Hi Brad, nix the moist paper towels. The seeds need to DRY, anything moist is a bad idea. When I harvest seed, I either put them in a little 5 oz dixie cup, or a paper lunch bag. Let dry for about 2-3 weeks in a dry well-ventilated place. Then I clean the seed and store in fridge. In my experience, Asclepias syriaca - common milkweed - is very slow to establish from seed. All of the tap-rooted perennial milkweeds that I've started from seed grow slowly and take at least 3 years to bloom, if the critters, insects, or fungus don't get it first.

Melissa, I, too, read the warnings of the common MW spreading so I planted mine in a big pot; one of those big plastic work tubs with the rope handles. Drilled lots of big holes in the bottom, lined the sides with bubble wrap and then filled with good potting soil and old decaying leaves, then mulched the top once the seedlings emerged. The bubble wrap is my attempt to help keep the roots cool during the heat of the summer. The plants didn't do a lot last year and I'd begun to worry that growing in a tub was a no no. To be fair, it was extremely hot and dry last summer so not the best of circumstances for starting new seedlings. However, this spring, they were the first things up and they're currently 24-30 inches high and looking very healthy. They have such big leaves that they're an excellent source of food for the little Monarch cats. I grow other varieties of Milkweed and planted this particular plant as a backup food source, in case I ran out of the other milkweed. Now I'm thinking I will try growing more plants in ground at the back outside corner of my greenhouse, where they'd be fairly isolated. If they get out of hand, I can always zap them with roundup. However, to answer your question, yes, they appear to be doing quite well in a big pot. photographed April 11, 2011 From Mary

byrdlady, it's so good to hear this! where i grew up in western PA therew were syriaca grwing everywhere roadside, with nearly every patch having monarch colonies. now the milkweed is less common, because of more mowing, and monarchs are much less common, even up there. i've been trying to get syriaca going here, too. i have some nice patches of tuberosum after working on it for 8 or 9 yrs, and have grown currasvica from seed before. recently got some otherr ones (don't recall off the top), and just this yr, noticed 3 cats on my tuberosum. so maybe it does take a while for them to come. ralph gave me some potted currasavica, which i hope to overwinter in the cool basement, and some cats, too. hoping they'll come back in spring and lay eggs. the last one is making a chrysalis now. your expeience heartens me that i wasn't doing anything wrong. tammy

If I had already planted milkweeds grown from seed I'd leave them in place. You have a small enough area that if you wanted to, you could eradicate milkweed pretty easily, or you could control it simply by watching where it comes up each spring and removing the ones you don't want. That is the advantage of a small garden - you can monitor each plant personally, and control the aggressive ones by hand pulling, digging, etc. I would, in future summers, limit the milkweed to maybe 5 or 6 stems. This will be wnough to support a couple of caterpillars, but won't occupy too much space in the garden. You will learn to recognize the new shoots in the spring, and you can pull them up with some of the rhizome that in underneath and i think you'll have OK control.