And....the name is??????

Jay,

You're playing with our minds now. How very cruel to tell us you're giving us a new source, and then there is no new source linked.....

Carol,

Well, let's play detective. He said RM, which I assume means Rocky Mountain. So, I went and found the most recent thread there that has seed sources listed and I'll link it below. There's several mentioned on that thread, and I was just looking at HorizonHerb this morning, which is one of them.....but surely Jay and I don't think that much alike, do we? He could have been talking about one of the other companies mentioned there on the linked thread.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: New Seed Source Thread from RM Forrum

Dawn, You are a better detective than I am. I sat here and looked at RM and tried to decide what it meant. LOL

If that is the right one then I won't get too excited since if it gets past aloe and basil, I'll probably be lost anyway. I do plan to have a little herb area next year tho, but nothing fancy. I have an area on the west side of my house that gets pretty hot in the afternoon and I also have a big stack of rock, so I thought I would make some beds. It's kind of a 'dead spot' for gardening, but I thought it might work for a few herbs and it is near a water source. I am visualizing small beds sorrounded by rock with some type of herb in each area. Now I have to decide what to plant. You guys are going to have to coach me through this one, because I am pretty clueless about herbs.

Hello....

A fellow Okie here posting for the first time on this regional site and what do you know? I pull it up and find there is nothing under the tree this year for Christmas. What a bummer! I thought I was finding a new seed/plant source.

I will instead share a site with you that has some different stuff that is cheap, no shipping and grows real well here in Oklahoma. Its not really new, but at least it has a name.

AND THE NAME OF THE PLACE IS.......... "Plants of the Southwest". That wasn't hard to do at all!

They do sell many herbs seeds, which was mentioned and other seeds of plants that enjoy weather torture. Also, vegetable seeds that will do well in drought. I do the natives and don't have to water ever. (Well, not hardly ever)

By "no shipping" what I meant is no shipping cost on seeds. Just the price of the pack which are $2.50 each.

Carol,

Horizon Herbs sells veggie seeds too. I was there looking for chocolate corn for the chocolate garden I'm planning for 2011. If you want to see a lovely selection of chocolate flowers (some are only chocolate colored or have chocolate in their name, but others are chocolate-scented), check out the link below.

Herbs are easy as long as they get the right soil and right drainage. My herbs are rampant monsters that reseed if I let them go to seed and spread themselves around all over.

Cactusgarden, I was just at the website of Plants of the Southwest the other day, just browsing around to see what they have. Another website with great plants for xeric landscapes is High Country Gardens.

Now, y'all, I have to get to sleep. We've been out fighting fires all night and I need to fall asleep before the sun comes up or I won't be able to fall asleep at all.

Most of the chocolate veggies I already had, but I found chocolate corn at two websites, and I ordered most of the chocolate flower seeds I needed from Summer Hill Seeds.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Chocolate Plants, Seeds and More

It was Horizon Herbs. I forgot to add the link. I'm not sure I had ever heard of them before. Or maybe I was like Carol and saw the name and thought they only offered herbs and such. Poured concrete yesterday. Will say I was tired and old is why I forgot to add the link. LOL. Jay

I am dying here, my fingers are getting sore from filling out all the forms for the catalogs. hehehehehe....

That's a great idea, Dawn. I grow one plant that is a native plant in Oklahoma (an many other states) called Berlandiera lyrata, or Chocolate Daisy. It's a pretty little plant, with silvery foliage and yellow daisies with a maroon colored center. They open in the morning and evening, closing during the heat of the day. I find that some of the blooms do last longer than a day, though, unlike some of the other heat sensitive and day sensitive plants. When they are open they do have a chocolate scent, usually best in the early morning. Great little plant.

I imagine you're also going to have some Chocolate Cosmos (a perennial Cosmos) and Chocolate mint (in a pot?). Summer Hill Seeds is a very good place to order your seeds from.

Jay, I have noticed I forget things a lot more now than I used to, but I'm going to blame it on information overload from the 24-hour-a-day TV news cycle and the internet. Well, others will blame it on my advancing age, of course, but I never forget the REALLY important stuff like ordering seeds of tomatoes, etc., so I haven't commpletely "lost it" yet.

Ezzirah, Take care of those fingers....you'll need them for seed-starting in a couple of months. All we talk about all winter long is what seeds we have, what we want, and what we're going to buy for spring. As soon as spring planting is done, we talk about the seeds we need for succession planting.

