I have 2 solid green i can send you,my plant is still young and doesn't have many babies yet.

Brandy, I also have jade plant babies if you're interested. Please let me know so I can put them in with the spider plants. Ann

I wait til the pods start looking dry and brown before collecting them...sometimes the "seam" on the pod will start to split and that's when you know for sure the seeds are ready to collect. If the pods haven't started splitting yet, I just use garden sheers to snip them off the plant (pulling them at that stage almost always causes them to split open and you'll lose alot of those tiny seeds) If they've already started to split, I hold an envelope open underneath the pod and brush the seeds into it with my finger. If the pods you collected your seeds from were brown and kinda dry feeling, your seeds should be fine. I've never collected the seed pods while they were still green. The seeds have ranged in color from a medium tan to very black. Regarding what to grow with Cleome....I usually grow medium sized flowering plants in front of Cleome because the foliage on Cleome tends to get really ratty/ugly at the bottom by the time they've reached the flowering stage. This year I direct sowed Periwinkles and Marigolds in front of my Cleome....looked beautiful. The Periwinkles are still going strong, in fact, and have grown into little shrubs. It has been my experience that you don't really need to "dry" Cleome seeds if you've collected them at the right time. I store my seeds in little zip lock baggies and put them in a cabinet in my kitchen until I'm ready to sow them. The pods are brittle and fall apart and you need some other form of storage. Renee

The rhizome contains genetic information that will duplicate the parent plant. when you take a leaf cutting, the whole reproductive process changes. Just one cell from either I, II, or III will begin the rooting process but that one cell only contains the genetic material coding for whichever layer it comes from. The rhizome contains all of the genetic information from the parent, instead of having to start from scratch at just one type of cell. many African Violets are this way, chimeras. You can reproduce the plant only if you have a full crown (with all the genetic information, including the mutation) but if you take a leaf and try to propagate a new plant, it will not be true to the parent and will lose some of that genetic coding along the way. The cells in the leaves are very simple. They are to do one thing, and one thing only. Now, the cells in the dormant buds contain a different type of cell, one with much more potential than just a leaf cell. imagine it as if the dormant buds are similar to human stem cells, they can grow into almost any type of organ or tissue. Humans can't regenerate limbs (or bodies) so that example has to stop there lol. But with starfish (sea stars!), they can grow a limb back, but if a limb is ripped off, unless it has part of that central core (body), then the arm cells don't have enough genetic information to create a new body. The difference is the TYPE of cell used in starting the plant, whether it's a "stem cell" that holds information for the whole plant or just a leaf cell that is specialized and only holds the genetic information for its layer of leaf cells. That's probably going to be really confusing. It was kind of all over the natural world lol. I love biology though, so I enjoy our conversations!