It occured to me we have exchanged many peas and fava beans, some came with holes or dead weavils in the bag. I don’t know if there are different varieties of them and if we’re not creating landraces if we don’t kill them with deep freezes and soaking in water, before planting them out.
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Hehe, we need to hard select them for not bothering our fava and peas landraces.
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I think this is the first time I laughed at a topic title.
The extra protein content is for nitrogen.
Oh, of course. Polarca recomeded to freze the seeds two cicles, to make sure all the larvae and eggs are destroyed.
Yeah but not everybody knows her and read that. So i started this topic to pick some brain powerrrr. And we’ll not create a super invincible evil weavil landrace. I heard from Polarca even super seed compagnies send themwith holés in.
I did not find holes in my bought seeds yet, but probably my weavil came from those companies.
I thought the topic was half humorous. But yea, we need to froze those fava and peas seeds, better two times.
What else do we have to freeze? Or do we simply make our plants resistant to it? If we start thinking we even have to remove the viruses or bacteria that are present.
It was half humorous indeed, because off course we don’t want that, but it’s also serious and could be a really serious problem. So let’s think of all ways we know of to avoid it. How much is a good freeze temperature?
Freeze is freeze? I suppose -5C maybe for a week. Make sure to have very dry up seeds. Put them in a sealed plastic bag, maybe double bag them. And then remove the bag from the freezer and leave the bag inside the house for a longer period, one month?. Probably not all of the weavil are going to freeze and die, I guess the ones that are still in the egg can survive. So leaving the seeds on room temperature it makes their cycle change, from egg to larvae, and you freeze them again.
Pull it out of thin air.
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-5°C is not enough to kill the weevils.
Furthermore: If you freeze them slowly, by for example having a big batch of seeds in a warm freezer that needs hours to reach -18°C, the weevils can adapt their metabolism to the cold and survive freezing
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Oh, thank you for the info.
What are your recommendations?
I read that shake the seeds like a maraca helps.
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