Winnowing

Yesterday was all about getting my seed harvest sorted out. I keep paper bags in the corner of my dining room full of seeds of various kinds. The beans had already been sorted out, but I still had mache (which I forgot to plant this fall), three kinds of lettuce, coriander, dill and mustard seeds to deal with. I got all but the mustard done. Sadly the lettuce seeds I didn't label. So I have three kinds of lettuce seed - Red Sails, Little Gem, and Deer Tongue - in bags, but they just read lettuce. Oh well. I'm going to plant them all next year at the same time anyway. The coriander and dill, which you see above, are also saved for eating. I use a lot of dill seed in my pickles every year. I use some coriander and cook with coriander too, but I won't use nearly half of what I picked. I really should start doing less. Winnowing seeds is hard work. I wonder if my townhouse mates want any.

I have two patches of mustard growing for seed. Both are really experiments to see if they can be grown in another season besides spring. The above patch was planted in early August. I'm not sure it will have time to produce anything. We are going to start getting frosts soon. Typically by the middle of November the ground is frozen. The other patch was planted in late June. I picked some of the seeds on Saturday. I'll let them dry in the paper bag for a week to make sure they are well dry before I try to break open the pods and winnow them out. So the summer sowing was a success. The fall sowing not so much. Next year I've got the rotation set up so they can go in after the garlic which gets pulled about the first of July. I think that will work out well. And I'll have more space than I had this time.

And in other spice news, I finished drying the garlic and ground it up.

Then dried an onion and ground that up too. I love the smell of freshly dried onion. It smells like onion dip.