Eww love the thread cause I love collecting seed!! Almost started a thread like this myself. I tried to collect from my phlox divartica and I be dern I totally missed them, I have never seen a plant produce seed and drop that fast. Ugg I sorry if anyone wanted any but I failed on that miserably!! It is dormant so I will be happy to send some if anyone is interested for postage. I did manage to collect from my muscari grape hyacinth and my dianthus barbatus is starting to produce seed and my gailardia is almost ready. Another treat is the virginia stock that I sowed this year I am already collecting seed pods from that. I was pretty excited to find out how easy it was to collect seed from that little plant. The pods look like miniature little beans, how neat!! I noticed it has been weird with some of my plants, I mean the phlox I have never tried to worry about collecting the seeds so I had never timed that but that was a fast drop. My poppies are just starting to bloom and usually they bloom way earlier in the season. They look kinda weird this year and the bloom it self it is kinda like something keeps knocking the bloom off then one day I went out and the entire thing had just crusted up like it was a week old and it had just bloomed the previous day. Something is weird anyone else noticing this? I am not sure about your columbine or your poppies hopefully someone will come along and help you out!!

You can always copy Mother Nature and toss any seed onto the ground as soon as it is ripe. A little clearing out of other plants and roughing up the soil to allow better contact with the soil once it rains/gets watered. You could also summer sow--which is just like wintersowing, with the milk jug, etc, but at a later time. The advantages of the container are: constant ambient moisture to improve germination and prevent drying out as fragile seedlings, avoidance of washing away in a torrential downpour, avoiding the seeds and seedlings becoming lunch for some hungry rodent, and the containers are labeled, so you know what is growing and can plant it where ever you like and move them in and out of appropriate levels of sunlight/cold, etc. Happy sowing! Martha

Leslie, I know it seems crazy, doesn't it, but it is time...and for folks further north and further west, planting time is painfully close cause those areas tend to get the autumn freezes earliest. I was thinking about this on Sunday and thinking I should dig out the seeds of the tomato varieties I intend to grow for a fall harvest and get them started. I haven't done it yet. I think the late spring has us all off-balance. I keep looking at the calendar and thinking, in a most bewildered way, "how can it possibly be June already?" It is making me crazy. I feel like I am out of step with the calendar this year. wbonesteel, My squash, melons and pumpkins are just starting to run and climb their trellises. It seems late, but then I have to remind myself we had freezing temperatures and frost during the first week in May, so of course everything is late. That doesn't make it feel any better though. And, y'all know, most of us are the lucky ones. We haven't lost our homes, vehicles, landscaping, gardens, and even pets, family members, friends, etc. to severe weather. While we may feel out-of-sync this summer, I cannot imagine what life feels like right now for gardeners who have been left homeless and gardenless. Gardening can be incredibly therapeutic and healing, which they need, yet they are unable to garden right now, and they certainly have much larger issues to deal with. luvabasil, I got the Territorial Seed Company's fall and winter catalog today. Is that the one you received? They have had a fall and winter catalog for at least the last 10 or 12 years, and maybe even longer. I've only received it for the last 10 or 12 years. Flipping through it gets me into a fall gardening frame of mind. For anyone who is reading this thread and saying "Fall tomatoes?", I'd just like to explain them briefly. The tomato plants that are lush, gorgeous, flowering, setting fruit and oh-so-beautiful in June are not likely to look quite so lush, gorgeous and beautiful by late July or early August. Not only is our intense heat and sunlight very hard on them, but so are the multitude of pests. So, lots of gardeners start over with fresh plants for fall, generally planting them in a different location from the current plants. By the time the spring-planted tomato plants are starting to look really awful by, let's say, late-August, the recently-planted fall tomato plants either already are setting fruit or are just waiting for temperatures to fall into the right range for fruit set to occur. You don't "have to" start over with new fall plants if you don't want to. You usually can carry plants through summer and into fall here most years unless a huge insect or disease outbreak occurs. The recommended planting dates to put fall tomato plants in the ground are July 1- July 15. Now, the order is exactly opposite of the spring planting dates. With the summer/fall planting dates, the folks in northern and western OK put in their fall tomato plants according to the earlier dates and the folks in southern and eastern OK put in their fall tomato plants by the later dates. People in the middle of the state choose a date somewhere in the middle of the range of dates recommended by OSU. I have found that the stores here don't seem to heed the OSU-recommended dates and often don't have fresh tomato plants for fall until mid- to late-July. What I have found is that most years, my spring-planted tomato plants simply exhaust themselves fighting the heat, wind, hail, pests and diseases all summer, and also exhaust themselves by producing tons of fruit, so that fresh, new plants usually perform better for me than spring plants carried through summer and into fall. I try to keep the spring/summer plants going as long as possible so usually I still am harvesting fruit from at least some of the spring plants while just beginning to harvest some from the fall tomato plants. When choosing varieties for a fall tomato harvest, you increase your odds of success if you choose early varieties or even mid-season varieties, but not so much with late-season varieties....unless you are growing in containers and can move late-season varieties into a greenhouse or sunroom to keep them from freezing in autumn. Further south of us in central TX and southward, where the heat generally arrives earlier than it does here and lasts a ridiculously long time in summer, their tomato production often is shut down pretty early, so for them, fall tomatoes are a second chance to get more fruit once the temperatures are cooperating. The further north you go, and this is especially true in OK, the less imperative it is to have new fall plants as you often can carry the spring plants throughout the season with some judicious pruning at mid summer to force them into a new vegetative growth spurt. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: OCS Map: Ave Date of First Fall Freeze

Thanks, Need2SeeGreen! Really heavy rains every week or so. Some cold but no snow where I am (some in higher areas; I'm only 2200'). The moles are digging in my lawn, and the hairy bittercress (cute little weed which would like to take over the world) is flowering madly. I need to prune the apple trees. The violets are putting out tentative leaves; probably the pink ones are flowering -- they're evergreen, and nothing much stops them. The spring camellia flowered Thursday -- and froze Friday night; this cycle will continue for a while. It looks like this year the scillas/squill will bloom before the Jeanne d'Arc crocuses. I will start some of the tomato seeds this week (indoors).