I'm still waiting on a lot of stuff. But I'm quite a ways farther north and we are several weeks behind usual temp wise. So today, I finally went topless on a few containers that had sprouts growing out the tops :) I am very happy with my results so far. I've had a few single hollyhock sprouts, lots of red poppies and several sweet peas. All of which were from very old seed (8+ years old). I messed up marking my annual ws containers though. Marked them with numbers right on the jug with sharpie and the numbers have all faded. Woops! Oh well, at least they are all annuals so I'll just use them to fill in wherever in my perennial beds anyways. Live and learn. Sharpie on the duct tape seemed to work pretty well for my perennial containers. Only have one of 80 that the duct tape has fallen off. I'm sure once I start moving some things around I'll find that label too :) I think I have about 30-40% germination rate so far. It's been a rather cool spring here so I'm still optomistic I'll get a lot more sprouts over the coming weeks. I haven't planted anything out yet, still cleaning up the gardens and mulching. Since it has been so cool I'm not in a big hurry yet either. I've always got gobbs of potted plants waiting for a home up by my greenhouse anyways :)

Yeah, my neigbhors asked me how I was able to achieve that many plants. They saw me working on the garden around early March. They were curious about the garden beds I was making. They saw the milk jugs. I explained to them what it was and also gave them the Wintersown site. I actually watched their reactions when they saw it. They didn't pay much attention to it kinda like "oh, ok". However, when plants started to come out/bloom, they went back to me and asked, "was that from the tiny greenhouse". :) I'm going to make more beds maybe by fall once my knee gets better. :D Thanks mnwsgal! :)

To aid in identifying, I made a little diagram of the pot. I spent many hours last night looking at pictures to try to identify things myself. I confess I am too green to have any confidence, though. 5, 6, & 9 are identified. 1 may be a kind of Echeveria? Maybe a Tylecodon? 2 Sempervivum? 3 a type of Haworthia? 4 Aeonium? I do have more close-up pictures of the individual plants, if that would be of any help. And not to be pushy, but keep in mind that I'd love to get ideas on which members of my collection I can successfully grow together. If I can just run with what I think I like together visually, great. But I'm receptive to other concerns. It may take a while to get the whole collection up here. I have some plants that had labels, but I want to try to verify the labels first.

Hi Andrew. A. sericeus should propagate quite easly from the current season's growth, as long as its quite firm. I don't know about the exact strike rate as this will vary with your propagating medium and conditions, but from my experience it strikes quite readily. No reason why layering wouldn't work either. Try both and see what's the most successful. This plant's pretty rare in nurseries, where'd you come by it? Cheers, Jim