Growing your own food and letting some vegetables stay in the garden to set and produce seed will certainly benefit you the following year. Not only will you be able to eat homegrown food all year long, you will also be able to plant your own seed in next years garden.
Use Heirloom seeds and follow this process – it will work for lots of root crops including beets, sugar beets, carrots, mangels, turnips, rutabagas, etc.
First year, sow your rutabaga seeds 1/4 Inch deep in rows 2 feet apart.
I like planting thickly, so I just leave 1 foot between the rows.
The plants will need to be thinned after they start growing. If you can wait to thin until the root is small, then you can eat them or feed them off to animals. Our chickens and pigs love the leaves too.
Harvest them as you need them (the later, the bigger) or after the first frost. Store them in a cold room in your basement and then eat them over the winter. They are great in soups and stews. Save 2 of them and put them in a cool dark place. Don’t cut off any roots and cut the top growth back to about 2 inches.
In the Spring, plant the two leftovers back into your garden. Let them grow all season and let them flower.
Close up of the seed pods
At the end of season, strip the pods off the stalks. I throw mine in a paper bag to dry out further in the house.
Here’s the little black seeds in the pods.
Earlier this winter, I threshed them to get all the seeds separated from the pods. There are probably a million ways to do this. You can leave them in a big paper bag and then roll over the bag with a rolling pin. You could hit the bag against a post or wall. You could even take a baseball bat to it it you wanted.
Since it was so cold outside and I didn’t want to be out there working, I thought of something that would be a little neater, and I could do it while sitting at my desk.
I put a handle of pods into an envelope and just squished on the pods , breaking them open.
I cut a small hole in one corner of the envelope, tipped it down slightly and the seed started rolling down and out thru the hole, onto paper I had put out.
+of+rutabaga+seeds+8.JPG "How To Grow and Save Rutabaga Seeds")
Here’s what I have saved so far. There’s still some chaff in there, so I’ll take it outside when it’s windy and pour the seed from the little container into another. The chaff will blow away and the seed won’t.
There’s probably a couple thousand seeds in that bottle….I should never have to buy rutabaga seeds again (and that’s the whole point)
I think there’s a problem with the RSS feed here. Seems like a broken link to me?
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