A Perplexing Case of Mystery Seeds

Last month, while clearing out a cubby beside his desk in our home office, my husband found this:

I have no idea how old these seeds are or where I got them.  That's my handwriting, so there's no doubt that I was the one that saved them.  There are dozens of them, stuck to the inside of the paper towel ... like I just squeezed them out of the tomato and folded it up.  The newest I think they could be is from 2008, because that's when I moved my stuff out of the office and gave it over to my husband.  'Hillbilly' is a real heirloom tomato cultivar, a pass-along variety, but I don't remember if that's what these are or if I just called them hillbilly seeds.

I like a challenge, and I was really curious about these seeds, so I decided to see what would happen if I planted some of them.  I soaked 24 seeds in a cup of water overnight, then I planted them in a take-out container, with drainage holes drilled in the bottom of it and a lid, and put it under the lights in my basement grow area.  Within a week, I had this:

Babies!!  Over the course of the next few days, more seeds sprouted.  Twenty of the twenty-four seeds germinated.  One of sprouts was weird and stunted, so I discarded that one.  Last week, when the babies were large enough to handle, I transplanted them from the community container into little individual pots.

There's one rose seedling here, too.  I will tell you about it some other time.

This morning, one week later, the babies look like this:

They're all about three inches tall, and they are fat, healthy and happy ... and almost ready to transplant into larger pots.

Our weather has been unseasonably cool and very rainy, so I will have to wait till it's warmer to begin to harden these off to life outside.  I plan to keep three or four plants and give the others to friends and family.  

I have to confess that I have never been a very good vegetable gardener.  I know roses, of course, and I'm pretty proficient at gardening with ornamentals in the sun and in shade, but I never been able to get the hang of growing food.  I try, and results are always less than stellar.  Maybe this year will be better ... I say that every year.

Sunday Snapshot: One Last Seedling

Every year, I gather some ripe rose hips and plant the seeds.  Most of the time, I don't get anything special to grow ... though I do have one really nice yellow rose in the garden that I grew from seed. 

Rose seeds can germinate in as soon as six to eight weeks after planting, or it can take months (or even years).  I planted this year's batch of seeds in February.  My flats of seeds have been sitting on my kitchen counter since then.  I haven't had a sprout for months ... this morning I decided to reclaim my counter and get rid of the flats.

 

 

When I took off the lids in preparation to dump the flats, I found this last little sprout.  It's a tiny thing ... no more than a day or two old.

 

This seed came from 'Frances Ashton', a dark pink, 5-petaled Hybrid Tea rose from 1937.

 

 

I used a fork to carefully lift the sprout and transfer it to a larger pot, and I put that pot in a protected place outside on the deck.  Then, I followed through with my initial plan ... I dumped the flats and I reclaimed my counterspace. 

 

Happy Sunday, Everyone!!

Transplanting the Sprout

The little rose seedling from my last post was getting too long too fast, as if it was struggling to reach the light, so this morning I lifted it from the seed tray and transplanted it into its own little pot.

 

 

Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say.  I needed a tool that was small enough to lift the seedling from its small cell, but large enough to keep and hold an adequate ball of soil to protect the seedling's tender root.  A silver pickle fork looked like it would be the perfect tool for the job ...

 

 

... and it was!   Using the fork, I carefully lifted the seedling out of the corner of the cell, and it came out perfectly!  (There is another seed in this cell, so I had to lift just the seedling and not disturb the rest of the cell.)

 

 

 

Downstairs in my basement workshop, I put a small amount of potting mix into a bowl, added some water, and stirred it up (using the pickle fork for this, too)  ...

 

 

... filled a 3-inch pot with the mix, and hollowed out a hole about the size of the little seedling's root ball ...

 

 

... and used the fork to gently place the seedling into the hole.  I used the tip my finger to firm the mix lightly around the rootball, and then gently watered the pot to settle the seedling into its new home.

 

 

Now the pot is under the grow light, keeping company with some of my rose cuttings from the fall.  

 

 

More news on this as leaves form and especially (fingers crossed) when/if we get a bud and a flower.

A Sprout!!

Remember the rose seeds that I showed you in THIS post from the beginning of February?  I'm excited to tell you that the first sprout showed up this morning!

 

 

The flats holding the seeds have been sitting on my kitchen counter for seven weeks.  They're here because this is a good spot for me to keep a close eye on them.

 

 

 

I check them every day (not hard to remember to do this, since they're in the middle of the kitchen).  This morning, I saw this:

 

 

 

The seed that sprouted came from 'White Wings', a beautiful single, white Hybrid Tea rose.

 

Photo taken in October at the San Jose Heritage Rose Garden.

 

 

My handful of fat hips.

 

 

 

 

The sprout is so incredibly tiny ... only about a centimeter tall.

 

 

 

As soon as the cotyledons clear the soil and open completely, I will carefully lift the sprout and plant it into its own little pot.  It will then go to live in the basement workshop under the grow light till the weather is warm enough for it to live in the greenhouse.

 

 

 

Now I'll be waiting impatiently for this baby's first flower. 

