zeedman, Actually I would love to grow the vine. It's just that last summer I grew giant pumpkins and that space (the only appropriate one) has been reserved for other things (plus passionfruits on the nearby fence). There will be plenty of cucurbits: Kiwano melon, Mexican sour gherkins (Melothria scabra), Cucumis sp. Sudan (aka Cucumis carolinus, an ornamental, from J.L. Hudson). And a repeat: Armenian cucumbers. Also in that spot--some Andean root crops (Oca and Ulluco) plus cape gooseberry (Physalis peruviana). The cucurbits will be on trellises and the passionfruits will cover the available fence space. It there were any other vertical space I would certainly try it. The fruit was from a produce shop at the border of Cupertino and Los Altos (Foothill Produce). I HIGHLY recommend that place for others in the area. Great variety, amazing prices. Almost too good to be true.

This is an exciting year for me.... Before wintersowing, I used to spend so much money on geraniums (the annual geraniums) and would store them in my unheated garage for the winter. I would snip the blooms and keep them in their pots (or pot them up if they were in a huge planter) and hope for the best. I've always had pretty good luck, but worried all winter because they looked so "sad"... but would always perk up in the spring with a bit of warmth and some fertilizer. Now.... I am ready to put my geraniums away for the winter and this time I have about 25 MORE! I sowed geraniums from seed (inspired by another wintersower) and now I am not worried about them overwintering. Hey, if we get unusually cold weather and for some reason they don't last in the garage - I'LL SOW MORE next spring. Wintersowing forum... gotta love it!! Carrie

I got down to 25 last nite, and everything came thru with flying colors! A few of the things that prefer cold look BETTER than they did before! The wind made it a little bit chilly, but I was out in the yard doing some miscellaneous things today anyway. Tomorrow is supposed to be beautiful--then cooler again, with "possibilities" of precip! I'm not buying it!!! Kat, if your yard is sloped, seriously consider doing some sort of terracing to level the soil. Watering on a slope--even a gentle one--is really hard. At the swap try to remember to have a look at my Escape-Proof Garden! It's less than 2' wide, but it's sloped--doesn't really look like it should be much of a problem, but it was impossible to water until I half buried some 2 X 4 pieces here and there to keep the water from immediately running off. In this case the area isn't visible from the yard, and you wouldn't want to do that, but maybe a couple railroad ties or bricks or something--depending on the degree of the slope. I had tried using bark mulch to make it easier to water, but it turned out that the mulch just kept washing down to the bottom--and a lot of water was wasted in trying to get the plants watered deeply enough to grow well! And it'll be a lot easier to do some sort of terracing now than it would be after you've started putting plants in. Just something to think about. Skybird

Hmm... I'm noticing that even though that article begins with a nice drawing of a bee visiting a bachelor's buttons plant, BB's are actually not included in the list of hardy annuals suitable for winter sowing. That's surprising as it reseeded quite well for me. I've always been intrigued by what determines whether the seed of any particular annual, dropped by the plant's mature seed pod in late summer or fall, starts to germinate a few weeks later in the warmth of late summer or fall, or doesn't and instead over-winters to germinate and grow the following spring. I remember seeing many BB (ok: Centaurea cyanis) seedlings around their parent plants around October of last year and thinking, "Oh, my dear brother -- you shouldn't be growing here now. It's not going to work out well for you in the long term. Have you heard of something called winter?" I'm guessing they eventually all learned their lesson. But other seeds from the same parent plant get smart and decide to remain on or slightly beneath the ground during our cold winters, don't mind getting snowed upon, and then in April celebrate their great fortune and good wisdom by growing into nice healthy plants in May. And then in June they celebrate their beauty by bursting forth a glorious blue, or purple, or white flower. I know that many plants know enough science to insert into their seed some sort of chemical that allows the seed to go dormant when it needs to. Do all annuals that grow on the east coast have a fall-dormancy chemical in the seed? Some? Most? Even if many do, I would guess that sometimes it just doesn't work. Maybe the dormancy chemical is only effective for some percent of the seeds, and that some other seeds do germinate, or try to germinate, in the fall when it's a fairly good bet that germination will not lead to a full plant. We all know that's why nature insists that flower plants produce so many seeds: to guard against the unexpected or unwise. But every spring when I see these brave seedlings, already nicely-sized for early May -- way, WAY bigger than any plant growing from seed I'd been able to plant even in earliest spring -- I think: yes, this is one of the real advantages of winter sowing (or really, fall sowing), here done by nature, not by any human. She really knows what she's doing, or at the very least, how to make up for any inability on her part to foretell the future.