seeds on september's last day

those are carolina horse nettle fruits on the left and potato fruits on the right and they are soft enough to process 9 i tried this a couple of weeks ago when they were not quite ready...today saw better results )

and here's one of each still oriented left and right...

and here sliced open...

the carolina horse nettle seeds are large relative tot he size of the fruit...

while the potato seeds are not...

and the seeds of their nightshade cousin the tomato are even larger...

the nine carolina horse nettle fruits produced...

...far fewer seeds than an equal number ( albeit physically larger ) of potato fruits...the potato seeds are so genetically diverse it will be impossible to predict what i will get in the way of tubers when i germinate them in the spring..i have to wonder about the horse nettle...we will be growing some of that in very controlled conditions next season as well...

outside the nasturtiums continue to bloom...and will until there is a hard frost...

and where there are blooms there will be seeds..i collected thirty more today and now have over one hundred from a handful of seed i planted in may...no need to purchase seed in spring of 2018 ( and i will happily share )...

and, finally, the obligatory teosinte ears...it is almost october...only about a month and a half of this to get through yet..you can handle it.

spuds and seeds

another container spud came in from autumn this afternoon and it was about what i expected...nothing dramatic...a number of tubers...some to eat..some for seed...fair deal for being raised in a pot...while i was washing them up i remembered there was a bag of potato fruits ripe enough to process so, since i was in the kitchen anyway, i did...fourteen fruits resulted in many hundreds of small potato seeds to use in the spring...and for many springs hereafter...after they dry for a few weeks, into the freezer...who knows...there may be more winter vines downstairs...depends on how much other stuff is going on...it nay be a crowded winter down there if the yacon moves in.

bigger size...

doesn't, of necessity, translate into more seeds...marooned at home for a few hours with pupils that haven't been this dilated since the seventies after a visit to the opthamologist i decided to look through the potato fruits and see if any were ready to process...some of the larger ones had finally softened so i set out for the kitchen to harvest seeds...i cut open one of the larger ones first curious to see how many seeds it would contain...what i found was a lot of support structure in there and not that large an amount of mucilage...so i scraped the seeds out into a container ( third photo ) there's more than a hundred seeds in there ( you can count them if you like )when i cut open one of the smaller ones i found a correspondingly smaller amount of support structure but not hat much less in the way of mucilage...or seeds as it turns out ( fifth photo...you can couint those too if it's a boring day )...just about even in that respect...i have many more potato fruits of all sorts of sizes that are not ready to process yet as well as more ripening "on the vine' here and at the community garden so there will be more opportunity to see if the "size doesn't matter" rule holds true...the last photo is today's haul of potato seed destined for the freezer..more results as i slice things open...and as a side note, solanine usually will make my hands itch as i process these fruits...unless there happens to be any sort of small ( or large, i suppose ) nicks or cuts on my hands...then it just burns.

rendered seeds

yesterday evening just before bed time ( this was an act of spontaneity...there is no such thing as too late in those ) i began rummaging around in the paper bags i have been storing unripe potato fruits in since last month waiting for them to soften so i could remove the seeds...as luck would have it if ound half a dozen in a state that could only be called ready ( top photo )...so i stayed up a bit longer and took each one...like the one in the second photo...and cut them open...when ripe on the vine they resemble knobby cherry tomatoes only they are green...and the inside of the fruits is also similar...tomatoes and potatoes are cousins so that isn't much of a surprise...neither is the fact that the seeds somewhat resemble tomato seeds...only much smaller...those six fruits rendered about five hundred seeds which i rinsed in water to remove the mucilage and then strained into paper towel to dry...some of these are off to a friend out west...the rest will dry for a few days and then go into the freezer for storage...i have fifty more fruits i have brought in to ripen and about twenty netted and ripening on vines...if this average holds i will have thousands of seeds in a few weeks...i will be beyond the local potato seed baron..i will be the vicount.

freezer seeds

since the warranty work on the refrigerator has been done and the freezer is functional again i decided it was time to preserve the potato seed that i extracted from the potato fruits last autumn...i have quite a few actually...there were a total of 458 seeds in the containers so i split them up into bags of fifteen to twenty seeds...ended up with twenty-eight bags...divided them between three containers and put them into the freezer where the usda assures me they will remain viable for any number of years...seeds, peat pots, and gibberellic acid should provide an interesting platform for demonstrations of potato genetic diversity for some time to come.

potato fruit renders seeds

gleaning the potato plants i harvested from the pgp sunday yielded a few more potato fruits and a small tuber ( top photo )...the potato fruit in the second photo has been in a paper bag since the fifteenth of september and had begun to soften ad shrivel so i decided the time had come to remove the seeds...i cut it open ( third photo ) and scraped ( fourth photo )the pulp, seeds , and mucilage into a container of tap water...i put the lid on the container and swirled the water around which caused the seeds to collect in the center ( fifth photo )..i used a wire kitchen strainer to separate the seed from the rest of the pulp and spread the seed on paper towel to dry...i see germination to test viability in the near future...more as it comes up.