Harvesting My Own Sugar Beet Seeds
Hello friends,
Back in the Winter of 2024 I was perusing the Kings Seeds website looking for seed packets to buy for the upcoming spring season. One of the packets I was looking to purchase was Sugar Beet seeds, which Kings Seeds had supplied for many years. As you may have seen in my blog, I grow Sugar Beet plants as a source of my own sugar. You can read all about my Sugar Beet extraction method in this blog post from 2023.
Except there wasn't any Sugar Beet seed packets available on their website. So I contacted Kings Seeds and asked them if they were going to be selling Sugar Beet seeds that year, and they told me they were no longer going to be stocking them. I had a little panic, but then went online to see if anyone else in New Zealand was selling Sugar Beet seeds for the home gardener. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any Sugar Beet seed suppliers, and all of the big commercial seed companies were only selling fodder beet for farmers.
So now I was panicking big time. All I had left was one packet of Sugar Beet seeds, and it was only half full. The expiry date had run out as well, and Sugar Beet are biennial, which meant that seed harvesting from any plants was two years away.
Determined not to give up, in Spring I direct sowed all the Sugar Beet seeds I had left, and impatiently waited for them to germinate. I managed to get a small number of seedlings dotted around the vegetable garden, with each plant growing under slightly different conditions, with the hope that some of the plants would survive the two year wait to collect my own Sugar Beet seeds.
A number of Sugar Beet plants managed to survive the first growing season, including a very cold winter with -6˚C frosts, and then started growing again in their second year. The Sugar Beet plants began bolting over summer, and started flowering in February of 2025. By this time the plants were very tall, about 1.5 m high, and were prone to toppling over in the wind. A number of plant supports were erected to keep the plants upright until the Sugar Beet seeds were ready to be harvested.
In late March 2025 it was finally time to start harvesting the Sugar Beet seeds, and I made the decision to harvest them by hand, picking off each of the seeds one by one as they became brown. This long and drawn out period of harvesting the seeds took around two months, and then once they were nice and dry, I stored them away over this winter.
Now I have my own Sugar Beet seeds to use year by year to make my own sugar, and to collect my own seed in Autumn, whenever I need to. And I'm also pleased to say that I have enough Sugar Beet seeds at the moment to sell my excess to other home gardeners through my small business Hearth & Oak. If you are interested in buying some of my Sugar Beet seeds so you can grow your own Sugar Beet, and then collect your own Sugar Beet seeds in the years to come, please follow this Sugar Beet seed packet link to my Felt Store.
I had not intended to use this blog commercially to sell anything through my small business Hearth & Oak, but the thought of home gardeners in New Zealand not having access to Sugar Beet seeds and plants in the coming years, was too much to bear. Rare and interesting seed varieties in New Zealand deserve to be saved, and this is my attempt at doing this for Sugar Beet at least. I hope that if you do buy some of my seeds, my blog posts on Sugar Beet will help you grow your own plants, and then collect seeds, so that you can grow Sugar Beet every year.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Side Garden Project - Planning and Building Raised Garden Beds
Hello friends,
After we had taken down the old aviary/berry cage, it was time to get to work turning this space into garden beds.
The first task was to weed the area, tidy up the fence line, and move two concrete pavers. Once I pulled out all the weeds and then tidied the fence line by putting old pieces of wood up against it for protection, hubby and I maneuvered the pavers into the space next door, where I have my worm farm located.
With all that done I ordered macrocarpa sleepers from our local garden centre for creating the new garden beds. The sleepers are 1.8 m long, which was the exact size we needed for that space.
The next step was to first put up some old trellises for our raspberry bushes, so we could train them along the fence line. We then create 90 cm wide beds using the macrocarpa sleepers, with 50 cm pathways in between for easy access to the garden beds. It was a lot of hard work considering there was a lot of river pebbles in the area. We transferred those river pebbles into the pathways between the garden beds when we were finished.
Once all the beds were in place, hubby did the hard work of digging over the garden beds and adding compost. The first bed closest to the garden shed was set aside for the strawberry plants I had put into pots in the glasshouse before the aviary was removed.
The next garden bed was set aside for my natural dyeing plants including Madder, Woad, St John's Wort, Tomentil, and Lemon Sorrel, which I had squeezed in another garden bed down the side of the house. While transferring the plants I was able to harvest some of the madder roots for natural dyeing. I have enough space leftover now to put more natural dyeing plants in the other half of the garden bed this spring.
Garden beds 3 and 4 are currently empty, and they still need to have compost added, before being prepared to a fine tilth for spring.
