Free Seeds! How to harvest seeds from your groceries

The nigella seed I planted from the grocery store spice is just about to come into flower.

I had my first harvest of fennel fronds yesterday.  I started that patch from some fennel seed from the grocery store.   The roots tend to be perrenial here but it self seeds beautifully.

We harvested most of the fava beans planted originally as cover crops last fall, but we kept some for snacks.   These came from the bulk food section of the grocery store.

Today is good weather,  so I'm off to transplant the apricot trees that grew in our stone pit.  Aka, where we toss fruit tree stones.  This type should grow true,  but I can always graft them if not.  We only got seven trees this year.

But we did get two dozen sweet chestnut trees from 15 dollars worth of nuts bought from the cheese shop last Christmas.

Photos to show it works - that we really can grow vegetables from seeds and other goodies scavenged from the grocery store shelves.

Well, how about I start?  A quick glance around my garden gives me this.  

All these originate from the grocery store shelves.  

As an amature gardener i found a great read. i love to grow my own plants and veggies now
love how tomatoes are so easy to grow and chillies
i make my own sauces now and home grown have a flavour of its own
as a newbie i found a few tips and tricks that need to be kept in mind  plantsvila.com/from-seed-to-sprout-the-journey-of-a-baby-plant/
i keep a track of all the essentials now to grow my greens

Plantsvila


https://plantsvila.com/from-seed-to-sprout-the-journey-of-a-baby-plant/

William Bronson wrote: I have been doing this with food from the CAM Asian supermarket, Whole Foods, and Jungle Jim's.  I even found sunchokes at Jungle Jim's, but they are crazy unique anyway,'chokes are positively mundane for them.

I have established buckwheat in my yard, and I am gonna grow some sorghum from a bag of bob red mills.

My potatoes have grown so well inside it makes me wonder if one could do indoor potato towers for winter food production.

Last summer an African neighbor asked for my sweet potato leaves but declined my turnip and Collards greens. CAM had the greens for sale so I bought their yams to grow as well.

Curious how do you grow them indoors? What do you use.

Fabulous thread. Very practical & inspiring!  And timely. I just spent $5 for the teeniest packet of black oil sunflower seeds. Next time I’ll use bird seed!
I have a small bag of alfalfa seeds for sprouting that I’m going to broadcast out onto unused parts of my garden.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:.

Beets, carrots, onions, and brassicas in the store are often hybrids which were created using Cytoplasmic Male Sterility. That means that they will not produce pollen and neither will any of their descendents. That means that they are incapable of producing seed, unless a pollen donor is growing nearby, such as wild Queen Anne's Lace with carrots. Buying organic does not get around this issue. There are both natural and GMO versions of this trait. I cull either version from my garden by inspecting the flowers to make sure that they have normal looking anthers that are producing normal looking pollen. The sterility issue has been my biggest ongoing disappointment with trying to grow seed from grocery store vegetables. No lawyers necessary if terminator technology is used.

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How disheartening to learn but thank you so much for sharing this point with us, and how to tell if they are defective! I've been in the habit of planting my stubs in compost hillsides.

Do you know if they do this with green onions as well?

I can't afford to buy artisan garlic to grow, so most of mine is from dried up pathetic Chinese garlic and it grows just fine!

I've been growing spices from bulk food sources for years: if it won't grow I won't eat it.
Also I go to an ethnic store to buy brown mustard seeds.
I buy sprouting seeds instead of small packets, which is by far the cheapest way to get daikon radish which I grow piles of (good stir fried like a non spicy root veg as well as leaves and pods and regular radish).

All my sunchokes were originally a $1 dried up discount bag over a decade ago!

I buy my massive quantity of dried peas from both the restaurant outlet and forage peas from the feed store and use them for ground cover on compost hills. The restaurant outlet peas are a regular feed for any of my caged pigeons I am holding back for breeding or overwintering because I can get lazy with supplying digestive rocks. The wasted peas in the cages go to compost so they aren't wasted after all. Forage peas are amazing as pea sprouts!

I feed my pigeons whole grain mostly, because that will sprout and I hold back a couple handfuls of sunflowers and grow them under cages until they are about a foot high and past the danger stage with the squirrels and chipmunks, then gently lift off the cages (have to use cages with small spacings about 3/4") lift off the cage carefully.

Incidentally sunflowers transplant well if done before the flowers open and I will build tipi's with extra sunflowers that pop up in inconvenient places, but do it when it's pouring rain because carpenter ants can be horrible!

Cage planting works well for me growing corn too but I find my corn must be corralled from the dog who blasts through everything after squirrels! Therefore I cage them differently for the season if I'm going to bother. However I buy my corn from a seed supplier because of the sheer bombardment of GMO corn and I don't want that in my garden though in Canada the judicial system (sometimes an oxymoron) can't jail people for having unwanted GMO corn contaminating their crops!

I feed my pigeons where I want something to grow and let them trample the wasted seed into the soil.

One thing that has been stressed by our instructors when I was studying for my master gardener certificate is that you should never plant vegetables that you bought from the store.  The reason is that they can have various diseases that you would then introduce into your garden and home.  Seeds that are sold for planting typically have a lot more rigorous requirements before they can be sold.

