Seed Swap

Samantha Holloway wrote:Hi!

Is this thread still active? I don't have much more than muscadine grape seeds, which I don't think grow true, but I'm working on having more to trade next year!

Thanks!
S

i'll trade for some muscadine seeds. are they bronze or purple?

i have a pretty long list of stuff to trade

heres my trade list again at GW, i do a lot of trading there

http://members.gardenweb.com/members/exch/leilahamaya

They're the purple kind, super yummy! I'm growing some myself once I'm done eating them all!

I'd love to trade for your CA grapes, or any roses or fruit! Message me--I'm on my phone right now.

Thank you!
Sami

I have a lot of stinging nettles seeds, can grab more bur dock anytime, and after the hunting seasons are over in another month I can grab some more yarrow.

Wanting:

black locust, osage orange, sea buckthorn,... and just about anything that will survive zone 5

If there is still anybody here that wants to trade seed, check out my have and want lists at https://permies.com/forums/posts/list/80/11200

OK some people asked for something unusual so I am throwing out giant ragweed seeds!

Now I know everyone hates giant ragweed. And yes seventy percent of people allergic to ragweed react to the leaves. However, here is why I use this plant. First if you sprout it and only plant seedlings or sprouts you do not have seeds sraying in the soil. Second this plant grows over fifteen feet tall. I use it for shading. Second it produces a lot of biomass, I chop it before pollen develops for mulch. Third many of my animals will eat the high protein leaves. You can feed goats this when parasite loads are high in pastures. Fourth, bees seem to be attracted to the pollen. My plants are covered in pollen and bees in late summer. Such honey has proven useful to people with allergies because they can take some every week over the winter and summer and do not get hit as bad during ragweed season. Finally the plants produce a good amount of seed that is not hard to collect. That seed has been used as a human food in the past and is high in fat and protein. My chicken love the stuff, so do wild birds.

I have a couple of pounds of very good seeds.

alex Keenan wrote:OK some people asked for something unusual so I am throwing out giant ragweed seeds!

Now I know everyone hates giant ragweed. And yes seventy percent of people allergic to ragweed react to the leaves. However, here is why I use this plant. First if you sprout it and only plant seedlings or sprouts you do not have seeds sraying in the soil. Second this plant grows over fifteen feet tall. I use it for shading. Second it produces a lot of biomass, I chop it before pollen develops for mulch. Third many of my animals will eat the high protein leaves. You can feed goats this when parasite loads are high in pastures. Fourth, bees seem to be attracted to the pollen. My plants are covered in pollen and bees in late summer. Such honey has proven useful to people with allergies because they can take some every week over the winter and summer and do not get hit as bad during ragweed season. Finally the plants produce a good amount of seed that is not hard to collect. That seed has been used as a human food in the past and is high in fat and protein. My chicken love the stuff, so do wild birds.

I have a couple of pounds of very good seeds.

I tried to collect Giant Ragweed seed myself this fall, but found it rather hit and miss. How do you gather yours?

I do not use heavy machines to harvest my ragweed. There is one guy who uses a vacuum to harvest pollen and a truck with a bag and thrasher to harvest seeds. If you google the internet you should find these.
I collect mine the old fashion way.

First you have to understand that Giant Ragweed can grow over 15 feet tall in good soil.
It loves animal waste or waste runoff. In such an area it can form a dense growth that will kill off ANYTHING by depriving it of light and nutrients.
It also bends in the wind. A row that is around six foot wide makes a nice shade and wind break. The wind where I live generally blows in one direction.

So the first thing I do is allow it to grow in rows around six foot wide perpendicular the the prevailing wind.
Now if you are collecting seed you have to remember that such a row will produce alot of pollen. So I have my rows away from the house so the pollen tends to blow out to a field.
So in late summer the seeds will start to set. Now seeds to not set all at once. So some will fall in the area and regrow next year. Stands of Giant Ragweed also are full of life so some of your seed will be eaten by birds and rodents. But when I start to see a good number of brown seeds that will fall out of the seed clusters than it is time for me to harvest seeds. Generally the plants are still green and full of leaves at this stage.
So remember my plants are in rows planted perpendicular to the wind. So the first thing I do is get a big tarp. I lay the tarp out on the ground next to a row I will harvest opposite the direction the wind comes from.

Now I start at one end of a row that is ready to harvest and bend a stalk down over the tarp using my left hand. With my right hand I cut the base of the stalk so the stalk fall on to the tarp.
What I use to cut the base is a strange type of slightly curved blade about five inches long that has a two foot wooden handle. The last two inches of the blade is sort of a L shape so it catches the stalk.
I believe any corn knife would do as well. I use this because I am less likely to cut myself, it is a bitch getting old
As I bend, cut, and stake the stalks on the tarp I can hear seeds hitting the tarp. I keep harvesting until I have a load. Than I drag the tarp to the chicken pen.
Before I unload I take a stick and hit the stalks with it. This tends to detach any loose seeds on the stalks so they fall on the tarp.
I then unload the stalks, giving them a little shake before I move the stalks into the chicken pens.
The birds will eat the leaves and any seeds that remain on the stalks. If I have goats I would be feeding them also.
After all the stalks are removed and feed to the birds what remains are leaves, waste pieces, insects, and seeds.
I just dump it all in a bucket and set it outside to allow most of the insects to leave. Care must be taken to keep your birds out of it or your chickens will eat all your seeds.
Than I screen the seeds and allow them to cold stratify so I can plant in spring.

