Wild ground cherries grow well around here along the roadsides and (in one case) in my orchard area. But last winter just to be sure I ordered some Aunt Molly's seed and got a packet with just 10 of those tiny tiny seeds in it. What with me being an infamous seedling murderer, I wound up with one healthy plant in a big pot that is fruiting well.
I know that ground cherries reseed themselves well from dropped fruit, but I want to save some seed (from the wild and from the Aunt Molly's) for sharing and planting in new locations. I've already got about 100 seeds that I did in the traditional tomato way, fermenting the pulp and then drying out the seed. I found this to be ridiculously labor-intensive when dealing with those miniscule ground cherry seeds, which probably explains why the packet I bought only had 10 seeds in it.
My notion is that if I just pop some whole fruit in the dehydrator, they will dry up like little raisins that I can probably just plant directly (much easier to deal with than those fly-speck seeds). Does anybody have any
experience with doing this? Is there any problem with spoilage or subsequent germination?
I am also curious whether they will dry best after being removed from their husks or left in the husk, but that I can determine by experiment a lot more quickly.
Anybody got any experience drying ground cherries as a seed source?