My plan is to grow Linen and Japanese indigo plants in bed 3: I have my own homegrown flax linen seeds in storage from last year, and I bought Japanese indigo seeds from Growing Textiles last autumn with the intention to grow my own indigo plants for natural dyeing, and also for indigo seed production.
In bed 4 I want to start my own breeding experiments with dahlias. I've wanted to do my own plant breeding for ages, and I now have the space to start this. I have dahlia seeds set aside from last year's plants to do this. I'm very excited about this project and can't wait to get started in spring.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
Susie Ripley Gardening Seed Haul
Hello friends,
Recently after having cataract surgery, and not being allowed to do any gardening for two weeks afterward (due to infection and high eye pressure risk due to potentially getting my eye dirty, and lots of bending over), I got bored and decided to do some seed shopping from a local seed company, Susie Ripley Gardening. I found that she has a wonderful range of not so common seed varieties which match well with my gardening style.
I bought the following flower seed packets from her:
* Coreopsis Incredible Dwarf Mix
* Cornflower Mauve Ball
* Cornflower Pinkball
* Cosmos Double Click Rose Bon Bon
* Cosmos Double Click Snowpuff
* Dahlia Susie's Mix
* Dianthus Chabaud La France
* Nigella Delft Blue
The colours in the seed varieties I bought work well with my garden colour palette. And I'm particularly excited about Susie's dahlia mix as it has seeds in it from Floret's Petite dahlia varieties that grew last year, along with others. I didn't get Floret's petite dahlia variety seeds last year, and I'm quite sad now that I didn't invest in a packet. I'm hoping that there will be some pretty Floret dahlias in the mix.
Now I just have to impatiently wait for seed sowing to begin in early spring...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
Seed Saving And Storage In Autumn 2025
Hello friends,
Recently I finally got around to sorting out the last of my seed saving efforts for autumn.
First up I sorted out the pumpkin and tomato seeds I had drying on paper towels. It didn't take too long to clean up, package and label my Baby Bear, Grey Crown, and Kakai pumpkin varieties, along with my Island Bay Tomato seeds.
Next up was dealing with all the flower seeds drying in the garage. I had two different stashes of Calendula officinalis seeds, a mixed container of seeds from various Calendula plants around the garden, and one container with seeds from the Calendula Strawberry Blonde variety I had growing. It didn't take very long to sieve them using my soil sifter, which I use for seed clean up.
I then sifted my Nigella, Love in the Mist, seeds I collected from various plants in the front garden.
And I also cleaned up and then stored mixed Cosmos seeds I collected from all the Cosmos varieties I grew over the summer. The seed sifter's multiple sieves came in handy, as there was quite a bit of flower bits in the mix.
In my seed clean up session I also found packets of Zinnia, Sulpur Cosmos, and Sweet Peas I had collected earlier in the autumn, but had not had a chance to store away yet.
With all that organising done, it was time to stow all the seeds away for the winter. I now have three matching seed storage containers, with one each for vegetable seeds, flower seeds, and herb and dye plant seeds. It didn't take very long at all to store all the seeds away in their appropriate containers. These containers make it so much easier to store the seeds, and then pull them out in smaller sections for seed sowing.
With that big job done, there's nothing more to do until the seed catalogues come out in the coming months, when I need to go through each box and check if I need to replace any seeds I wish to grow next spring.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
Sowing Ranunuculus Seeds
Hello friends,
Three weeks ago I finally got around to sowing the ranunculus seeds I bought from Bud & Bloom back in January. The seeds don't germinate in hot weather, so I had to wait until late March when we start to get cooler mornings.
I pulled out my new seed sowing tray protector and got to work. I'm so pleased that I invested in buying it earlier this year, as it cuts down on mess big time, and it's so much easier to sow seeds.
I sowed one seed per cell, and gently covered each ranunculus seed with vermiculite as suggested in the instructions that came with the seeds. I gave them a good watering and stored all the seed trays undercover in the woodshed where it is cool for most of the day.
Now came the patiently waiting part, as ranunculus are notoriously slow at germinating, usually taking 2 - 3 weeks to germinate. Each day I checked on the seed trays and kept the vermiculite damp.
Two weeks after seed sowing, a single ranunculus seedling popped it's head above the vermiculite, and then another and another over the next few weeks.
Quite a few seedlings have come up now, and they are slowly growing in their seed sowing cells. Over the coming weeks they'll grow their underground root systems, and then as the weather gets even cooler, the plants will grow more leaves. I can't want to see lots of ranunculus plants flowering in spring this year.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
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