First time WS II

Great photos, DEMinPA! Do you have any to share that show the garden?

I did ws the Panicum miliaceum Violaceum

and phacelia tanacetifolia

viola

achillea ptarmica The Pearl

Agrostemma githago Milas

Calendula arvensis

centaurea montana 'mountain bleu'

chrysanthemum leucanthemum

Cytisus scoparius

digitalis purpurea

echium planatagineum

escholzia californica

.

Lovely photos, Jonna

Don & Jonna -- wonderful images.... i'm so 'itchin' for Spring already, and winter really isnt even here yet. though it's been so cold.

Hopefully in a month [Mid-Jan] I should be WS'ing full swing... we shall see.

Don - thanks for the info on the Malva. I have a couple types and was wondering how they would do WS. In fact I think those are the two types I have. Yea!!

I am in seed heaven! I just received my second and third packages of seeds and since I don't recognize most plant names I spent the morning looking them up in Plantfiles and saving them so I could just keep looking at them. Sad I know...

I received some sunflower seeds and the sender recommended not WSing them - does anyone have any experience with them?

Jonna and Don - thanks for the pictures - what a beautiful way to start my day.

-GB

GB, I don't have any experience with WS as it's my first year. However, I can not put sunflowers out until they are well established as the squirrel and chipmunks eat them! All of them!! Seeds, sprouts, all of it. It has taken me some very frustrating seasons to realize that if I keep them inside until they are about to topple over and then plant them out, they survive. I can just picture my squirrels dragging the milk jugs around trying to get to the seeds. LOL! Anyone see Ice Age? hee hee

GB, I wintersowed sunflowers last year with great success. I sowed them later than most (late March), along with zinnias and cosmos, to prevent them from getting nipped by frost. When I direct sowed sunflowers, I often had issues with slugs and cut worms, but WSing them took care of those problems :-) In your zone, I doubt there's any need to wait.

Last year I had left a sunflower head in my unheated greenhouse. Just forgot to give it to the birds. When I entered my greenhouse in April there were a lot of sprouts coming out of the head. It was watered by a hole in the roof. There was no earth at all. I transplanted some of them in pots and I had beautiful sunflowers.

Well, I WSed 12 more "pots" today!
You can visit my DG Journal for info.

with sunflowers... i too have the squirrel problems.

I think after the first year, of buying all sorts of cool ones - and getting nothing in return.... i gave away all my seeds, except for a few Velvet Queens.
Last year i had few come up... it must have been from the squirrels burying the seeds out of the bird seed. I never would have tried to germinate a sunflower out my dining room window... and low and behold, that one actually made it.... the squirrels had fun munching the seed heads.

Maybe I'll try like Chele does and wait til they are much bigger to plant them out... i have found that once the stalk is thicker, they dont eat them.... oh, bunnies too.

For all of you who may not know.....Jim does not have chipmunks! I find this astounding. Not to mention that I love learning new things.

Don (DEminPA) have you tried white liatris? I did and it reverted to purple. I want to try it again though. Also does your malva zebrina self sow? They are supposed to but I've yet to have it happen. Maybe they hate me.

Dahlianut, I have seeds of Liatris spicata Floristan white.

I'd luv some seed if it stayed true JonnaS. I will collect and send you seed for white obedient plant and rudbeckia 'green wizard' from your trade list. Although I wouldn't recommend the 'green wizard'. I think it's very unattractive. I have removed it all except for one plant.

Hmm, do most places have chipmunks? We never had them in Delaware. It was always a treat to go on vacation and feed them in the national parks and such! We DO have them here in SC. I'm not sure what to think. Are they a major muncher of flowers? No problems so far, but this will be the first year I start much outside.

I do not have chipmunks in or near my flower beds... my 'munchers' are rabbits and squirrels.... I do have "voles" too, but i do not know if they eat seedlings.

Maybe I have some "fading" chipmunks, since I never have any luck with sunflowers. Ms Marta loves them, but I've given up trying to grow them. The Rudbeckias are my best substitute!

Well, I cannot assure you it comes true out of the seed. I didn't sow the seeds myself. The seed is from plants I've grown the last 4 years in my garden. Until now I had no other Liatris spicata, so no cross-pollination.
You can also buy these seeds commercial, so I suppose it will be true.
Anything else you'd like?
I love to try the 'green wizard', it looks attractive to me, especial in flower arrangements. And you make me very happy with seeds of the white obedient plant.
I will dmail you my address.

