Daylily seed pods - Stella D'oro seeds available

On my vacation we stopped overnight in Connecticut. The hotel we were in had beautiful gardens filled with the spent stems of Stella D'oro Daylilies. So, yup, you guessed it, I did some gardening, cleaning up the dried seed pods and bringing them home. Collected more in Springfield when we stopped at Plato's Closet for Mia's back-to-school shopping spree.

And for those of you with teens out there it is a worthwhile trip to Springfield to get some great clothes for your teens, girls and boys. It is a consignment shop which only has teen clothes. Racks and racks of jeans, tops, shoes, accessories and even books and Dvd's. Mia tried on dozens of jeans to find the ones that she liked best and fit her to a tee! Check it out online. We got top brand clothes for a fourth of the original price and less!! I saved about $150 on jeans alone! They only take top brand clothes in and they are in very good condition, some even never worn with the original tags still on them!

So I have all these seeds now, waiting for people to get them and plant them for next year. And I was at a cookout at a dear friend's who has many of my plants now growing in her gardens. She has a great selection of Daylilies, and as many had wonderful full, bulging seed pods, I asked her if she would be willing to let them mature so that I could have them to share with you.

SO, folks, if you have plants that are starting to set their seeds, please think about letting them set their seeds, and fully ripen and share them with all. I am willing to take them in, separate them and keep them dry to give out to others who may want them and then to plant what's left in the seed bed here for all to have access to next spring.

I am learning that I really don;t know all that much about seeds, as each variety has very different ways of producing seeds. The best way to learn things is through trying it out, and learning from mistakes made. I recently noticed the berries growing on the Dogwood trees. I noticed that they were growing out of the seed bracts that were still on the trees. In that moment it occurred to me that I probably had been giving out barren seed bracts to all of you who took the Dogwood seeds from me earlier in the season.
So this is how I had figured out my seed collecting in the spring. My spring blooming plants dropped their seeds and produced their seedlings by the end of the current growing season. So I reckoned it would be the same with the Dogwoods. I always saw these seed bracts falling in the spring, and just assumed that they were the fertile seeds ready to produce seedlings. WRONG!!!!

This is a picture of the on the tree seed bract with the berries growing, which are the seeds, DUH!! LOL These berries will turn red as they ripen. I just found out that the berries on Cornus kousa, are edible, you just have to get past the skin. I'll have to see if I can find any to try out sometime. Supposedly they taste like melon!! If anyone has any Kousa, I would love to try some hardwood cuttings this winter.




So I just googled Dogwood seeds, and they are growing within the berries and aren't ready to be used until the end of the season. I will make a note to collect seeds at the end of this season, which won't be until October or November. I also found out about a =great way to use hardwood cuttings to propagate them, but that can't be done until January. I will keep you posted on my progress with this. Or I will just look around the gardens for the new Dogwood seedlings I am always finding all over, probably mostly courtesy of the birds!!