Winter Sowing Seed Swap

I could sign up again...and get 40 seed packs!!!...but then again I am not sure what I am going to do with all the seeds that I have been harvesting...the seeds that I had left over from last year...the 20 packs that I am already getting...and the seeds that I could not resist ordering! ahhh...this stuff is addicting. ;-)

- Brent

Well said, Brent!

Anyone want some carrot seed from Bakers Creek Heirloom seeds. I don't have the package in front of me, but I think the name on them was St Vincent. They were a bonus package and I don't grow veggies either. Would be willing to split it up if several people are interested. I don't intend to use them as part of this swap.

Brent, I know exactly what you mean, I keep finding new seeds that I just must have.
If you'd really like to take the take the vacant spot, let me know.
Alice

May I claim the vacant spot for my friend Megan (lafko06) if Brent doesn't want it? This is her first year on DG, and I just pointed her to the WSing forum... she's very enthused! I just Dmailed to let her know I'd be happy to send extra packets on her behalf (not sure where she is at with her seed saving and/or purchasing).

awwww Critter that is awfully sweet of you.

Connie

Whoops, I guess I was too late... I see there are 20 slots filled on the list.

That's OK, I'll think of some other way to encourage her to try wintersowing!

What about Seed Swap #2 - I think that is still open.

Critter,
Spot #14 is 'open', waiting to see if Brent wants it.
Brent?
Alice

You can give the spot to somebody else...welcome abord lafko06!

- Brent

Thank Brent!!! This sounds great. Off hand, I know I have lupine, basil, miniature hollyhock in 3 colors (red,pink, yellow), Cleome Rose Queen, Galliarda and an unknown zinnia variety someone sent to me from DG -- and a few others!

Megan

Hi Megan, Welcome to the WS Swap. All the instructions you'll need are in the first post on this thread.
Alice

Hello,

I just finished bagging my 20 seed bags and will be sending them on Wednesday when I get the car. I'll give you a tracking number alice, even though it is not required... thanks for letting me in!!! I'm glad to say that I was able to exceed the minimum requirement of seeds per bag and hope people enjoy them!

Megan

How's the seed collecting going?
Got seeds today from Maggie 'etravia', thanks for including the extra postage, it will help to bridge the gap since the seed pack numbers keep growing! As it stands now, everyone will be getting several more packs then the original 20 as expected...some members are sending extra packs and I've thrown in extra's also.
Anyone want some mixed Lily seeds?
Hope everyone is saving those containers to WS their seeds in?
Alice

Alice, I'm waiting for the rest of the picked heliopsis blooms to completely dry so I can collect mature seeds. They should be ready to send to you in the next few days. ... To everyone who gave links and encouragement for seed collecting, a bouquet of thanks.

garden6, you better watch out for that seed collecting, it can become very additive!
Alice

Anything that you're getting too much of?

Alice~ I'm addicted, DH gives me "the LOOK" when he sees my seeds drying. I've taken to the tweezer method as suggested to separate the seeds and chaff while we watch football. I just smile at him pleasantly in return as I dream of gardening possibilities for neext year! You know the smile, today "ROME, tomorrow the WORLD"! ok, today a rose tomorrow a rose garden! ;0)

Beaker, I did kind of save a little too many "lemon gem" marigolds seeds. I know marigolds are very easy to save, but a couple of my neighbors wanted some. They're single row almost daisy like in appearance , but a yummy lemon color. Also the leaves are slightly different. If you want some, I'll send you some. :0)

Beaker, no. So far it's been a nice variety of seeds.
Alice

Oh, those 'Lemon Gem' marigolds are wonderful! And the foliage smells nice and lemony too, without that musty marigold scent that I don't much care for. I think I'll get a few seeds from my plants, but I only ended up with a couple of plants this year, and they bloomed pretty late (then frost came early), so while I'll have enough to sow next spring, I don't think I'll have seeds to share this year... I'm glad somebody will!

Yeah, definitely let us know if you're drowning in a particular variety -- if I know, I can put something else in rather than more of the same.

BTW, when I first started trading seeds a couple of years ago here, mostly what I had to trade was a huge bag full of zinnia seeds... I thought they'd be way too common, but people still wanted to trade with me, and I was thrilled! This year, I was away at the wrong time (again) to get zinnia seeds from my yard, so I'll be looking for them this winter. So don't think, oh, all I have are "ordinary" seeds, nobody will want to send me something neat in exchange for them... not true! And what's "ordinary" to one person may be new and different to somebody else. That's what keeps trading and swapping fun!

Thanks Critter for the encouragement. ;0)

Critter, I am a huge Zinnia fan, it's my favorite annual....cosmos are a close second. I still have some of both in bloom. I've been saving zinnia seed heads by the bag full...hoping to find time this winter to clean out all the chaff.

