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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>Wow, that's a LOT of carrots...

Yes, perhaps.  But there are six of us with several of that number being 
teenagers or pre-teens.  Moreover the produce goes also to bevy of 
octogenarian 
parents, aunts, and uncles.  If it were just the two of us, the gardens would 
be 
reduced to 1/8 the size they are now ...... may that day never come.



> I can never seem to save the small seeded stuff...I lose the seed.
> Perhaps my method needs work.  How do you do it?
> 
> > 

I probably tricked them.  The white carrot seed I saved was from several 
plants with hoplessly twisted roots (hence didn't get harvested) that were 
started 
in my infamous tubes in January.  The plant though it was in its second year 
and bolted to seed, a LOT of seed.  The seed stayed on the brown and dried 
tops for weeks.  I just put several tops in a paper bag and whacked it around 
and 
got half a cup of seeds.

Last year I saved seeds from my brocoli, several kinds of kale, mizuna, corn 
salad, arugula, tsa-tsoi, turnips, parsnips, beets (a very few), onions, 
several kinds of radishes, several kinds of lettuce and a few other small 
seeded 
plants.  I found the key was to plan ahead and leave a square foot or two of 
a 
plant where it can hang around undisturbed.  The biennials are the trickiest 
although most will bolt to seed in the first year.  Turnips and beets won't.  
A 
few of the turnips and rutagabas wintering over in the garden will simply be 
left alone and in early spring they will send up a seed stalk and make more 
seed than you can imagine. I have a forlorn stand of chard soldiering on 
through 
the winter and I hope to provoke it into seed in the spring.

Onions are the easiest seeds to gather, although your window of opportunity 
is very small.  They will fall off the flower stalk at a sneeze.  Radishes 
hang 
in the best, but you almost have to flail them to schmithereens to get the 
seeds out of the pod.





> 
> I am almost positive that was the variety of the Hairy Carrots.  I had
> great yield that year, but no flavor, and have I mentioned that those
> carrots had hair longer than mine? ;)
> 

Ha!  Well, now we've really solved the enigma of carrots.  You see, there is 
NO vegetable that can comepte with me for hairiness.  The carrot does not 
exist that my patriarch's beard.