After I collected seeds from last years herbs, I wanted to get some other seed collecting done. I always manage to hawk some seeds from my in-laws, aka the next door neighbors, and this year I decided to go for their beautiful coneflowers. A native plant that has a lovely pinkish purple flower. Looks a lot like a Black-eyed Susan…different color, but similar.
The seeds came off very easily, although a bit prickly.
We collected a goodly amount.
Next up on the kids and my list of targets, was the grasses growing on our property. We live on a dirt road and want to try and knock down the dust naturally, so our thought is if we can establish a grass strip along the road it might help.
The seeds were challenging to strip, so we decided to just break off the heads into our paper bags.
Light fluffy stuff, that made for a great lesson on how seeds travel in nature.
Tony gently tilled up the soil (yay spring!) along our road front. We then scattered all the coneflower and grass seed–coneflowers in front, grass in back. Fingers crossed that some of the seeds will take.
I do have my doubts at how successful this might be, so I decided to test some of the seeds before we put them all in the ground. This is a great method for testing any seeds. Place seeds on a damp paper towel. (I did 10 seeds so that if 8 germinate, I can say I had 80% success. If only 3 germinate, I only have 30%. You probably should test more…but I like easy math.)
After you place your seeds on the wet paper towel, and fold the towel over, place them in a bag and set in a sunny location. Keep an eye on them over the next few days/weeks to see if you have any roots develop. This would indicate germination and that your seeds are still viable.
And here’s the third babe. I’m hoping she really develops a love for the carrier since gardening season is right around the corner! Looks like she enjoyed it enough today!