I couldn't figure out how to separate the seeds from the dried flower petals with zinnias... but since I sent stuffed sandwich baggies of seeds and dried petals (I did pull them off the flower heads and dry them), nobody seemed to mind that there was a lot of chaff. There were a lot of seeds in there, too! Actually, I still don't have a good way of separating zinnia seeds... I just sow handfuls of seeds and chaff together, and actually the dried petals are useful for seeing where I've sowed the seeds.

Hi folks,

What am I doing wrong? I am looking under EXTRA's in the address exchange but I can't figure out how to search for your name Alice. It makes me go from page to page???

Thanks!

Megan

Megan,
Saved you the trouble and sent it to you by d-mail.
Alice

Oooh, I am so glad to see marigolds, zinnias and cosmos mentioned. Some of us are newbie gardeners and what everyone else thinks is 'old hat' is still new to me! Lemon anythings sounds yummy, never heard of that kind garden6 - of course, I've never heard of lots of things so I'm trying to take it all in as fast as my brain can!

I can hardly wait until I can fill up baggies with seed heads! Right now I'm just tickled that I will be able to plant 2nd generation impatiens from my OWN seeds next year (hey, some of us are easily excited, okay?!) I never knew the little seed pods exploded - heh!

By the way, thank you everyone who is participating, I've never done this before and I can't wait!!

~Sunny

Sunny what kind (colors) of impatients do you have?

I have spent the last couple of days sorting ALL my seeds I have received, and putting them in order. Boy I tell you what, I don't know where I am going to put all my flowers when they come in LOL. After I do the 5 garden beds I have planned on doing and the Church's garden bed... I am still going to have TONS of flowers :o) But I will find a home for them, lol

Connie

Well, November 30th is still a ways off, so I'll burn up some thread space here with a couple quick thoughts about good old 'ordinary' flowers...The lowly dandelion had a hand in the start of White Flower Farms! Harris and Grant bought a house in the country, wanted to spruce up the dining room and floated a bunch of dandelions in a bowl of water, and thought it looked really nice. Then they started collecting wildflowers, and found that most wilted before they got them in water, so Harris decided to plant some flowers that would last longer, to please his wife... the rest is history...
~ ~ ~
I got a postcard last week from a friend where I vacationed around Labor Day, thanking me profusely for "the lovely flowers". I didn't know what she was talking about. Apparently, my fiancee decided the bunch of zinnias she bought for the cabin were too pretty to leave for the cleaning lady, and unbeknownst to me, gave them to our friend on our way out of town. They dried perfectly somehow, and six weeks later I get a postcard about 'em. Go figure...
~ ~ ~
This spring I bought the obligatory tray o' annuals from our local nursery, and long after the spring bulbs, veronica, columbines, azaleas,daylilies, irises, snap dragons, etc. have all disappeared, the Marigolds are standing tall, about two feet high and covered with flowers. From a distance they look like all the mounds of mums everybody here has. Any second now, they'll fade away to nothingness, but I have to admit they blew everything else away toward the end of summer. I need some dahlias and other later blooming flowers, I admit, but I never expected them to do what they did. Some self seeded, and I'm going to save some seeds. They earned it! I don't plan on sending any in to the swap, though, unless somebody really wants some.... cegoins? LOL

LOL PA hahaha, But come to think of it, I don't have any dahlias, NONE, rofl What I am going to be looking for soon is some total shade perennials, One of the beds I will be doing is totally shady no sun whatsoever... and I still have to research all the seeds I have, for size (height), month they bloom, if I can WS them etc. Now that I have them in alphabetical order, I can get started on that :(yuck) But once its done, it will be good :o)

Connie

Connie,
If you're looking for shade plants, you may want to try Winter Sowing some hosta seeds. I did a couple of years ago, and while they were the last to sprout and I thought all were lost, I ended up with hundreds of them.
Alice

Alice, I don't really like hosta's, dh has a couple of them and we had sooo many at the church and I just got sick of them... There was one that I saw that I liked, it was different than the ones we have. big dark leafs I mean hugh! But I am looking for things with lots of color... Even if they are annuals... I may have some in my seeds, for all I know lol. Thats why I have to do a search on all these seeds... Received alot that didn't give any color info and have I can't even read the name on. So I really have my work cut out for me...

Someone posted this link on the winter sown forum, it is going to come in handy for me :o) When I start going thru my list of seeds... http://theseedsite.co.uk/profiles.html I didn't know this was on the seed site...

Connie

I love the cosmos, and was quite upset that they would not bloom all season, just kept getting bigger. I only have 2 pink and one white, and now look at the blooms!!

Wow Kelly, they came out lovely!!

