Grocery store gardening experiments

So I like to grow things from fruit stands, and grocery stores in addition to harvesting wild seed, transplanting, and buying seed from nurseries.

One thing I have not gotten around to trying is growing plants from the bulk foods section. From what I read it is sort of a hit or miss thing. I was reading about different beans, since now is a good time to plant them where I am at, when I thought about the fact that I have a bag of 13 bean soup from the bulk foods section of Winco.

I found another blog post from someone who had decent success in growing from these beans. Some of them were a little slow to germinate, but otherwise they seemed to do fine. I had not really thought about growing dry beans until today. I am all about green beans, peas, and sugar snap peas (My favorite) but I do love to cook with beans when I can.

I thought this might be a good way to get some more experiments in this year. I just repurposed a to go container into my new germination station. I think this one is going to work better than the tupperwear one I had, but I will have to see if the little round vents cause it to dry out too quickly or not.

I put two of each bean type in the germination station with the peas having a few more since they are in halves. The peas only have a 50% germination rate from what it would have been due to them being split. I figured it could not hurt to have a few in there rather than just two halves.

Now is a good time to be direct sowing the seeds,  but I would rather them germinate here and I transplant them later, than put them out in the garden, and keep watering a spot that does not grow anything.

My husband of course makes the comment “So do you need salt water to grow Navy beans?” Lol

In addition to my bean experiments, I also packaged up 90% of the seeds I had dried. The packets are really small but perfect since I don’t always get a ton of seeds for one plant. I printed out 4 of them on one sheet of paper.

I consider these seeds to be “experiments” also as I have not tested them out yet.

I picked some mallow cheeses “Seeds” which I almost feel is pointless as they grow all over, but figured it couldn’t hurt to have them anyways.

Mallow is related to the Okra plant and has a similar mucilage to okra when chewed or cooked. The green cheeses (which I did not harvest as of yet, I only harvested the dried brown ones) taste more like mini okras, while the leaves have the mucilage when chewed, it does not have that fleshy texture of okra.

Mallow has a lot of health benefits and I harvested some of the young leaves to dry out for teas later. I have not had them in a tea before and hope that drying them will not make my tea all slimy later haha. Mallow is used to thicken soups if that helps give you any idea on things.

Given the stress all my poor tomato plants went through, I only harvested one speckled roma tomato. It is the first time we have had one of those. I think I like it better than the normal roma tomatoes, either that or I just like the taste of it coming fresh off the vine.

I did save the seeds from that and they will be ready for drying tomorrow. I just scoop the seeds into a container and swirl them once a day. They have to ferment so the “anti sprouting” coating that is naturally on the seed will come off.  I then fill the container with water. The seeds that float are bad and will not sprout. Those I let run off. The ones that sink are good seeds and I keep those for planting later.

I have more tomatoes that I can save seeds from that are ripe and ready to be picked as soon as I get to drying the speckled roma tomorrow.
Next year I am sure they will be much stronger than the ones I moved into the garden.

Gardening really is all about trial and error. I actually enjoy it when I am not freaking out over my plants. Thankfully my tomato plants actually strengthened up without anything but water really. I did add some water to them that I had used to blanch some bok choy, and lambs quarters for freezing.

I like to make my own fertilizers. Basically I use coffee grounds, left over dried tea leaves (which my garden seems to always favor when I had used them in my container garden), left over veggie water, left over water from boiling eggs, egg shells, and things along those lines.

I will eventually start composting once I look into getting some smaller bins for it. That will be a new fun thing to learn. I like knowing exactly what is going into my garden and will not use harsh chemicals in it.

Speaking of the water I used from the bok choy… I forgot to mention that I only used the outer leaves and left a few inner leaves of the two heads I got, so I can regrow it. I also got these from the store.
They are already growing back. One is in only water, the other is in soil. The one pictured below in the water also has some watercress growing next to it that I had separated from the original mother plant I got back in June. They taste like radish greens.