and that's ok. The drying process can go on without anything being hurt.
• When you're ready to harvest the seed, prepare by lining a big table with newspaper.
• Collect a few brownie-size baking tins, shoe box lids or similar size vessels.
• Collect small coin envelopes or use empty, cleaned, dry pill bottles.
• Get one or more sieves or strainers with varying hole sizes.
• Open one bag at time and empty the contents into a strainer. Shake to loosen the seeds and allow them to fall through onto the baking tins or show box lids.
• Using a spatula or piece of cardstock, scrape up the seeds and pour them into one of the coin envelopes or pill bottles.
• Write the name of the plant on the envelope or bottle.

When you're ready to start your seedlings, consult a good seed catalog (for example, http://www.johnnyseeds.com/) for sowing depth and germination times for your plants. You can check planting manuals or the Cornell vegetable gardening website http://www.hort.cornell.edu/gardening/homegardening/sceneb771.html for details on sowing times of vegetables.

Plant Garlic in October!
Plant garlic in mid-to-late October for harvest next summer. Purchase garlic sold specifically for planting, or buy organic garlic. Commercial, non-organic, supermarket garlic might have been treated to inhibit sprouting, or it may be a soft-necked, non-hardy variety from California (which is where most garlic is grown). Break the garlic head into individual cloves. Keep the largest ones for planting. (Use the small cloves for cooking!) Plant the cloves about 2-3 inches deep and about 6-8 inches apart with the pointed side up, in rows that are about 15 inches apart. Mulch the bed well with straw. This helps protect garlic cloves from winter freezing and thawing, and suppresses weeds in spring.
Try some different varieties to see which you prefer. German Extra Hardy is one of the best rated by New York State gardeners! Interested in rating vegetable varieties? See: http://vegvariety.cce.cornell.edu/

For More information on growling Garlic:
http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/homegardening/scene568b.html

http://counties.cce.cornell.edu/yates/mg10.10.01.htm

Should I keep composting through winter?

Absolutely! If your compost pile or bin is active enough, it will continue processing your food scraps and garden debris. You'll need some balance foe all the food scraps, and the piles of sawdust you create when sawing wood for your wood stove are excellent for this purpose. Even when temperatures plummet, you'll still be reducing your contribution to the waste stream if you continue composting. Of course, if your compost area is way at the end of the 'south 40,' we won't blame you for spending more of your winter indoors. For more about composting, go to the source:

http://cwmi.css.cornell.edu/compostbrochure.pdf

Are you a teacher? Check out how your classroom can compost, at: http://compost.css.cornell.edu/CIC.html

Late Blight,
And End-of-the-Season Veggie Garden Clean-up.

If you, like so many other enthusiastic vegetable gardeners, watched your tomatoes succumb to late blight this year and melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West, you may wonder what to do to clean up your garden this fall.

The answers may be simpler than you think! Late blight can only winter-over in live plant tissue. In our area the only likely way this can happen is in a potato tuber accidentally left in the garden bed. If you grow tomatoes and potatoes, be especially vigilant in digging up those potatoes!

For more information on late blight, check out this link:
http://www.longislandhort.cornell.edu/vegpath/lbfaq.pdf

For garden clean-up after other tomato diseases, such as Septoria leaf spot, check out the section on http://www.gardening.cornell.edu/homegardening/scene7af3.html that discusses cleaning up your garden and discarding debris!