For anyone actually interested in the label makers, I get a preview of the ads for Staples. This week Dec14-21 they have a label maker on sale :

Brother P-touch 1880 advanced home and office label maker

24.99 after easy rebate
uses up to 3/4 in tape
6 fonts
$49.99 - $25 easy rebate: 24.99

I don't know anything about this particular model but it seems to get good reviews.

I am tempted. I keep looking out at my empty plastic containers wondering if I should just get one. ;)

I have a Brother -- different model that takes up to 1 inch tape and really like it. I think 3/4 inch tape is plenty large enough though for most uses. When you buy the tape be sure you get TZ laminated tape -- the kind designed to work out doors. I think most of the models are about the same plus or minus a few bells and whistles.

Can these label makers be used to make address labels?

Yep, they sure can. And you can get them in various colors and clear. I haven't done a cost comparison, though, with the label materials put out by Avery for use in the computer. I don't know which is cheaper, but the brother is easier.
I used to do address labels for an organization I belonged to, and such labels can be done with MS Word very nicely. So I would compare costs. I am not sure the tough outdoor type material would work in a printer for a computer, though.

I'm still waiting for my ordered paint pens to arrive, but decided to get started and change labels later, so today I began winter sowing. I have 7 milk jugs, one soda bottle, three trays that had spinach in them, and seven quart size yogurt containers sown with seed. I used two cut down cardboard boxes, lined with plastic garbage bags, and one laundry basket, as trays to hold the containers. For temporary labels I just used stick on labels on the containers, wrote on them with pen. Hope the paint pens arrive this week!

I sowed:

Rose Campion (seeds collected by me)
Morning Glory (ditto)
Moth Mullein (ditto)
Genovese basil (ditto)
Jewels of Opar (ditto)
"money plant" (given to me by a cousin)
Lavandula Ångustifolia (Pinetree seeds)
Correnta Spinach (ditto)
Walla Walla onions (ditto)
flat leaf parsley (seeds from WS.org)
blue flax (ditto)
lacy phacelia (ditto)
lupine (ditto)
amaranth "love lies bleeding" (ditto)
California poppy (ditto)
Evening primrose (ditto)
Blackeyed Susan (ditto)


I saved some of the spinach, onion, and lavender seeds to sow in probably March. I also did not sow any of the May Queen butter lettuce, Cherokee green tomato, (WS) or sunflower mix (Pinetree) -- saving those to sow in March.

Now I am waiting for it to snow. ;-)

Editing to add that I placed these out on my deck, just outside my front door. It is second floor, faces East, gets only morning sun this time of year and that not too much as the sun has to clear the mountain before shining down here. Most of my questions about how to do this have been answered just by following along on this thread (after I initially read the stickies and browsed in the WS website......) so thank you all! Fingers crossed, inviting the plant spirits to a winter party! ;-)

This message was edited Dec 14, 2008 1:08 PM

Yes. I am sure that you could make labels with 4 lines of addresses if you bought one that would print a wide enough tape. Mine goes up to 1 inch wide labels, but they make tape up to 1 1/2 inches. I did an experiment with mine and decided it doesn't do 4 line addresses at size 10 font very well. If you could go to size 8 it would work. Mine is aproximately a 2700 ( I think it was a 26xx a year or two ago, but it behaves like and looks like the 2700 on line now. :
http://www.brother-usa.com/Ptouch/ModelDetail.aspx?ProductID=PT2700

The one below will handle both Avery and TZ labels and will make labels up to 1 1/2 inches wide, but it costs $299.00 on the company web site. That's rather a lot to pay for an extra 1/2 inch of width. See it below:

http://www.brother-usa.com/Ptouch/ModelDetail.aspx?ProductID=PT9500PC

Just experimented a little more and found that the size 9 font fits pretty well, too and that if you make the font bold, the labels are still pretty readable for a postal worker.

So, I would think you would be happiest not doing more than three line labels on the 2700, but it only costs $99.99.

I guess in your shoes I would do the 4 line ones manually or find a way to make them into 3 line ones. The lines can be very long -- I have never hit a limit and have some fairly long plant names in 18 point type.

What I will say is the mechanism seems to work quite well and the labels have held up well in my garden.

This message was edited Dec 14, 2008 3:00 PM

pajaritomt, Thanks for all your hard work on this. It's the kind of information I was looking for.

Congrats, Kylaluaz! I hope your seeds enjoy their new winter home.

-GB