Dogwood seeds

This gardening season has been a learning experience for me. Having been sick for a few years, I was out of the gardening loop. Due to lots of medication over those years I found that I had not retained all my gardening as I would have liked. Since I had not let my plants go to seed in a number of years, it was like doing it all over again for the first time. Many of the varieties I had no problem with as I had so many seedlings coming up every year. Some plants were more difficult as I had not had seeds from them in the past or had not paid attention to that part of their growth.

As one of my gardeners had requested that i take photos of all of the plant stages, I worked on it all season. I just didn't have the time to post them due to time required in the gardens. It is a process I will be working on over the fall and winter. I have thousands of photos that I took during the season, and I will be sorting them to get them posted to this blog.

So by now most of you should know that I mistakenly gave out what I thought were Red Dogwood seeds in the spring. They were only the barren flower bracts that had come down in a heavy rainstorm. This is a branch from the Red Dogwood out front showing how its berries are ripening.



They turn red as they mature. You can see there is a berry below the one in this photo that has split open. It was opened by birds trying to eat it.




Here is an opened berry in plain sight. The flesh is yellow, making it a great contrast to the bright red skin.



And this photo shows a slew of berries on the ground under the tree. When the berries were at their ripest we had continuous swarms of all different birds feasting like there was no tomorrow. And what a mess they made!! Berries all over!!




Strewn all over the path. Tossed haphazardly around the gardens.




Even falling under some fall colored poison ivy. Who knew it could look so pretty in the fall? I usually get it all out early in the season. but , due to such a wet summer, it was coming up all over throughout the season.



This is what the berries and seeds from within look like.




Berries get harvested in November for planting for seedlings which will start coming up next spring. I have swept all the seeds on the path into the gardens so that they can start coming up for anyone to have next year!!

Garden questions

A recent email brought me these questions:

I have a couple of quick questions for an experienced gardener:

I have some "Money Plant" seeds- they are a plant that -when dried turns into silver looking coins. Quite pretty I think in a dried arrangement. Anyway, my question is: when do I put those seeds out? And do I plant the seeds or just spread them?

And my second question is: What should I do for my garden to put it to "sleep" for the winter? A friend told me to trim all the perennials of their dead and dying leaves and then cover everything with mulch...but then a neighbor remarked that it really was not necessary... What to do? I have found both opinions - to do nothing and to cover everything on websites???? What do you do? I mostly have lilies, hostas, ferns, and they were given to me and planted late summer so they haven't really grown a spring/summer season yet.

Any advice would be appreciated. Many Thanks!

Toni


My response:
About the money plant - know it well - Really enjoy it, although some people treat it as a weed! To each his own taste!. Anyway, you can just spread the seeds wherever you want it to grow. It needs no attention at all to thrive!

Both opinions are good. To safeguard your plants over the winter a mulch can help. I let the leaves fall as they land and then rake in spring. I often will put a top shovelful of compost on my more tender plants, as an extra treat for the winter. By mulching the plants you can help protect them from winter heaving. That's when the soil freezes, then thaws, then freezes, etc. The mulch can help protect the plants from having their roots come up to the surface, freezing and killing off the plant. I have this happen occasionally, but not every yeaer.

It all comes down to how much work you want to got through. When I was sick for several years, I was unable to do anything, and most of everything survived fine on its own.

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!!