In which we look at testing common 'dried beans and pulses' to see if we can perhaps plant and grow them. Spoiler Alert: That description 'dried beans and pulses' literally describes the concept of 'seeds'.
I still haven't gotten around to the pictures yet, but here goes the basic principle:
How To Test For Viability
I've done this more times than some people have had hot homecooked meals and I'm sooo kicking myself for not doing anything about taking pictures. But my broad beans are due to go in soon so perhaps I'll run a viability test and take pictures.
The basic idea that I've tried on all my dried pulses etc all go a bit like this:
- I get hold of the disposable trays that meat, cakes, and some vegetables come on and clean them while doing my dishes. You can use any small flat tray with a depth of 1cm or a bit more as long as it's non-toxic.
- I get hold of a roll of paper towel. This is pretty much THE medium to use, facial tissues are sometimes treated with aromatics or chemicals and so might spoil results.
- I pick out some of the seeds (dried beans, lentils, etc) and set up a tray apiece for them. I number the trays with a texta somewhere visible outside.
- To prepare a tray, I put a few millimetres of water in the bottom of the tray, then fold paper towels to a size that pretty much precisely fits in the bottom, stopping when I've put about ten layers down.
- Now place ten or twenty of your test subjects in neat rows on the folded paper towel, and fold up another four layers of paper towel and place on top of the seeds and (hopefully) soggy bottom paper. Make sure the top layer is just damp, not too drowned.
- Write down in your notebook the origin and type of the subject seeds, the tray number, and then put in a cool dark place.
- Every few days, check in on your experiments and make sure they haven't dried out, drizzle a bit of water on if they're too dry, and watch for bulges that might indicate that seeds are sprouting.
- When it's obvious many seeds have sprouted, give it a few more days for late sprouters, and then:
- Carefully lift the top paper off and count how many seeds have sprouted and how many haven't. This gives you the viability percentage of the seeds and now you know how many seeds to plant if you want a minimum of a certain number of plants. Write that down in the notebook so you'll know for next time.
A Cool Money-Saving Note:
I also have some food-grade plastic containers with loose fitting lids and I often throw in a double layer of mung beans or poona peas and so forth, cover them to almost double that depth with water, and leave them in a cool place for a week or two. The seeds sprout and make a great addition to sandwiches, salads, stir fries, and other cooking. A bag of mung beans costs a few bucks and if you cook them up you can get perhaps half a dozen meals from them. If you sprout them, you easily triple that or more. And you'd pay top dollar for a tray of sprouts at the supermarket, whereas that bag of beans was relatively cheap.
Also, some things like poona peas, mung beans, and radishes make a great green manure for your soil - plant them by the handful, allow then to get 30cm tall, and spade-dig them back into the soil.
Now for some notes about the seeds your supermarket sells as drygoods.
Drygoods Or Seed Stock?
Almost all those dried goods are seeds. Red beans, red kidney beans, great northern beans, white beans, broad beans, chickpeas, mung beans, and some lentils and seeds are just dried naturally. This is how beans grow in nature - the pods and beans dry on the plant, then the pods split from drying out and seeds fall out, and hopefully some will get a purchase in the soil and a new plant or twenty will come up. Things like wheat are sometimes viable but also many times they've been blasted clean and may not be viable at all.
Birdseed is often a good source of viable seed. Out of a kilo bag of sunflower seeds for parrots I was able to grow a decent patch of black sunflowers. Seeds of those sunflowers were okay to eat, but the whole plants from roots to heads were also a great feed for the poultry and by rationing them out they supplemented the chicken feed for the rest of the year. Bunnies and goats would also enjoy the plants and even a few seeds here and there as a treat. So don't overlook stuff like that.
Some online seed catalogues sell things like alfa-alfa seeds in bulk, and they make great salad sprouts or fully grown feed for the herbivores. Your local seed libraries often have seeds. And all of these can be tested for viability as outlined above and grown.
Things like radishes also grow well from seed, and if you let a few plants go rather than digging them up, you can let their pods dry, then save the seeds for the next crop. Rocket lettuce will surprise you by growing to a metre tall and setting pods full of seeds too - and yes they're viable and easy to grow for greens, micro-greens, and more seed. Carrots are an exception, they seed on a two year cycle, so you should leave them in the ground or over-winter them somewhere they won't get frosts, and let them go the second year and collect the seeds once the plant dies back.
Potatoes themselves are all you need to grow more potatoes, and to be honest, they're even a pest in my garden, no matter how carefully I dig the beds over and remove all the little Kipfler spuds, they come back year after year and if I'm honest I'm actually quite happy to have them in the kitchen.
Silver beet and rainbow chards will really eagerly go to seed if you let them, and if you just let them have their way they'll grow absolute jungles of new plants every year so you can then cut back the old ones and let the cycle repeat with the young ones. And as with so many of these plants, the poultry and herbivores (if you keep any) will enjoy the trimmings, cuttings, and spare seed heads.
Once I have beans or peas planted and growing happily, I'll mark out one plant or one vine for seed, and not pick the pods of that marked section. I sometimes loosely wrap a piece of wool around that vine section so I can tell it apart from the rest. I then just let those vines stay in the garden until they're dried and the pods are dry - now I have seed for next year.
E.g. I started with about 15 broad bean seeds from a store-bought packet seven years ago, and we've had beans enough for a dozen meals that I cooked directly from each planting since then, or that I blanched and froze, or kept as dried beans by picking them before they started to dry off, podded, and let dry in a hanging dehydrating tent then stored. I could also have placed them in a dehydrator and done the same.
And I also ended up with around a hundred or so beans for seed that first year, which I swapped with others and kept a few to plant the next crop and the next, keeping about forty seed beans. At this stage they've actually gone for five generations in those seven years and I'm only just now going to buy a new pack and plant them just to revitalise the line.
But I could as easily have kept on keeping seed and mixing generations to keep the gene pool mixing a bit. After all, these big boi seeds can stay viable for quite a few years.
A seed box can be something like a couple of shoeboxes, with seeds in folded-up paper towel envelopes marked with the seed and year. Once you've raided the pantry drygoods and the local garden clubs and seed libraries, you can keep planting year after year, saving new seeds every year. Just keep the box in the coolest and driest place in the house and keep the newest seeds and sow the oldest ones and you'll be golden.
Ornamentals
To me, there's nothing as beautiful and ornamenting as a good healthy crop of edibles and herbs and fruit - but there are also people (my beloved among them) to whom the aesthetics of a garden are also important. Flowering plants also have seeds that can be saved in many cases, and they can be saved the same way, traded with other people for other varieties, and replanted. They're just beyond the limited scope of my article here, and I may find a few sources online and update this document here with those resources.
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