The great thing about Giant Ragweed is it only grows from seed and is an annual. The reason it is such a pain to farmers is that it produces so much seed and shades out farm crops so easily.
Instead of fighting this plant we should be using it by sprouting seeds and planting only sprouted seeds or seedlings. Than we should harvest the biomass for animal feed or for heavy mat of mulch.
Used in such a manner it becomes a great way to rehab a garden area that is overrun with weeds because it will choke out almost any weed I can think of in a good stand of Ragweed.

Well there is my secret method. If you go online you will see that ragweed and giant ragweed seed sell for a good price to people putting in hunting areas.
I would be doing that myself but my health is not so good and it is alot to just keep what I have going.
For those of you who are young, have time, and some land you might want to look at Giant Ragweed as a side crop or as a source of summer feed.

Thank you for the method! I should have thought of that myself, it is simple enough. I just moved to where I live now, this last Spring, and I don't remember seeing Giant Ragweed until I moved here. It grows here wild, and the neighbor thought that the name of this plant was "Indian Paintbrush", so I Googled that name, and found that it properly belongs to a totally different plant. So I Googled "lobed leaves" and looked through the pictures until I found a match. The plants are quite fibrous, I think that I read that they can be made into fabric, but I am sure that you could use the fiber to make paper. Although the neighbor did not know that these plants were Giant Ragweed, he told me that the flowers of the plants will stain your hands red if you rub them, which he later demonstrated. So if you want, you can use the small flower heads as a red paint or dye! I tried to collect seeds this fall, by shaking the seed head into a bag, but that did not work well. I tried to pick the seeds one by one, but that was very time consuming, so I gave up. And yes, I saw the price of the seeds this Summer, when I was reading up on these plants, and can verify your statements. By the way, the soil up here is good for growing grains, and not much else, so our Giant Ragweed only got about 6 foot tall at most. But I did read about a specimen, I think it might have been in Texas, that grew 21 feet high! Imagine the biomass crop if you had a field of those every year!

Wyatt Brush wrote:Thank you for the method! I should have thought of that myself, it is simple enough. I just moved to where I live now, this last Spring, and I don't remember seeing Giant Ragweed until I moved here. It grows here wild, and the neighbor thought that the name of this plant was "Indian Paintbrush", so I Googled that name, and found that it properly belongs to a totally different plant. So I Googled "lobed leaves" and looked through the pictures until I found a match. The plants are quite fibrous, I think that I read that they can be made into fabric, but I am sure that you could use the fiber to make paper. Although the neighbor did not know that these plants were Giant Ragweed, he told me that the flowers of the plants will stain your hands red if you rub them, which he later demonstrated. So if you want, you can use the small flower heads as a red paint or dye! I tried to collect seeds this fall, by shaking the seed head into a bag, but that did not work well. I tried to pick the seeds one by one, but that was very time consuming, so I gave up. And yes, I saw the price of the seeds this Summer, when I was reading up on these plants, and can verify your statements. By the way, the soil up here is good for growing grains, and not much else, so our Giant Ragweed only got about 6 foot tall at most. But I did read about a specimen, I think it might have been in Texas, that grew 21 feet high! Imagine the biomass crop if you had a field of those every year!

The Giant Ragweed I have growing in the Cincinnati Ohio area has yellow pollen. When it is ragweed season my car will have a layer of yellow dust on it.
I did not know that there was a red pollen variety. I guess I should not be surprised because there are several types of ragweed.
One thing that I have not tried with ragweed seeds yet is running them through a sunflower seed oil press.
Ragweed seeds are high in oil so in theory you could press oil like you do for sunflowers.

Wide open plains here, with hurricane force winds regularly, so I don't know what color the pollen is, I just know that the flower heads rubbed on the skin turns the skin red. It is not a powdery substance, more of a liquid, if I remember right.
I forgot about the high oil content! That is one of the main reasons that I wanted to save seed in the first place! The seeds are also extremely high in protein.
Another despised plant that is high in oil, is Pennycress. It grows all over out here. They have seeds about the size and shape of cabbage and cauliflower seeds (it is in the same family) so I fed some to our newly hatched chicks. They seemed to prefer them to the oatmeal and wild lettuce seed we were feeding them. It didn't seem to cause any problems either.

I was wondering, if anyone has Siberian garlic (hardneck variety) for trade? It grows well in hot climates, and it grows scapes. I don't need a lot, my garden is small. I have less usual veggie seeds like achocha (2 varieties), longevity spinach, stevia, Pepino melon, etc, and some more usual ones as well for trade.