from seed, the easy version

Fall: Prime time to sow many seeds in California’s mediter­ranean cli­mate. Self-sown gen­er­a­tions of clarkia, pop­pies, baby blue eyes, buck­wheats and lupines are show­ing up all around the garden.

But this year has pulled me in lots of direc­tions and I haven’t put a lot of effort into sow­ing seeds. Also, part of this lack of moti­va­tion is an attempt to accept the real­ity that the gar­den is pretty full as it stands, and I try resist the delu­sion that a plant grow­ing from a tiny seed won’t take up as much space as a nearly mature one from the nurs­ery. Con­se­quently the only active seed-sowing I’ve taken part in has been lim­ited to two very dif­fer­ent kinds of plants: the California-native blad­der­pod and some car­niv­o­rous plants.

The blad­der­pod was mainly an exper­i­ment. The pods that give Iso­meris arborea its com­mon name are full of seeds the size of dried peas. How easy would they be from seed?

Very easy, as it turns out. I opened up a cou­ple pods and buried the seeds about a quar­ter to half inch in these pots just two weeks ago. Here they are, show­ing almost 100% ger­mi­na­tion and phe­nom­e­nal seedling vigor.

The more upright of my two young blad­der­pod plants

Now that I see they’re really easy from seed I can check out the other thing thing I was curi­ous about. I have two blad­der­pods in the gar­den. One is slow-growing but is assum­ing a nice upright pos­ture. The other is an exu­ber­ant floppy mess of green-gray leaves and yel­low flow­ers. Both forms have their use in the gar­den, but I was really hop­ing for more upright growth pat­terns when I put them in the garden.

My seedlings come from the more upright plant, so we’ll see whether they fol­low mom’s growth habits when placed in var­i­ous loca­tions around the yard. Is the dif­fer­ence in growth habit nature or nur­ture? Might I have a con­sis­tently strain of upright-growing blad­der­pods on my hands?

In the native plant com­mu­nity grow­ing spe­cific strains or cul­ti­vars is often looked down upon as reduc­ing nat­ural vari­a­tion and dumb­ing down the gene pool. But in the gar­den it’s use­ful to know what kind of plant you’re get­ting. A gar­dener might be dis­ap­pointed to end up with a low mound instead of an open upright shrub. The cus­tomer might never buy another native plant again and instead fill their yard with hydrangeas. They’d spend thou­sands of gal­lons water­ing their hydrangeas, there’d be no more water for peo­ple and plants, and civ­i­liza­tion as we know it would collapse.

Any­way, so far this has been really easy. Next post I’ll look at my more high energy-input efforts to grow some car­niv­o­rous plants from seed.

November 21 2010 06:30 am | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • •

8 Responses to “from seed, the easy version”

  1. fer on 21 Nov 2010 at 9:51 am #

    Great to see some seedlings, I will do some seedling to, but mostly veg­eta­bles. I hope they con­tinue to grow nicely.

  2. Susan Krzywicki on 21 Nov 2010 at 11:51 am #

    Great post about the gene pool. This is a com­plex issue and rais­ing the issue helps bring awareness.

  3. Gayle Madwin on 21 Nov 2010 at 12:52 pm #

    Well, I’m glad you’re doing your part to pre­vent the col­lapse of civ­i­liza­tion as we know it.

    I planted tons of seedlings, but now half of them are drown­ing, of course.

  4. Wendy on 21 Nov 2010 at 7:02 pm #

    Blad­der­pod — what a bizarre name for a plant.

    I’ll be look­ing for­ward to your suc­cess with car­niv­o­rous plant seeds as well.

  5. Colleen Miko on 23 Nov 2010 at 6:08 am #

    Inter­ested to hear about your foray into seed ger­mi­na­tion for car­niver­ous plants. The ones I know from the south­ern US seem to ger­mi­nate after fire. Might we see a new series of pho­tographs along­side this project?

  6. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » from seed, the labor-intensive version on 23 Nov 2010 at 6:32 am #

    […] my last post was ded­i­cated to an easy seed prop­a­ga­tion project, this one details a cou­ple that were a little […]

  7. Arleen Webster/Camissonia's Corner on 02 Dec 2010 at 6:41 pm #

    Blad­der­pod is such an inter­est­ing plant. I’ve seen it grow­ing from coastal regions (Upper New­port Bay) to the deserts (Joshua Tree National Park). I have one in my gar­den, recently pur­chased from the fall plant sale at Ran­cho Santa Ana Botanic Gar­den, so it’s still just a babe at only 1 1/2′ tall. But now that I know they’re so easy to prop­a­gate from seed, I’m look­ing for­ward to some flower action, hope­fully in the spring! The yel­low blooms are lovely in a sub­tle way and very attrac­tive to the hummers.

  8. Brad on 05 Dec 2010 at 5:22 pm #

    I agree with you about hydrangeas. They will bring the world to an early end. I believe the Mayans men­tioned it in their 2012 doom proph­esy. And even if they don’t, I’m just not a big fan.

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