Nic

Whatever dug up my beetroot seedlings and knocked over my tomato containers last week, came back for a second go yesterday. After very carefully replanting, repotting and cleaning up the absolute mess this creature created, I’m now faced with playing plant hospital with all my poor traumatised plants once again.

I had no idea that I would have to be dealing with fending off wildlife, being a good 10 metres off ground level…but now I have to figure out a good strategy for protecting my seedlings so they don’t get dug up again. I think I’m going to go and get some mesh for the container boxes and try and figure out suitable positions for the little pots so they can’t get knocked over again.

Picked one of the jalapenos just to see if it was ready. It looked fairly fully formed on the inside and tasted okay, but it still looked like it could have used a bit of extra growing time. I’m going to leave the rest growing for a while longer and see if they improve.

So, I decided to see if I could get some seeds out of this cress since it was so determined to produce flowers and bolt as soon as my back was turned. Naughty cress! I thought I might document the process as this is the first time I have tried to harvest seeds like this. If there are easier ways of doing this, or I did something completely dumb…let me know!

The Process

When the whole stalk was pretty much a yellowy straw colour, I chopped it off as one complete piece and let it sit outside (ok, well more like I forgot about it and accidently left it outside, but that didn’t seem to do it any harm). When it was nice and crispy dry, I cut each branch off (see pic 1) and held the branch in between my fingers whilst holding it inside a bag. I then used my fingers to strip the seed pods off – finding that it was much easier doing it in the same direction as the seed pods (i.e. going “with the grain” not against it). In retrospect, it was probably a good idea to use gloves instead of bare hands at this point as I had quite sore fingers afterwards.

I’m now left with plenty of seeds (and plenty of chaff) at the bottom of a plastic bag. It seems like a huge task to separate out the seeds completely – I started doing it but an hour later seemed to only have got a tiny amount done, so I’m not sure if I could have done something differently to make this part of the task easier? Anyway, I managed to get an absolute tonne of seeds from this exercise – plenty for next year (and any seed swaps, if anyone is interested!)

Another harvest – they are reaching a good size now…

Yay! Finally got my first harvest from the Urbikanys. They are a little on the small size (the larger ones are still ripening up) but at least I got to taste what they are like:

Taste Test

The Urbikanies are really well balanced – not too sweet or sharp and not grainy in texture. They’ll go beautifully in a salad. Only thing was that the flavour wasn’t as intense as I was expecting – but this might be due to the rain lately more than anything. I’ll update with a taste test after I’ve harvested a couple more down the track and see if the flavour improves.