It is Almost Gardening Time

It is snowing outside and everything is covered with snow and frozen.  The seed catalogs are mailed out and it is time to start thinking about planting a garden.

I know that a lot of pumpkins are needed.  We used up the last of our pie pumpkin last month.  Pumpkin waffles seem to be a new favorite.
The grandkids what to have a pumpkin carving and painting party next Halloween.
I'm out of Mandarin Sauce and Chili Sauce.  That means lots of tomatoes and bell peppers.
Lettuce and spinach is always planted. As as you know from the last post, being lazy can make you have no seeds; that is if they don't up and vanish like the spinach seeds did.

Last summer six pickling cucumber plants gave me enough cucumbers for pickles to last about two years.
I saved seed from one of the cucumbers.  Here are pictures.

The is a Boston Pickling cucumber that I am saved seeds from.  They turn yellow then orange the older they get. This picture was taken on 9-21-2015.

It finally fell off of the vine on 9-25-15.  In the meantime it grew a little longer.

Cut open and ready to harvest the seeds.

I put the seeds into a colander to be rinsed.  Had to use my hands to get some of the slimy mess off of the seeds and it wasn't easy.

This is them after rinsing and picking out the broken seeds.

I realized how hard they were to see on a white wet paper plate so onto a black napkin they went to dry.
After four or five days I pulled them off of the napkin (with a few pieces of napkin still stuck to some seeds) and put them into a zippered plastic snack bag. I rolled the top of the bag down so it would stay open and set the bag out of the way for another month to make sure they were completely dry. Then I closed the bag and added it to the collection of seeds.