Seeds, tomato blossoms and bees.

As one assignment, i wrote and told about collecting seeds, and i just went through my picture files and found some photos i had taken last October, when we collected and washed seeds like rosa rugosa and chokeberry, so i thought i'd share some of them here.

We made quite a mess.

We washed the seeds and poured out the pulp with the water several times, so that all we had left was the seeds.

The chokeberry seeds sink to the bottom. There's still some pulp left.

But, the seeds of the rosa rugosa float on the water.

---

Oh, and on Wednesday we went to look at the tomatoes we had planted the week before. 

They had grown quite a bit, but they were planted a tad too early, they should have had one flower already open when they were planted, because now that they got some new soil, the plants might get exited and start growing like crazy and forget to make flowers. So, the gardeners try to slow down the growing with keeping the soil dry. It's always risky to do such a thing, but slowly the flowers start blossoming.

I found about five blossoms that are nearly open...

...and only one fully open.

There was the bumblebee-box/house there and one guy was already flying around, looking for blossoms to pollinate. There's one queen and about 50 to 60 workers per box, and one box costs about 75 euros. 

About last week

Last weeks Monday i finished making the little shelf in the woodwork classes.
Tuesday was all work, no theory classes. We planted some summerflowers in pots, like hundreds of them, and then sowed some herbs, such as dill and basil.

On Wednesday we had english, it went fine, but after that we were supposed to have some theory about raising chilis with Tiirikainen, but we had to go plant some tomatoes in the greenhouse, i wasn't dressed properly for that, i wasn't expecting any physical work for that day, so i was a bit pissed. And i was kind of pissed off also because we have so little time with Tiirikainen, only two hours a week, and then we have to go do something else during her lessons... After that we had some finnish lessons, where we did nothing, the teacher was arguing with couple students about what is a vocational skills demonstration and what is a competence-based qualification, because they didn't know the difference, so we just sat there doing nothing.

On Thursday morning we had Pessis classes where we listened about plants that bind nitrogen and nurture soil. After noon we had bussiness classes where we did some unfinished assignments. 

On Friday we had Pessis classes again, but this time it was about seedlings and sapplings. We went to look at the seeds of flowering quince that we had put in the cooler in November, i think, and they had germinated. In November the seeds needed a cold-treatment, so we had put some fine sand in a plasticbox and we moistened it and sowed the seeds in there and then covered it with plastic. Some of the seedlings had a disease in their roots caused by Fusarium-fungus and in the box there was also some grey mold, but many of the seedlings were fine, so we planted the healthy ones in seedlingtrays. We also put some cuttings of saintpaulia in pots to grow. After lunch we had fruits and berries -classes where we presented the assignments, that we had done about different plants. I did it about appletrees and how to defend them from pests, diseases and weeds using organical means.


...I'll edit this at home, and add some of my photos of those germinated seeds of flowering quince...

---

edit: 9.3.2013

Well, here's the photos that i promised.

 Here's a couple of seedlings with the root disease. The roots are clearly brown and droopy.

And these are healthy seedlings, the roots are white and firm.

Here's the box where the seeds had been for five months. I had remembered wrong, we collected and sowed the seeds in the beginning of October, not November.

And here they are, almost a week later, in the seedling tray.