You're sure welcome, Cabrita. "The book you mention sounds like a good addition to my library. ... I think I need to learn a bit more about plant sex ;-)" Heh-heh! Seed to Seed explains a whole lot of "the birds and the bees" when it comes to vegetables. ;) It's an excellent book on isolation techniques for saving pure seed. It'll explain in great detail caging, bagging, hand pollinating and all sorts of other things involved in saving pure seed. The best part is it tells you which techniques to use on which plants. EXCELLENT resource for that imho. And it's less than 17 bucks on Amazon. I just put in an order for another one as a friend came over today and I gave her mine. *blush* But that gave me an excuse to buy Great Garden Companions by Sally Cunningham, a book on companion planting that I've been wanting for a while. Gotta' spend $25 to get that free shipping you know. *snicker* "I am confused about caging, how will the bees get in there? then you say hand pollinating. I don't know how to do that. I heard (read) this on the tomato forum too." The bees won't get in there. That's the entire purpose of caging. If you don't cage the ones you want to keep pure, a few bees will visit some Queen Anne's Lace nearby (really, I'd bet money you have it growing near you), pick up some QAL pollen on their legs/hair, land on your carrot blooms on the way back to the hive and deposit some of that QAL pollen on them. Now your carrots are cross pollinated with the QAL. Bummer. And you very well may not be able to tell ~ just avoiding saving seeds from white-rooted carrots won't be enough of a guarantee that they didn't cross since sometimes a cross will look just like one or the other parent, but won't taste or grow like them. Just like humans ~ some people look a whole helluva lot like Mom, but they're not her twin. To keep that from happening, you build cages with some sort of screening on them that will allow air, sun and rain through but not bees. Window screen works nicely on a wood frame, as does light floating row cover on hoops tall enough to keep the cover off the carrot blooms. You cover your carrots with them, a bunch of plants at a time. Here are some pictures of what I'm talking about: Pic 1 Pic 2 ~ second picture on that page And here's a thread with a good picture and lots of info on how to build them. Since there are no bees, you'll have to take their place and hand pollinate. It's as simple as moving pollen from one flower onto another. (Be sure to only do this between plants that are showing the trait you want ~ heat tolerance in this case.) This can be done with a small paintbrush ~ just touch the pollen parts, loading it up with pollen, then touch a bunch of blooms and the pollen will get desposited. Do this all over all the blooms and you're done. Another way is to pick one bloom and use it as the paintbrush, brushing the other blooms with it ~ pick a few different blooms and brush each one on all the other blooms to ensure a good genetic mixup. But if you pick those blooms, that'd be that much less seed you'll get since of course the blooms you've picked and used as your paintbrushes won't go on to set seed. Don't think that you can just avoid that by picking the blooms of the plants that aren't showing heat tolerance and use those ~ you need to use blooms from plants showing the trait you want since their genetic traits are going to be crossed into the other blooms and their resulting seed ~ the blooms you pick are going to be Daddy to your next generation of seed. But in the coming generations when you have hundreds of plants growing out, you may find it so much easier to do it that way that it's well worth sacrificing those blooms. The Seed to Seed book will explain all this in better detail and more accurately than I can. It's really a great book. I highly recommend it to anyone and everyone who wants to save true vegetable seed. I've given away two of them so far and doubt that my third one will stay with me for very long before it gets passed on as well. ;) It's really that good of a book. There's also a book on breeding new vegetable varieties that was recommended to me, but I haven't bought it yet (one of these days...). I can't remember exactly what it's called ~ something like "Breeding Your Own Vegetable Varieties" or something.

Forgottenone: If my garlic is any indication, you've got it backwards on the flowering. All of my softnecks produced scapes and none of the hardnecks produced a scape. WJB2: for future reference, wait until your plants have lost their bottom 3 - 4 leaves (dried up and turned brown), stop irrigating and when the ground is dried and not wet enough to stick badly to the bulbs then, lift the plants with a turning fork and carefully remove them from the ground. Now it's off to cleaning and curing as described by others previously.

I used to garden in Kuwait but winters there are a fair bit cooler and longer than in Dubai. I didn't grow beets or carrots but I did grow other cool season crops/flowers like lettuce, potatoes and pansies. I seeded those in late October for a Jan-Mar harvest. Tomatoes and peppers were seeded in late September for a Jan-May harvest. But because spring arrives earlier and hotter in Dubai, you might have to shift those dates earlier, so they don't mature in the heat. Seedlings can take heat better than mature plants, in the case of these crops. Still, I would wait until October for seeding any cool-season crops. As suggested by others, starting indoors and transplanting is a good idea - just make sure you harden them off really well. Water very frequently when the weather is hot - deep, infrequent watering does not work there because of the sandy soil and high soil temperatures. Always do a moderate watering in the afternoon to cool off the soil surface a little, and a more substantial watering every morning. If you're planting in the ground, amend with lots of compost. Otherwise, soil pH might be a bit on the high side for tomatoes and peppers.

Well I went out and pulled off the dark brown/black ones that have dried out. Cracking open the shell was a lot like cracking open some peanuts. Anyways, the beans that came out were perfect. I still have the original batch of soybeans from the asian market. My grown ones look almost exactly the same. The only difference is that mine are just not quite as fat. Also I'm growing some mung beans. Same deal there, I pulled off a dry pod and cracked it open. The beans look the same as the bag of mung beans I grew them from. I'm still amazed I got any beans at all from these plants. I mean I truly treated them like crap. They were not at the edge of my balcony but close to my door. So they only got direct sunlight for about 5 hours a day. The stuff at the edge get 8 or 9 hours. I grew them in crappy $4 for 40 pound "organic" potting soil. No fertilizers added or anything. I really haven't been very diligent with watering them either. These bean plants never had any good looking leaves. They've all been full of brown spots and frayed edges. I've built one of those earthbox type self watering containers and have a tomato plant and basil plant in it. They've grown so quick and look so healthy. I'm going to build some more and I want to try a soybean plant in there to see how it does when it's treated nice.