A few things make a post

[unicornduke]

Good things:

 I got out to my garden on friday and harvested a few things, everything looks super good except for the late planted melons which got eaten by cucumber beetles. Oops. I have a harvest of potato fruit as well, so I need to get them opened and ferment the seeds. gross.

I helped dragonlady7  pickup and move her building supplies and it was a great time. Yeah it was work hauling things around but at various points we were waiting on the person driving the tractor and were just standing around chatting. Yay in person hangouts!

I got my Corriedale yarn plyed.

My knitting/crafting group is meeting on Tuesday for the first time in a long while

Bad thing: my stomach was extremely upset by the tacos we got last night and I ended up throwing up in the middle of the night.

Other:

 I signed up for a hand building pottery class in August

It's been rainy gross all weekend and I'm relaxing today. only tasks are to eat food and make yogurt. I was planning to make meatballs but I would need defrosted meat for that and guess what I forgot to put in the fridge.

Comments

[graydon]

Boo, vile tacos!

Today I learned that planting chunks of tuber is NOT just for the agricultural convenience of cloning. Hope the process is not too stinky.

[unicornduke]

they are really tasty tacos too :(

I mean, to be fair, tuber saving and planting is much easier to get similar varieties because potatoes are incredible outcrossers and are frequently self sterile, so they require cross breeding. Almost all potato seed comes with a warning that it may have cross bred because it is so out there and they can produce a huge variation in size, color, yield and taste. Some tubers can be poisonous even.

Tomatoes are actually another crop that the seeds need to be fermented.

[graydon]

Often, yeah. Giving up cheese was really hard; just because it's poisonous to my biochemistry doesn't mean it stopped tasting good. (took years for bread to stop smelling appetizing.)

Somehow my mental image for "fermented potato" -- which is of course of the tuber -- is much worse than my mental image for "fermented tomato" -- which the fruits will do themselves if you let them get too ripe -- which doesn't really make sense under the circumstances.

I kind of wonder what was eating the fruits in the wild, to ferment the seeds. It doesn't seem like it can have been the same thing; I can believe it was llamas (well, guanaco) for potatoes but that seems unlikely for mesoamerican tomatoes. Turkeys? The seeds are small, it's not like the osage or avocado problems.

[unicornduke]

It's actually rotting fruit that does the fermenting! When we ferment, you basically just juice the tomato/whatever into a container and keep the skins out. We've bred these plants to hold their fruit but the fruit dropping to the ground and rotting happens pretty easily. The fermentation mostly removes a gel from the outside of the seed that inhibits germination so they don't sprout in the fruit while it is still on the vine.

Even if the seeds didn't have the fermentation, generally time would take care of the gel.

[graydon]

Nifty!

(This also explains compost heap volunteer tomato plants.)

I have learned a thing; thank you!

[recently_folded]

I've not done the potato seeds, but definitely the tomatoes. Some years I ferment them, some not, and I'm not sure but that the ferment-stripped seeds sprout faster.

But I chuckled at the melon loss (which isn't funny at all) because I was just rummaging around in the bottom of the "warmframe" (too small for a greenhouse; too large for a coldframe) where I grow my tomatoes and discovered that while the tomatoes are in great shape, the basil plants I put in as an insect repellent have been eaten down to just stems! Sacrificial is not what I intended at all for them, grrrr. I'm glad I keep a pot or two of basil in the kitchen in the summer so that I at least have some to cook with. It's been a wacky growing season this year anyway, but this was an especially unpleasant surprise.

[unicornduke]

Yeah, I've always at least partially fermented tomatoes but potatoes are notoriously difficult to germinate so I need to give them all the advantages I can.

Yeah, sacrificial melons! It kept the cuke beetles away from the older melons I guess....

But oh no, your basil! I hope you can get more if you need

[unicornduke]

You're welcome! Compost heaps are good for volunteer everything as far as I can tell haha