Physalis pruinosa a.k.a. “Ground Cherry”

...iced at a staggering $3.99–a lot considering the package only contained 12 seeds. You can be certain that we’ll be doing some seed saving on this one if we get a successful crop! The googling required to sort out the many common names of Physalis pruinosa revealed an intriguing source of seeds, Trade Winds Fruit, located in Chula Vista. Trade Winds carries a number of nightshade family plants including four from the Physalis genus and even somethi...

Read…

Why is My Squash Bitter?

...of the Cucurbitaceae family, one of the most difficult vegetables to save seeds from. Cucurbitaceae have both male and female flowers and lots of wild, inedible relatives. Cross pollination is what Cucurbitaceae want to do. If you want to save seed and you take the precaution of taping up the flowers, bumblebees and solitary bees can chew their way through the tape to get at the pollen. In short it’s really easy to breed a freak Frankensquash or...

Read…

Newspaper Seed Starting Pots

...We started our summer herb and vegetable seeds yesterday using the method in this video. It’s labor intensive but it beats having to buy pots. Happy planting . . . UPDATE: We had some problems with these and have shifted back to old plastic pots for starting seeds. Read more here....

Read…