Tropical Zone Gardening: The coconut wireless - chat threat 2, 1 by lourspolaire

lourspolaire wrote:
A glorious morning to everyone out there.

Christi, I was amazed when you said you were in the 108-110F every day. What a bummer. Seeing all those beloved specimens turn brown in order to protect themselves must be very hard. Jenny (Braveheartsmom)'s garden has suffered enormously from the sun in Maui, too. This is so heartbreaking. May we all get some rain soon. Yesterday was a good day here because we got 3 good-size downpours, and for that I was SO thankful.

Great news this morning: 2 of my desert roses have produced seed pods. They were ripe this morning, so I brought them into the house to sort the seed from the dandelion-like "parachutes" that carries them away with the wind when the seed pod opens. So, it was seed pod shells in the refuse bin and seeds on the other. Within minutes, the "parachutes" deployed and were rolling around on my desk in the air conditionner's breeze. I had to put them in a piece of paper to avoid chasing the seeds all over my computer station.

I'll plant them today because those seeds have almost no shelf life. I have often said I am notoriously useless with seeds. That is not quite true. I was planting seeds that had been stored too long waiting for a sucka to purchase them from an unscrupulous dealer on E-Bay. I have seen one fruitless attempt where I planted 100 adenium seeds and got 2 seedlings to sprout: not exactly what I was expecting. So, it's into the soil as soon as I am done removing those pesky "parachutes". I'll do that outside, so if any discarded "parachutes" fly away in the breeze, I won't have to worry about vacuuming the whole house to retrieve them.

I include a picture of the seeds, to make easier to understand this "parachute" business. Oy, check how dusty my computer keyboard is! I'll clean it up fortwith. I know you'll forgive me for writing with such a dusty keyboard.

Take care, all.
Pu'ole, a.k.a. Sylvain.