This year i had quite some lettuce plants, they grew great. A three month drought turned them very bitter despite my watering the plants, so i gave up after a month with the watering. The plants turned out to be extremely hardy, they caught the morning dew and kept the earth under it wet in comparison to other places. It got me thinking about saving the seed and plant this variety densely to retain moisture.
I've let them flower to save the seeds, but they had aphids on them. I put the aphids and stalks with the flowers on them into a bucket to drown. Which worked fine, i dried the stalks with flowers and aphid corpses on them.
My question, are there eggs in it that will survive , will i hence be seeding an aphid plague when i throw this seed around next year? Has anyone any idea or experience with this dilemma?
Thank you, there will be eggs then. Will these eggs survive a dry spell in a paper bag in my cupboard i wonder? Or is there something else i can do to kill them before i seed? Maybe somebody knows.
I agree. Save the seeds of the plants you liked! Aphids or their eggs are always out there, but they only proliferate and case trouble sometimes. Eliot Coleman says they especially cause trouble when the plants have too much nitrogen, or underwatering because watering can flush out nitrogen from the soil. In my experience, that does seem to be true, but other times there's a little aphid epidemic when i don't think there's too much nitrogen or insufficient watering. Also, it's not a bad thing to have those few aphids around all the time: hopefully their predators' populations also stay steady, and ready to jump in if the aphids proliferate on one type of plant or another. I sometimes squish aphids, and in many cases, one type of plant will have aphids when it is small and tender, and then I squish them, and they reduce a lot as the plant grows bigger.
Given the fact that seeds are sewn underground, would aphid eggs survive if planted along-side the seeds underground? (And that's assuming that they'd even survive in a dry cool paper bag all winter).
Thanks, i'll go with keeping the seed, i'm in the process of cleaning it, like you get it in the shops. It's quite some work, but less of those eggs will be around, they'll be worm food.
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