No seed merchant is reliable, unless he goes to collect the seeds himself in the natural habitat or unless he knows personally the collectors. And no seed merchant does collect seeds himself outside his own country. The Botanical Gardens are now requested to grow and plant only material coming from the wild, with a traceable origin. Too bad some people still do not understand this.

i walked out into the yard.. in the rain .. just for you ... i have 25 to 50 cones on A. k. ... browning .. right now.. and one big ugly spider ... i also have 2 to 4 cones on A. k. Silver show .... but i didnt walk out there to make sure .... at one time... one producer was saying silberloche .. came true from seed .. so if you grew these.. you will probably get a %'age of the curled leaves that show the undersides ... though i would argue they arent true to name .... soooooooo .. why dont you drive over here and get them .. lol ... i do NOT know proper harvest time .... ken

Slight deviation, one reason that the price of grass seed for some species is so high is the amount of waste material thats produced. Not just the chaff, but they sift out at least half (if not more), of viable seed that is smaller than the optimum, premium, size seed that they sell. Which leads me to the woeful tale of when I first moved here and desperately needed to add organic matter to my badly leached out clay soil. The seed company up the road generously agreed to dump their waste material, the chaff and small seed, at my place, and I would theoretically till it into the ground. This all happened in January. I got about a hundred cubic yards of waste seed and chaff dumped on the site of my future vegetable garden, where the plan was to compost it a bit, and then till it in. Unfortunately, in the seed sifting process, they lower the moisture content to as low as possible, and the resulting chaff and stuff is very hydrophobic, so it was nearly impossible to get this mountain of stuff moist enough to begin the composting reaction. I tried all kinds of stuff; surfactants, heating the water, spraying it a mist, and so on. No go. All the moisture would run right through it into the ground, and the heap remained too dry to do anything. April rolls around, and I'm getting desperate, so I spend a few days spreading this mountain out, end up with a knee deep layer of seed and chaff over the entire area. I pulls out the brand new, small Mantis size tiller that I had saved a fabulous $50 bucks by buying it at the end of the season the year before, and try to mix this stuff into the soil. The reader, at this point, is likely shaking his/her head, saying that that wasn't the tool for the job, and they would be correct. The tiller over-heated and caught on fire. I tried to douse it, but it was too late, burned up all the plastic and stuff on the motor, and lighting the chaff on fire. Get the fire out with a hose, and, properly outraged, I think I can return the tiller to the dealer as a faulty piece of junk. Not so, as this was 9 months after purchasing the thing and they had a clearly written policy about that, in fact, when I brought the smelling thing in to the shop,hoping for sympathy, the guy just pointed to the sign on the wall about 1 month returns. I'd lost the receipt anyway. Long story short, I finally had a neighbor plow it in, then disc, then till. That summer, in my vegetable garden, I then grew the most astounding crop of native grasses and weeds you ever saw, and I think a zucchini, but I never could find it in the mess.

Nevermind, I found it.