Dried Pods
This year’s garden had a lot of volunteer crops make an appearance – lettuce, kale, radish, carrots – completely unintentional though I’ve recently learned lettuce and kale when left to bolt and flower reseed themselves. The carrots were crap to eat but the lettuce was a nice welcome as it came much earlier than anything we planted on purpose. We usually rotate where we plant our vegetables as best practice but this year we decided to allow the kale to flower and go to seed. Before collecting the seeds you have to let them mature on the plant and dry out. I kept close watch each day on the plants and carefully plucked the toasted looking pods. At that point, the pods are ready to leap from their casings, and though it’s ohso tempting to shake the stalks to produce that soothing rattle you must steady your hand if you want to keep any of those sound makers from making for soil. It’s quite therapeutic to sit down with a pile of dried pods, take special care to separate each pod’s two sides, and concentrate on not losing too many of the tiny black/dark brown seeds in the couch cushions (also helps to have a good show to watch while sifting through about a billion pods). I hope to keep up the practice of collecting seeds each year… and letting those volunteer carrots go to flower, they’re so goshdarn pretty.
Seeds!