Difficult to divide for transplanting. Seedlings tranplant best if disturb roots as little as possible. You'll have all the seedlings you need after your plants flower & set seed. The rosettes will flower next year. If you plant 2 years in a row then you'll always have 1st & 2nd year plants to keep it going. They do best in poor, well drained soil like my gravel driveway. This year I left them to bloom just outside the garden bed at the top of the driveway & hopefully they'll reseed BACK INTO the bed. If they seed further out I'll move them. I've done it before. Deadheading does help them overwinter better. As does removing any crowded foliage around them from other plants that becomes mushy after frost. I have white ones in one section of a garden that I hope will reseed for me this year. I will also collect some seeds to plant. I use a lot of mulch in that garden & it's a bit shady. They do better in full sun, but I wanted to keep the 2 colors separate & I like how white lights up the shade.

Pansy, I just saw this post. If you have any more Magenta Rose Campion seeds, I would sure like to have some to get it started in my yard. What's Cottage Garden without Rose Campion? I can send you a SASE if so. Hoping to hear from you. ~ Annie

In addition, even after the pods open and seed fall out, give them a little squeeze as sometimes a bunch get hung up. They should be fairly dry and crack as you pinch them. When I harvest rose campion I take a pair of scissors and a large bowl so I can cut down and shake seed off at the same time. Some pods don't turn dark, just a light brown, so look for the opening at the top. I figure that when ma nature is ready to cut the seeds loose, they are ready. It's worked so far for four years of harvest.

I do like Hazzard's for things I want in large quantity. I ordered seeds sporadically throughout the day and think I'm almost done. Almost. Because I'm never really totally and completely done with the acquisition of seeds. I've actually exercised a pretty decent amount of self-control so far this gardening year and only have ordered seeds from a mere handful of suppliers: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Seed Savers Exchange, Victory Seeds, Select Seeds Antique Flowers (one of my faves for heirloom flowers that are hard to find any more), Territorial Seed (I had to have Butterpie squash and you know that I never order just one packet of seed from anyone, so I had to get a few more things to make it worth paying the shipping), and Dixondale Farms (of course, and I cut back to only 5 bundles of onion plants). There's still a couple of things I want from Kitasawa Seeds (because I like their hybrid avocado-type summer squash since it is a C. moschata) and also there's a mere handful of things I must have from Baker Creek. There's a lot more that I want, but I know I won't have room for more. Oh, and some wildflower seeds from Wildseed Farms, and that's absolutely the last thing I need to order. I'm going to try to ignore the new catalogs that just arrived this week. They're too late---I'm done. I've ordered enough (which means too much) and don't need more. I can look at seeds on a seed rack in a store and then walk away because, honestly, I've probably got all I need of anything that is common enough to be on a seed rack in a retail store here in my part of the state. We don't have many nurseries down here, so it generally is just whatever is in the box box stores, or occasionally I'll see something a little unusual in a feed store. I only really get in trouble when I find really unusual things that you don't see often, if ever, in stores. Those are the ones that tempt me, and that's what makes catalog/online shopping so tempting. What if you don't try that rare purple carrot this year....and cannot find the seed next year? That's how my brain works...... I usually start seeds on Super Bowl Sunday, so need to calm down and not get in a big rush. We have some lovely days ahead where I can work outside all day, leaving no time for me to start seeds too early. When the next big cold wave hits us late next week, that's the danger zone when it is tempting to open up the seed packets and start some seeds because it is too cold and yucky outside. Speaking of outside, November was mostly very cold at my end of the state, and December was really warm. It was so warm my rose bushes are leafing out....and the fruit trees are getting too eager to do the same thing, even though we had a night last week. Kim, Before the deer became as big of a problem as they are now, I would just drag out the rototiller and till up more soil to accommodate more seeds. When we fenced in the front garden with 8' tall fencing a few years ago, I "gave back" almost half of the large front garden to Mother Nature. We just couldn't fence it all or, rather, we could have but we weren't willing to because the west end was becoming increasingly shady so it didn't make sense to fence it in for veggies. I miss the pre-deer-herd days when I could just rototill more land to plant whatever I wanted, which gave me a lot of leeway when I bought too many seeds. Since then, we've added three more smaller fenced garden plots, but I think it still isn't as much as I gave up when I shrunk down the front garden a bit for the taller fencing. I was looking today at trees encroaching on the garden from the west and the north and was thinking we need to get busy cutting down some trees on the edge of the woods before I lose more of the garden to tree roots and shade. My garden is not relentlessly creeping ever closer to the woodland---it is the woodland attempting to take back the land we converted to garden space. I need every bit of that garden space for all the seeds I buy. Dawn