Connie:
I have bright orange, hot pink, pale pink, white and red. I *was* separating the seeds, but it got too tedious with all the colors. I mixed the pale pink and hot pink together, and the rest are still drying. We've had so much rain I'm sure I lost a lot to natural reseeding. I'm hoping to get out on Sunday if it dries off tomorrow and see how many seed pods are still swollen and ready. Let me know if you need some - I also have some bizzy lizzy seeds, mixed colors.

~Sunny

Sunny I would love some of each color, I don't care if you mix them up :o)

What are bizzy lizzy seeds?


Connie

In addition to impatiens and balsam, some plants that have surprised us with their shade tolerance and self-sowing over the winter have been:

Annuals or tender tropicals:

Plectranthus argentatus - http://davesgarden.com/pf/go/1355/index.html Once, here in zone 7a, we had such a fluke of a mild winter that this plant actually came back from the same roots in the following spring. Often, it will self-sow over the winter. But, to be more certain of success, it's best to take cuttings per the comment in the DG PlantFiles link. It gets to about 4' x 4' for us over a summer, and blooms not long before frost. However, a couple of autumns, I rubbed the stalks going to seed over a some indoor containers, and about January, little seedlings appeared. It's thick, pebbled, silvery leaves were beautiful this summer with double white impatiens and the deep rose/cream/green coleus 'Perilla Magilla' (spelling?). The DG PlantFiles list several types of plectranthus, many of which I understand are shade tolerant. PS - In the past, http://www.jlhudsonseeds.net/ has sold this seed. I have found Hudson's seed to be of excellent quality and generous amounts. Their selection is unique and comes with so much information, both of practical and ethnobotanical natures.

Torenia - I seem to recall reading that this one comes from a tropical or subtropical rain forest in Vietnam. So, imagine our surprise when it self-sowed over one of our winters. I'm referring to the short, bushy form started from seed.

Coleus have a surprising range of foliage color and patterns (and they have self-sown over winter for us, too).

The fibrous annual kind of begonia self-sowed over winter.

Perennials:

Astilbes self-sow here.

Begonia evansiana is perennial here and is known to self-sow as far north as Michigan.

There's one perennial combination in our shade that is very self-maintaining that always looks good: pink japanese anemone in a sweep behind the "silvery" Japanese painted fern (Athyrium nipponicum 'pictum' (spelling?) and a glaucous, blue-y hosta said to resemble Hosta elegans 'Blue Angel'. Dark-purple tinted leaves of viola labradorica bring black tones to this combination as it carpets its way up to it. All of these flowers have self-sown here, so could be excellent candidates for winter sowing.

I am going to try and get some seed of our pink Japanese anemone to everyone in this swap - it still needs to ripen some more first. This tap-rooted plant is very difficult to transplant when it hasn't been grown in a container, so perhaps winter-sowing it will get around that. The seeds appear in clouds of cotton fluff, and I hope y'all won't mind the fluff - separating those tiny little specks from their fluff is beyond me.

I did get good seed set on Actaea simplex 'Elstead' (purplish leaves, very fragrant) so can include that, too. I would never want to garden in the shade without that one.

Salvia forsskaolii (spelling?) - who knew? See DG PlantFiles.

Hi Connie,

Got a few more seed pods today during the break in the weather so I'm setting some aside for ya. Will send them on when I get a good little pile.

Fragrant AND shade loving, BlueSpiral you are the bomb woman! I was looking up Japanese Anemome and came across this site on how to build a Japanese garden - it's an online free book: http://www.fujiyamagarden.com/StoryIndex.html
I think I'll just start buying seed from you as your descriptions practically sell the plants!
Is this the plant you are referring to:
http://www.millenniumpark.org/artandarchitecture/luriegarden/plantlife/perennials/p_anem_hupe_pr.html


~Sunny

I think what I have is probably Anemone hupehensis var. japonica. It certainly looks like the picture in your link. But I don't know which cultivar it really is, since Carroll Gardens in Westminster, MD sold it to us instead of 'Honorine Jobert' which we thought we were buying. This has been a tough plant for us, tolerant of low watering and much shade, and may be invasive in "ideal" conditions - our kind of plant. It seems to bloom earlier than other cultivars from July - August instead of September - October (which Honorine is now doing here - we finally pounced on the real thing).

That looks like a great book, but my security software (McAfee) asks a lot of questions about it that I cannot answer prerequisite to my running it, so I have backed off from downloading it. But I sure would like to read it. Thanks anyway.

Bluespiral:

You can read it online as well, starting here:
http://www.fujiyamagarden.com/Contents1.html

No download required :)

That anemone is lovely, and I'm glad you're including it (if I read that right!) in the swap.

~Sunny

Thanks Sunny for the book link, If you want to you can send them with the seeds for the Happy Holiday Seed Swap, Just write my name on them, that way I know there mine.

Thanks Blue for the info and links...


Connie