On Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:56:13 -0500, Shanghai
wrote:

When harvesting seeds from fresh veggies (bell and jalapeno peppers, in
this case), how long do I need to dry the seeds before planting?

There's a difference between "fruits" (anything where the seeds are
inside the item you eat - squash, cucumber, tomato, melon, etc) and
"vegetabled" (chiefly leafy stuff, roots, tubers, or immature flowers
such as broccoli). The former can be planted wet, because seed
maturity is reached when the fruit itself is ripe. The latter though,
you need to wait until the seeds dry on the plant, otherwise they're
not actually mature.

The premise of drying seeds (after they're mature) is for _storage_
(so they don't host molds and rot). You can take a fresh, mature seed
and plant it.

I too have had some ripe vegetables (er, fruits), particularly winter
squash, with sprouted seeds inside - the seed cavity is a moist
environment, not dry. When you plant seeds, you keep the soil moist,
not dry...

Speaking of winter squash, I still have 150-200 lbs of Rouge Vif
D'Etamptes ("Cinderella" Pumpkin) in my garage. Last year, we
finished the last of the prior year's harvest in June, about the time
I was seeding the 2011 garden crop.