untitled/Tom Moody

Germinating Seeds

Thyme To Garden Now

Experiences and experiments in vegetable gardening

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Friday, September 17, 2010

Germinating Cantaloupe Seeds

Do you ever test-germinate your seeds to see how good they are?

We bought a cantaloupe from a local farmer's market a few weeks ago, and I saved the seeds.  I put the slimy gooey seeds into a bowl, filled it with water, discarded all the ones that floated to the top and just kept the ones that stayed at the bottom of the bowl.  Then I dried them on some newspaper.  Even after discarding the floaty seeds, I probably still have well over a hundred seeds.  I'm definitely not going to plant all of them and I'm sure they will go "bad" in a few years, long before I get around to ever using them all up, either personally or through seed trading.  But before I considered allocating garden space to these seeds and/or trading them away, I wanted to make sure that these seeds were good.

So I placed about a dozen seeds on a sheet of wet paper towel, loosely wrapped them up and put the whole thing in a ziploc bag.  I left the ziploc part open for ventilation, and placed the bag in my grow box.  About five days later, this is what they looked like:

Every single one of the seeds germinated!  Not only that, the roots were really starting to develop, with some of them growing through the double-ply paper towel and coming out on the bottom.  Since I don't know the variety of the parent cantaloupe, I probably won't plant very many of them.  But it's good to know that these seeds are good!

Before you ask, no, I did not save these seedlings, because our indoor grow box is definitely not big enough to grow melons in over the winter.  It's always difficult throwing perfectly good seedlings away, but they served their experimental purpose, and went to go rest (permanently) in the compost pile.

Chinese Elm seedling: Mr. Nature

Chinese elm seedling

I feel like this little tree after not having eaten solid food for 4 and a half days, been on a juice fast.
This was the 4th an extra from Mr. Nature, who as we had some confusion from my order from etsy included this little one as a bonus. It came with hardly any roots just a couple of hair width 1/4 long feeders so was skeptical of its chances but after a couple weeks and all its leaves falling off a bud looks like it will sprout leaves. A real survivor these Chinese elms prove to be. Maybe i should not start counting my chickens until it is out of the woods.

Fast

The Towelettes

Three Chinese elm tree seedlings from Mr. Nature via etsy They arrived bare roots 6 to 8" tall from Florida. Sent Ups express took 4 days to arrive, as it is june/july they came green and moist wrapped in plastic moist newspaper in a small tube, all seem to have made the transition to rich mulch and sand mix. Mr Nature sent me an extra one with very little root it's leaves fell off but it may come back. According to some research these elms are resistant to the disease that has decimated the American elm. They are extremely hearty enjoy full sun and are drought tolerant. Plan to plant 2 out side and keep one in a container. They join 17 other bonsai and small trees in my brooklyn collection.