Beautiful Garden!

Those are some of the best looking halloween costumes I've ever seen. Ladyrose is right. Your garden is beautiful, even when your flowers change their forms.

Well, at least you got pretty costumes! Were the seeds from a trade?

I have noticed that it is not uncommon that seeds from trades are mislabeled or not viable. One reason I tend to buy seeds. How does somebody mix up Digitalis seeds (teeny) with Rudbeckia occidentalis seeds (look kinda like Echinacea seeds)?

LOL - I like surprises (well, unless it's creeping thistle...).

A couple of days ago I was showing my neighbor the glads that I didn't plant that weren't there last year that came up in my garden. She told me she had planted glads, but they didn't come up. Darn squirrels! (or whatever critter might have moved them!) P.S. I offered to give them back, but she just laughed & said no.

Terrene, it's not difficult to mix up seeds and labeling of seeds, especially when you are a newbie at it.
I've done it myself, a couple of times, and just lucky that I caught my errors before it was too late.

All you need to do is make such mistakes as labeling a bunch of seed envelopes with one kind of seed, then do another set of seed packets to back up and put them aside.

Then you get the seeds to put in them and OOPS, wrong seeds in wrong envie

Another way it can happen is again, a newbie, or even an "oldie" like myself. in a trade you get some extras added in, labeled by either the person you traded with, or they got them from another trade and passed them on to you.
Either way, none of you are familiar with the plant they came from, what the seeds look like and you just keep passing them along, assuming that they are labeled correctly.
Somewhere along the line in the travels of those seeds, someone keeps the packet that has been passed along and WS them. Then it's found that they where not what they where labeled.

I've had it happen several times in the 8 years I've been on GW and trading. It's a surprise to see what they are, and I've yet to find something I was not happy with for at least that season.

As for non viable seeds from trades. I guess I've been lucky with that one, as I've had that happen only once, and they where commercial seeds that I got in the trade.

On the other hand, it's not uncommon to have commercially purchased seeds not germinate, not germinate well, or bloom the colors they are supposed to be.

Commercial seeds are grown the same way as in our own gardens, open pollinated. It is always a chance that some commercial seeds will not bloom the color that they are supposed to bloom, or be a throw back to a cross at some point.

That's why commercial seeds usually will be warrantied and replaced in not what they where supposed to be.

I'll stick with the seed trades and take my chances. I'm not that particular as to whether they bloom what they are labeled or not.
There are very few seeds that I "must have" and those few I do purchase, and my nursery purchases are extremely limited as well.

Either I WS the seeds, get the plants at my annual plant swap, or I go without. It's that simple now.

Fran

Here is my cherry brandy rudbeckia sown last year! Sad part is that I purchased these seeds. Oh well I have to say I like it though, it matches my water hose, lol, and it isn't quite like the common r. hirta.

{{gwi:401635}}

Fran, I'm not so sure your statement is right "Commercial seeds are grown the same way as in our own gardens, open pollinated". I think that's true of some small growers, and they generally state that on their website, that their seeds are open pollinated. I think that's true mostly of small growers, though, who might be running a small seed company with what they grow in their own yards. And I think they stick pretty much to heirloom plants for that reason.

I was under the impression that bigger companies (think Park Seed, or T&M), who sell lots of hybrids, take great care to isolate those plants. Some might be hand pollinated, bagged in netting, isolated in greenhouses, etc, in order to avoid open pollination and produce those hybrids. I've read that plants need to be located more than 1/2 mile apart to avoid cross pollination.

I don't know a whole lot about this stuff, and I've never sold seeds or worked for a seed company. That's what I've read though. I hope somebody with more knowledge of plant genetics than me will weigh in. I do find this stuff interesting.

Karen

Most commercial seed is grown in large fields and all they grow is one variety per field. That way they can cull the visible off types. The field is harvested, the seeds and chaff separated and they go into storage until there is enough to send to the distributer who then sells them to a seed packer. It's a global enterprise. Always remember that the date on the packet is the date they were packed, not the date they may have been grown.

For myself, because I do a LOT of seed packing, I've made it a habit to work on only one variety at a time, and I put the labels on after I pack the seeds, never before. I do however run the labels before the packing job because it's nice to have everything ready to go. I pack, I label. That's it and it's done in one place, at one table. And I never leave open seeds on the table unattended. It's a lot of little steps to assure true packaging, but the steps are simple.