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I too am a seedaholic! Those who know me, know I believe in the late Jackie Gleason's adage that "If its worth doing ... its worth obsessing over". I believe that adage is scriptural. No 12-stepping for me!
Our specialty is xerophytic and xeroidal (my word) plants. Think desert plants and fat swollen succulent desert plants!
During flowering season (pretty much 365 days a year here with GH in San Diego county) I spend upwards of an hour a day fiddling with pollen and seeds. Virtually every day there is at least one group of plants that begin giggling whenever I approach with my set of water color brushes. Carol calls it 'playing with the flowers'.
This year I used up nearly 400 coin envelopes with different crosses and species and several large containers with species of rare seeds gathered from desert plants in our own GH's and landscape. One large rare desert shrub yielded over 5 gallons of seed. (not so rare this year).
Organizing is a nightmare. some of the fruits on one large genus ripen and are ready to pop at different times on the same seed stalk and have to be gathered when dry. So making sure we have only one envelope for each plant is sometimes difficult. There can be a 3-month span between the first ripe fruit and the last one on the same seed stalk.
I find a few expert nurserymen in my area who've helped me develop all kinds of techniques for this weird pass time.
Cleaning and organizing the fruits of labor here is quite a tedious process. Thank you for the great article!
A terrific article and posting. I've been trying to mentally sort out the best way to organize a seed collection. On a recent trip, I used old gum and candy wrappers to fold around the seeds...not exactly a long-term solution. Back at the hotel, I was able to replace the wrappers with pages from a notepad, labeling the pages before wrapping the seeds. That started my little seed collection, or should I say obsession? ;) I still have the seeds folded in the notepad pages, just waiting for inspiration; so thank you for the great ideas!
This was fascinating to me, because my "seed collection" pretty much is one basket. I can't imagine the fun it must be to have so many to choose from. I'm sure many DGers will benefit immensely from your organization. Great job!
