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Spring in the Blue Mountains is almost here.

So the end of winter marks an interesting growing transition. Plants like the Brassica family start to push out their flower and seed spikes and we get to harvest some wonderful food like the ‘Early Purple’ Sprouting Broccoli shown here. Lots of these food plants are important to bees for the nectar and pollen they offer during this cold weather transition. Rocket (Eruca sativa) is a great example of this early spring time human and bee food abundance and reliably flowers at this time with edible buds, flowers (a rather nice scent), flower stalks and leaf. It’s traditionally called ‘Rocket’ because of the speed that it grows. Lots of plants will be triggered by the change in daylight hours and the warming of the air and soil and start to reseed themselves if you have allowed them to drop seed in place in your garden. So seed that has been sitting there invisible in or on the soil during the winter will start to germinate and grow. This is often the best and most reliable form of seed saving – doing nothing and allowing the seed to drop in place and to regenerate each year when they are ready. It’s a good idea to have some plants like this in your garden and containers to help track and show when you should be replanting other seeds out. The third photo here is of Shiso (Perilla frutescens) that has regrown in a large container. They will often drop many small seeds from their capsules and tend to fall out very easily as the reach full ripeness. They will only germinate when the temperature, light and moisture levels are right for them and it shows that now is the right time. Some seeds need to sit in the cold for some time to trigger the chemical processes that are needed to get the best germination and growth. This is why different varieties develop in different locations – they respond and adapt to the local weather and environmental patterns.

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It’s that time again!
This is just a quick reminder that the next scheduled meeting for the year 2022 of the Mid Blue Mountains SeedSavers is on at the Bullaburra Progress Hall this coming weekend.

Sunday 18 September 2022 from 10 am till Midday

Help celebrate the Blue Mountains Spring!

It’s time to put seeds and seedlings in and plan for the abundance of summer.

Come along and talk about growing things with like minded people.
Hope to see you there celebrating the current productive growing season!

The address for the Mid Blue Mountains Seedsavers website is:
https://midbluemountainsseedsavers.org/

We do now have a Facebook page as well:
https://www.facebook.com/Mid-Blue-Mountains-Seed-Savers-1629533990602860/

These regular notifications are sent out directly from the website if you subscribe to that email notification list.