Collecting Seeds

Back in the spring, before it was 475 degrees outside and everything was baked to a complete crisp I had some romaine lettuce plants.  Unfortunately, before I could harvest very much of the lettuce it started to get really hot.  When lettuce gets hot it gets bitter, perhaps like some of you might be feeling on any given day when walking outside between the hours of 1-7pm.   It quickly became inedible; the lettuce that is, becuase you shouldn’t eat people to start with. 

One other thing lettuce does when it gets hot is that it ‘bolts’.  It grows straight up and not in a nice compact head of the leafy veggies you’d want to put on your plate.  When it gets tall enough it goes to flower and then after the flowers come the seeds. 

In order to save money on buying more seeds, or new plants, you can harvest your own seeds.  I didn’t remember to take pictures of the plants before they were too far gone and out of the ground.  But I did take a picture of the tops drying on a paper plate in my kitchen.  They could dry anywhere really. 

Once they were good and dry I crushed open the little seed heads and got the fuzzy almost dandelion looking stuff out of the way and got to the seeds themselves.  Then I stored the seeds in a small Ziploc bag and get this complicated move… wrote ‘romaine’ on it so I would know what was inside. 

They are ready for planting and I’ve even shared some of them already to get someone going on their fall garden.