 

This is so exciting!!  More updates to come, of course, as additional seeds sprout ... or whatever else happens.

 

Sowing Seeds

You may (or may not) remember that I was in Sacramento, California, in October for a rose conference.  While I was there, I made a side trip to visit the San Jose Heritage Rose Garden.  It was late in the season, and many of the roses were showing off their fabulous fall flush of flowers.  Some of these also had a nice crop of fat, ripe hips ... some of which found their way into my pockets. 

'White Wings' ... this flower is over four inches across!

 

 

I also took hips from 'Frances Ashton' and 'Thomas A. Edison'.

 

I wrapped the hips from each rose in a piece of paper from my notebook, to try to keep an accurate record of which rose the hips came from.  When I got home from my trip, I tossed the paper packets into the refrigerator, and I promptly forgot they were there.  (Rose seeds require winter chill in order to germinate ... we can simulate this by putting them in the refrigerator for two or three months.)

I found the hips in there the other day.  Today, I decided to open the packets and see how the hips had fared during their time in the fridge ... October, November, December, January, February ... that's a bit more chill than they needed ... I wonder if they're still any good.

 

 

The hips were pretty wrinkly, but seeds inside of them were in perfect condition.

 

 

 

It didn't take long for me to slice open all of the hips and remove the seeds.

 

 

 

I will soak the seeds in water overnight, to soften the hard outer coating a bit.  Tomorrow, I can plant them in containers, and wait for them to grow.  (Rose seeds take between six and eight weeks to sprout ... sometimes longer.)  Every seed contains a combination of the genes from its parents, so each rose plant from these seeds can be unique. 

 

Growing roses from seed is fun and really interesting.  (If you want to see my best seedling so far, click HERE to go to a post from last year.)

A Superb Yellow Seedling

Three or four years ago, I pocketed a couple of ripe rose hips from a rose in the vineyard at Hartwood Winery next door ... I think the rose was Peace, but I'm not positive.  Most of the seeds in those hips sprouted and grew into puny, spindly reject roses.  One of them grew well, and continues to do VERY well in the garden.

This rose never fails to attract attention from garden visitors.  Its flowers are medium butter-yellow, and they don't fade much as they age.

The brown petals on these two buds are the only damage this rose shows in response to a whole week of damp, rainy weather that we have had.

The best characteristic of this rose is its foliage ... large, dark green leaves that are incredibly disease resistant.  I took this photo of the bush yesterday afternoon (and all the rest of the ones in this post, too), and you see leaves clear to the bottom of the plant, with almost no blackspot in sight.

This rose provides a perfect example of why it's important to evaluate promising roses for a number of years before making a decision on them.  Its first year in the garden, this one was out-performed by another seedling planted beside it and I almost dug it out in favor of the other seedling.  Now, three years later, this rose has become a star ... and the other one is gone.

Next week, I will be taking cuttings from this rose, to propagate plants to give to other gardeners ... so they can grow this rose and see if it does as well in their gardens as it does for me.  If it continues to do so well, expect to find it named and registered and available for sale in two years or so.

A shrubby rose with yellow flowers and disease-resistant foliage?  There was a time in rose breeding when this was seen as the impossible dream.  It's hard to believe that I may have achieved it by growing open-pollinated seeds from a hip that I snapped from one of my neighbor's roses.

I see that a few of you are planning to follow along and grow rose seeds with me this winter.  If you missed the first installment of this soon-to-be series on how to grow roses from seed, scroll down to the post right before this one to get started.

Growing Roses from Seed

Some of the roses in the garden have ripe hips ... a hip is the fruit of the rose, that contains seeds which will become new varieties of roses if planted.  It's been a few years since I planted rose seeds, and I have decided to do it again this year. 

This is a spray of hips on 'Kathleen', a Hybrid Musk rose that produces a beautiful show of hips in the fall.

If you would like to try growing rose seeds, here is a lesson to get you started.

1.  Cut open the ripe hip and remove the seeds.  I usually pry them out of the hip with my thumbnail.  The seeds vary in size and are very hard.

2.  Make sure to remove any pith from the soft part of the hip that may be clinging to the seeds, because the pith contains an enzyme that inhibits germination.  Again, I just do this with my thumbnail.

3.  I lay the seeds out on a folded, damp paper towel.

4.  Place the paper towel into a zipper sandwich bag.  I use a Sharpie to mark the baggie with the name of the rose that the hips came from.

5.  Put the baggie into the crisper of your refrigerator and leave it there for at least 60 days.

Also in this crisper drawer, you can see a gallon-sized bag of cuttings in newspaper burritos, a package of corn tortillas, and a cantalope.

Stay tuned for the next part of this lesson, in two months when I take the baggies out of the fridge.

These hips are called 'open pollinated' because the bees and the wind fertilize the flowers, instead of a human placing pollen to combine two specific roses in the cross.  It is rare to get a rose worth keeping from open-pollinated hips, but I still like to grow them just to see what happens.  I have one keeper in my garden, that I grew from a hip I took from 'Peace'.  In my next post, I will show it to you.