Saving Arugula Seeds
Within an hour you can collect hundreds of arugula seeds.
The Habitant Farm by Cornelius Krieghoff
Saving seeds is an important part of growing and sharing food. Arugula is a leafy green that can be grown all over the USA and other similar climates. It can be grown year-round in warm places, or it can be grown seasonally during the warm months of colder climates. It is an annual which means it doesn’t continue to grow year after year, but instead produces seeds at the end of its lifecycle. It reliably self seeds, so it acts like a perrenial. This means that ideally you won’t need to plant it again and again each year. It does the work of planting more arugula on its own, saving you time. It can even self seed in colder places that get snow like Chicago. Other plants can self-seed as well. Generally plants become less tasty after they start producing seeds, so you want to eat them before then.
Arugula1 by Sevinc Cavidan
Another nice aspect of Arugula is that it grows quickly. It only takes about a month or two to go from seed to harvest. Near the end of its lifecycle, the plant will produce seed pods which are actually also edible when they first appear on the plant. The seeds from the seed pods can be easily saved to plant somewhere else, or to be shared with others. After you have a bunch of mature seed pods on your arugula, you can cut the whole plant out or just the stems with the seed pods. Those cut plants and stems need to be left out to dry completely. Once the plants dry, you can squish the seed pods with your hands to get the seeds out, and dump them all into a bowl. You’ll inevitably get a bunch of fragments of leaves and seed pods in this bowl as well. If you are trying to save them over time, you want your seeds to be dry and free of debris, so you can run them through a sieve to get the debris out. You can also gently blow on the seeds. Because they are heavier, the seeds will stay in the bowl, and the debris will blow away.
If you’re planning to start a garden, you can begin with arugula. If you already have arugula growing, you can harvest arugula seeds and give them to a free seed library. If there aren’t any free seed libraries near you, your neighbors would probably love some.
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Tags: anarchy , sustainability