All that said, if you are going to do this, you might want to learn how folks in the tissue culture practice sterilize their xplants and seeds before placing them in growth medium.  This typically involves soaking dilutions of hydrogen peroxide or bleach for a few minutes, up to an hour in extreme cases (15 minutes often typical).  This would take care of any surface contamination (from bacteria or fungi), but really do not do much if anything for endophytes (fungi or bacteria inside the plant itself).  You can do the same thing before planting the grocery obtained plants and seeds.

Anyway, to learn more about this, check out Laur's Plants In Jars YouTube channel <https://www.youtube.com/@plantsinjars>, and maybe check out her discord channel. I highly recommend her videos and the channel.

Important to remember that although the master gardener program has taught many people many things, they are supported and run by State college extension services,  thus part of a slow moving cumbersome bureaucracy, often staffed by people afraid to entertain ideas that counter established norms.🤔😢

In my region, historically, they have disparaged restorative agriculture practices until innovative farmers ignoring the expertise of extension office recommendations had astonishing successes!

IMO, it’s a good starting place for basic information, more than the most informed resource.

Caveat emptor!

@Thekia, sure.  But lets take a walk down memory lane with all fo the fun diseases accidently introduced into the environment like the Chestnut Blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), White Pine Blister Rust (Cronartium ribicola), Dutch Elm Disease (Ophiostoma ulmi & O. novo-ulmi), Citrus Greening/Huanglongbing (HLB), and more.  Most of these are not directly comparable to what you might get by resprouting a vegetable shipped in from a foreign source, but my point is that the recommendations were made for a good reason.  If you want to do it anyway, you can study up and learn how to do so more safely.

I used to buy only good certified organic seeds, and, once in a while, something that just struck my fancy but wasn't organic.
But have you looked at the prices of seeds lately??? Once of these days, they will sell seeds by the UNIT!
Upon seeing that, I started scavenging the store shelves for seeds. For $1.50, you can get 1Lb. of soup beans: That will give you at least 10 varieties of beans to try for not much. Grow them one year and you'll be in beans to your armpits for a long time.
Buy any biennial, plop it in the garden and it will give you seeds the second year, so onions, garlic, leeks, carrots, beets, parsnips that you like will give you a bounty of seeds the second year. Save them and plant.
Just check if they are hybrids, because if they are, they may not come true to seed... But you will get something edible!
Of course, save all the seeds from the gourd and squash/pumpkin family that you like. Many will be hybrids, so they won't come true.  But hey, if you don't care for them, you chickens will love them!

I found out that seeds from green bell pepper are mature enough to sprout. I can just buy one and get hundreds of seedlings in a couple weeks. I tried one last year and it produced just fine.
I also rooted this small piece of store bought ginger to grow free plant.

May Lotito wrote:I found out that seeds from green bell pepper are mature enough to sprout. I can just buy one and get hundreds of seedlings in a couple weeks. I tried one last year and it produced just fine.
I also rooted this small piece of store bought ginger to grow free plant.

Lucky! - but green peppers are unripe red/yellow peppers. I found green chilli's seeds immature.

Anthony Powell wrote:

May Lotito wrote:I found out that seeds from green bell pepper are mature enough to sprout. I can just buy one and get hundreds of seedlings in a couple weeks. I tried one last year and it produced just fine.
I also rooted this small piece of store bought ginger to grow free plant.

Lucky! - but green peppers are unripe red/yellow peppers. I found green chilli's seeds immature.

Cool.  
Here they are very different varieties.  Green, red, and yellow sweet peppers come from different seeds and genetics.   It would be fun if they were the same, just wait a little longer.

Although chillies here are sometimes harvest early as green, it's unlikely to happen in the store as immature chillies don't keep as long as mature harvested ones, so the green chillies are a different cultivar to red chillies.  Personally, I don't like immature red chillies as they taste very different to green chillies.  

A germination test will help determine if it's worth keeping the seeds.

r ransom wrote:... Although chillies here are sometimes harvest early as green, it's unlikely to happen in the store as immature chillies don't keep as long as mature harvested ones, so the green chillies are a different cultivar to red chillies.  Personally, I don't like immature red chillies as they taste very different to green chillies.  

A germination test will help determine if it's worth keeping the seeds.

I grew up in New Mexico, and it was traditional to hang mature red chilli on a string (called a "ristra").  If you have extra chillis from your harvest, you might want to hang a couple some place that gets decent ventellation and see how well they dry in your area or not.  My guess is that they would do find inside of the house (which has controlled hummidity), which has got to be drier than a stone's throw from a river at 7,000' elevation.  And yes, they would be harvested early (while green), and have a different taste.

Bell petters, are different.  I do not know any ever drying those, but I could easily be wrong.  (Hatch) Chilli's are a staple spice, bell peppers are treated as a vegetable.

I reread my reply I need to post a clearification.  if you are making ristras, first do it with red chillies, not green.  I have used dried green chillies, but I have never seen a green chilli ristra (they might be done that way, but I am not sure).  What I meant when I postedthe last sentence was chillies "can" (instead of would) be harvested green, buit have a different taste.