Seeds Galore!

"All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today."  Swedish Proverb.  Well, most of the annual flowers that will be blooming out in the gardens this year were processed today by the three ladies above.  From left to right, Kay, Cindy and Pat did a great job preparing color coded labels for all the seed packets prior to them being taken to our growers.  This is a long process involving good old-fashioned hand writing (which probably wont exist in 10 years!).  Kay started this process yesterday and the ladies went through and prepared labels for our plant sale vegetables, flossflower (Ageratum) collection, lime green collection, orange collection, ornamental edibles, trial seeds and our general varieties seen directly below.  The second photo down makes us look like a pharmacy!  These are all encapsulated seeds that are part of our trials for Ball Seed.  The next step in this process is for me to divide these amongst our growers and deliver them by the end of the month.  The ladies did a nice job on this project today.

Aside from our seed processing ladies mentioned above, we had Pat and Dr. Gredler in for some painting.  Pat went out in the gardens to bring in more lights as it was quite nice out in terms of temperature (upper 30 degrees F).  Urban went out in the gardens for some pruning and Vern continued working on refurbishing benches.  Janice had a meeting at the other building and came over for a bit.  We also saw Bev, Mary W., Mark S. and many others.  Seen below are Gena (sitting down on the job) and Myrt who were in for their Wednesday afternoon work session.  They continued working on converting our obelisks to a new color.  Here they are priming prior to the conversion to orange. 

I worked on various projects today which included seed lists, labeling research, presentation preparations, etc.  I like to mix it up during the day so I don't go insane with one project and there is no shortage of tasks (or "brush fires").  As I organized the seeds for the ladies, I collected many of the selections for our lime green wall planting this year.  Below are just some of the lime green annuals that we'll include along this seasonal border.  Years ago, our entrance garden theme was bright pink and lime.  It turned out wonderfully and there will be a dappling of pink throughout this predominantly lime border too.  The identification for each plant is underneath the image.

'Wasabi' coleus (Solenostemon scutellarioides)

'Spring Green' cockscomb celosia (Celosia cristata)

flowering tobacco (Nicotiana langsdorfii)

'Kosmo Vanilla' celosia (Celosia spicata)

green love-lies-bleeding (Amaranthus caudatus 'Viridis')

Jewels-of-Opar (Talinum paniculatum 'Limon')

'HiGro Lime' double zinnia (Zinnia elegans)

'Sophistica Lime' petunia (Petunia)

'Hulk' Chinese aster (Callistephus chinensis)

same as above