BUYING GARDEN SEEDS AT THE GROCERY STORE?

Well, they are seeds, right?

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Recently, I passed through a town with a great Mexican Grocery Store. Among other wonderful things, they had some foods that I had always wanted to grow, but just had never gotten any seeds for. For the video folks, you can watch it here:

REALLY - GARDEN SEEDS FROM THE GROCERY STORE?

I don't know if you've even eaten any dishes that feature the large kernel corn that is common in parts of Mexico, but I love the taste, and size, of them. So far, I haven't purchased any from a garden center though, yet, here I was standing in front of all sorts of them at the Mexican Grocery Store.

I also noticed a huge bin of frijoles, which got me thinking even more. And then, I saw something even more peculiar.

On the left you see some dried, salted, pumpkin seeds, and on the right, something else. These were not salted, and not roasted. In fact, they even still had some of the green "slime" on them from the inside of whatever "pumpkin" they came out of. Some may thing that this is gross, but it excited me.

In my hand are the ones that I am speaking of. The packaging in the background on the right shows the ingredients for the other seeds; pumpkin seeds and salt. I figured that any salted or roasted seeds would no longer sprout, but these unsalted ones, complete with dried green slime, got my hopes up. Much like the dried goji berries from China which are just quickly dried in the sun without being exposed to excessive heat, I figured that these would sprout.

LET'S TEACH AND TEST

Since I have four older @little-peppers, and I had four types of seeds that I wanted to test out, I decided to use this as an educational opportunity.

They were each assigned their own seeds, and got to wet some paper towel for a germination test. They were supposed to count out ten, but the two year old just kept on going.

They each placed their seeds on their own wet paper towel, and then we rolled them up to see if they would germinate. This is a simple way to test if any seeds you have will work for planting. By choosing ten seeds of each variety, you can even get a rough estimate of what percentage are still good. If five of the ten sprout, then you have a 50% germination rate.

Once the moist paper towels full of seeds were rolled up, we placed them inside a plastic bag so that they would retain the moisture and saturate the seeds. Then, we had to wait a few days.

GERMINATION TEST RESULTS

A few days later, we unwrapped our experiments. Just as I had suspected, each and every kind of seed was still able to be planted. Check out how well these began to grow!

Interestingly enough, almost 100% of all the seeds sprouted! This was exciting news. Even more interesting was the cost of the seeds, since I bought about $1.00 USD of each. I literally had hundreds of the large white corn, the large pink corn, and the beans. I had slightly less of the pumpkin seeds, but we were eating them too!

If you think about that, I just bought multiple seeds for a penny! If these were packaged for gardening I would have never got them so cheap. We still need to see if they not only sprout but produce fruit, but I'll have to wait for next year to do that.

I'll certainly try growing these next year and see how they produce, but I think that it may work out very well. It's interesting how people don't really think about the fact that the seeds we eat could also be the seeds that we plant and grow. As long as they are not roasted, salted, or other things that "kill" them, we can choose to either eat or plant such seeds.

Not only was it a good chance for me to get some new varieties of seeds that I wanted to try, I got them very cheap. Also, the @little-peppers got to learn some more about a lot of things, even finances and math. I'm interesting in seeing exactly what kind of "pumpkin" those pumpkin seeds will grow too, because they look quite a bit different from the ones I normally grow. I'll let "Red-Pepper" prove it to you today!

As always, I'm @papa-pepper and here's the proof:

proof-of-grocery-store-seeds-sprouting

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Until next time…

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GIF provided by @malos10

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