I’ve got a few flowers seeds saved for next year. You may notice the white powder in the bags in the photo. The white powder is DE (Diatomaceous Earth Food Grade). I always put DE in with my saved flowers seeds in case some lil’ buggers hatches out during the winter. DE is helpful in killing bugs, insects, spiders, ants and stuff. We discovered it back a few years ago during a brown recluse scare. DE gets into the exoskeleton and causes the pests to dry out. I’ve used DE on a centipede and it killed it, so that impressed me greatly. I feel better thinking that I may help prevent some little pests or no-see’ums from surviving in my flower seeds.
I don’t have to put DE with my squash seeds since the seeds are clean, dried and will be put in labeled envelopes. I saved a lot more seeds than I actually plan on using (because I can’t make myself throw them away.) I told my husband that I plan on planting only 4 squash plants next year. He laughed at me and says, “Oh yeah, that’ll happen.”
I always go overboard with starting my squash seeds and then I don’t have the heart not to plant all the seedlings. But the problem is that I never know how productive my plants will be. I don’t plant 3 seeds or seedlings in a hill, I plant the individual seedlings about 4 feet apart. This year I started 9 round squash seeds, but 6 plants were all that survived. Those 6 plants covered us in round squash. Other years I’ve planted as many as 18 plants and we only got a moderate harvest. We’ll just wait and see how it goes.
Do you save seeds each year?
Do you have any special things you do with or to the seeds when storing them?
Have a terrific Tuesday.
🙂
Sheli enjoyed some time sitting in my lap under a shade tree. We’ve been trying to take advantage of the nice weather in between storms.
Last weekend, My husband built a small fire for me and our Grandson to grill some marshmallows to make some smores. Our Grandson was surprised I’d never made nor eaten a smore before. It was a lot of fun for me to have my Grandson show me how to make one. Here’s a photo of my first and only smore. 🙂
Notice the band-aid at the top of my KindleFire. It’s there blocking the camera lens. I do the same thing on my laptop too. I don’t like having cameras pointed at me all the time. I’ve never even activated the camera on my KF. I don’t see any reason too. If it had a camera lens on the back side like a cellphone, I’d probably activate it and use it though.
Our 13 year old Grandson loves playing minecraft. I noticed the blocks on the game are simple designs (and to my creative mind, begged to be made out of plastic canvas lol) I created simple basic patterns and am pleased with how well they look.
One of the stocking-stuffers that our Grandson got at Christmas was an alien egg. He had it sitting on a shelf and decided to it was time to try it out. It’s about the size of a regular plastic Easter egg. The directions are, submerge the egg in water and leave it. After a few days it cracks open and an alien hatches out.
Grandson hatched out a bunch of sponge fish from capsules.
Grandson had a wonderful time doing an experiment of Ivory soap puffing up like a cloud when it’s put in the microwave. It was so fun to watch.
Grandson got creative and made himself a toy gun out of cardboard and masking tape. He made it so it has removable attachments and also the the slider thingy moves too. I think it’s quite clever and imaginative.
We gave a big box of 1 ball squash to our Grandson’s Mother & Maternal-Grandmother.
We had sort of a corny weekend with gardening. We harvested a lot of produce.
Some of the potatoes are huge.
The onions are drying on a table on the back-porch, and the potatoes are drying on garbage bags in my craft room.
It may not look like a lot of potatoes, but it’s more than plenty for us. After the potatoes dry a couple weeks or more we’ll put them in mesh bags and stack them somewhere…Â and then I’ll have my floor back. lol
We used the normal method of shucking to prepare our corn for freezing. We’re happy we had about a bushel of corn. We put up 26 bags of corn-off-the-cob.
We had another good harvest of squash and beans. I figure we’ll get one more squash harvest about half this size. Right now I have more squash than Carter’s 
As for the beans, we put up a couple dozen quarts. We have enough to do through the winter. We don’t plan on picking any more beans. We figure it’d be stupid to let the plants stay and get completely infested with bean beetles, so my husband pulled up all the bean plants and tossed them away.
My dahlias are blooming real pretty.
If you look to the left of the dahlias you can see a volunteer cherry tomato plant. It already has several tomatoes on it. I can hardly wait for them ripen.
A lot of the flowers in my husband’s 
You’ll notice that there’s sparse spots where the Gerber daisies are. The rabbits and squirrels have been hard on them.
On a final note, our walnut tree is loaded with walnuts. It looks like it’s going to be a bumper crop year. We don’t use the walnuts for anything, but it’s still a joy to watch them grow. We leave them for the squirrels to eat or store for the winter. There’s been many times we’ve watched 
Joys Of Creating 