By the time we're through talking seeds, you'll have 50 catalogs sitting in a basket, a stack or a filing cabinet. They're great, though, for boring days when it is (a) sleeting or snowing and you're stuck inside, (b) too hot to step foot outside and you're stuck inside, (c) raining cats and dogs and you're stuck inside or (d) a,b, and c above all in the same day because this is, after all, Oklahoma and we have all 4 seasons here, sometimes in the same day.

Susan,

Yes, the ones you mentioned are on my list....and so is viola Frosted Chocolate Sorbet and a few others, including Chocolate Vine (which I know can be invasive in some places, but with my landscape's tendency to flood with 50" of rain one year and then burn up with only 20" of rain the next, not much lives long enough here to become invasive). The plants that can tolerate wet, soggy clay for weeks at a time can't take the droughty summers or vice versa. Well, except for bermuda grass, and you know how I feel about it.

I've always grown lots of plants with dark foliage and flowers, and I've always loved chocolate daisy, and I grow lots of veggies with chocolate in the name, including Cherokee Chocolate tomato, Chocolate Habanero pepper and Chocolate sweet bell pepper, so I thought it would be fun to combine all of them in one area and have a chocolate garden. I'll start a post on ideas for a chocolate garden later. Right now, fire dept. duty calls.

Dawn

Dawn, got to thinking about your Chocolate theme garden and wondered if you'd come up with more ideas. I've come across the following:

Rudbeckia 'Cappuchino'
Rudbeckia 'Chocolate Drop'
Chocolate Morning Glory
Sunflower 'Chocolate Cherry'
Chocolate Nasturtium
Penstemon 'Chocolate Drop'
Centauria moschato aka Sweet Sultan (light scent of Chocolate, more so on older blooms)
Calla lily 'Hot Chocolate'
Chocolate Larkspur (Delphinium elatum)

The attached link gives a list of plants for a Chocolate Garden. A longer list than I've seen most places.

Susan

Susan, I have a list somewhere but I don't know where I put it. It had most of the flowers you listed, except for Chocolate Larkspur. That's one I haven't seen before.

Don't forget Chocolate Mimosa (although it is sort of pricey.)

I'll also be adding the chocolate veggies like Chocolate Cherry tomato, Chocolate Habanero, Sweet Chocolate bell pepper and Chocolate Mini-Bell.

This is going to be a fun project, but I have to get through the insane holiday season first. It is so hectic, and I'm so far behind on my "To Do" list that it isn't funny.

Dawn

There doesn't seem to be a very comprehensive list online, so maybe this thread will help someone else, too, since it should pop up in a google search now.

What fun, Dawn!

Susan

I have a really long list...so far my scribbled notes about different chocolate plants fill 3 or 4 pages in a spiral notebook. There are some plants, like Chocolate Daisy, Chocolate Mint (it smells like a Peppermint Patty), Chocolate Vine and Chocolate Cosmos that actually have a chocolate scent.

Then, there's a lot of others that have either chocolate-colored foliage or flowers, like Dahlia "Karma Choc", Heuchera "Chocolate Veil", "Chocolate Ruffles", daylily "Chocolate Frosting" or "Sweet Hot Chocolate". There's even a dwarf bearded Iris called "Death By Chocolate". And, don't forget, not only is there the regular Chocolate Vine, but also a white flowered version called, appropriately enough, White Chocolate Vine.

There's another group that just has chocolate (or something chocolate-related) in their name, like Chocolate Cherry or Cherokee Chocolate tomatoes, Rose "Hot Cocoa" or Coleus "Dark Chocolate".

If you use not only plants with brownish-maroonish foliage or flowers but with dark purplish ones too, you can use a whole lot more plants.

I'm toying with the idea of adding vanilla scented plants at one end of the Chocolate Garden to give us a chocolate-vanilla garden. Then, if I wanted to, I could add strawberry plants or strawberry-scented/named plants plus anything I wanted in red or pink, and I'd have a Neapolitan Ice Cream garden. The possibilities are endless. I am bored with our landscape and looking to spice it up with some new plantings in 2011.

Dawn

One of my grower friends in the UK posted the link to this site for some interesting reading and beautiful pictures of veggies. A good way to spend time when a person can't get outside. Now that I'm getting lights and heat in my reefer trailer I won't have a reason to do as much computer sight seeing. I only scanned a couple of veggie varieties. Will have to go back and do a more in depth look later. Jay

Here is a link that might be useful: Medwyns