Tag: seeds

Leaf of the Day: Seeds, Peppers and the Pepper Lady

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There can be few things more exciting to a gardener that seeing first seeds sprouting. Over the last few days I have been talking to Samantha who has a blog here and likes very much to grow things from seed. Seeing her blog reminded me of my attempt two years ago to grow 27 different species of peppers on our windy sea salty balcony in Spain.
The whole pepper interest, and a taste for hot pepper sauce on everything, started as a result of coming into contact with Jean Andrews, sadly not personally, but through working at Casem at Monteverde in Costa Rica.

Jean Andrews, also known as the Pepper Lady, has written about peppers, grown peppers and drawn and painted peppers. She is one of life’s wonderful, tireless, philanthropic people and I will return to her and Casem another time. But if you want to know a little more about her and her pepper interest go here. I had two of her books (currently in storage in Spain…sigh..) one The Pepper Trail”, and the other just called “Peppers”. They both have her writings, recipes, pepper history and paintings.

Peppers are completely fascinating, the flowers, colour and shapes are wonderful and they come in every degree of heat from mild and sweet to a mouth searing, scorching Habanero, which will rate 100,000 – 300,000 units on the Scoville scale

The names are equally attractive, my particular favourite was Satan’s Kiss, which you stuff with mozzarella and anchovies, grill and drizzle with olive oil and herbs. Delicious.
Also, I grew Purple Tiger, Whippets Tail, Hot Purple Prince, White Habanero, Marbles, Bolivian Rainbow, Aurora which was beautiful , the classics Guajillo and Malagueta, and more. They change colour and shape and come in different sizes and leaf shapes, you can eat them and then there are all the delicious things you can make with them!
The plants did not much like their windy, salt burnt, high rise location but it definitely had the beginnings of an obsession and if we had stayed I had plans to find a small plot of land to really get going.
Probably the most exciting part was germinating the seeds. It’s so much better to leave them alone but sometimes you just can’t resist lifting the lid off the seed trays to see what is happening, can you?
These were my just-planted and labelled trays.. how satisfying it was to see them all neat and ready to go.

A couple of weeks later…and the first seedlings were growing. I was fascinated how they all grew slightly differently. Some waving the empty seed head aloft until second leaves had grown. I even kept a record of which grew first, fastest etc….Hmmmmm obsessive….

I particularly liked the brown peat pots ..as you can see. I made a few sketches of them and their new little seedlings

These were some of the later results:
Lemon drop.

Bolivian Rainbow

and Balloon…

So thank you Samantha for reminding me of the joys of seeds and now I want to grow peppers again. I need a garden!!…

The drawing is of my Cherry Pepper from 2006. __________________________________________________

Cherry Pepper

Leaf of the Day: Balloon Milkweed Seeds

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Today I was going to have a day off but curiosity got the better of me and I decided to investigate yesterday’s pod of the Balloon Milkweed. It was completely fascinating. Inside the green soft hairy pod there is a central S shaped inner pod. As the whole thing started quickly drying out, the interior pod split along its length to reveal inside many little red brown seeds, very neatly packed around what looked like a shiny silky core. The seeds quickly fell away, one by one, each taking with it one layer of the core, which transformed itself into a fluffy floating parachute. It’s very hard to describe….so I can do no better than let Anna Botsford Comstock in her classic 1911 book “A Handbook of Nature Study” for elementary school children, explain in more poetic terms.

“On either side of the seam, (of the interior pod) which will sometime open, are three or four rows of projecting points rising from the felty surface of the pod in a way that suggests embossed embroidery. Below the opening is a line of white velvet at one end and with their heads all in one direction are the beautiful pale-rimmed brown overlapping seeds and at the other end we see the exquisite milkweed silk with the skein so polished that no human could give us a skein of such lustre.
No sooner is our treasure open to the air than the shining silk begins to separate into floss of fairy texture. But before one seed comes off, let us look at the beautiful pattern formed by the seeds overlapping, such patterns we may see in the mosaics of mosques. Pull off a seed and with it comes its own skein of floss shining like a pearl; but if we hold the seed in the hand a moment, the skein unwinds itself into a fluff of shining threads as fine as spider’s silk and each individual thread thrusts itself out and rests upon the air and altogether there are enough of the threads to float the seed, a balloon of the safest sort.

Isn’t that lovely..

Soon the outside of the pod had shrivelled and the fluffy white seeds had exploded out onto the table and were busy drifting off around the room.
It was all so quick that I couldn’t draw it fast enough.

So today just my sketchbook drawing and these two photos I took of the seeds.. you can now see why it’s also called the Swan plant. Very pretty and, as always with nature, beautifully designed with some superb engineering.
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Balloon Milkweed Seeds

Leaf of the Day: Three Colour Seeds

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I have spent all day sorting out colours and laboriously painting samples of my watercolour paints which are a motley bunch in every way. It takes hours. Having done that I consulted the afore mentioned excellent site for all things watercolour http://www.handprint.com/ to check on the names of the colours and the pigments in order to eliminate once and for all some very bad and fugitive pigments.. so its goodbye alizarin crimson, and aureolin, and a few that are so old they don’t list any pigments on the labels at all. Does in matter? Well yes, if you are selling originals it is important that the colours don’t fade, it doesn’t really add to your artistic mystery to have your works slowly disappearing from the walls. Also for really accurate colour mixing or for some experimental colour mixing, to avoid mud it is absolutely necessary to know how pigments work with each other. The Handprint site is a mine of information and you will find ideas for different colour palettes and all the technical information your heart could desire. Here is a photo of my progress so far.

I was also thinking about some coloured pencil and have a couple of small seeds on my desk, however having gone to all the trouble of getting the paints out I decided to try one of the exercises for colour mixing using just 3 colours. We just get so lazy and use premixed pigments for convenience. So here are 4 different little seed painting. The first one is the (almost)natural colours and the other 3 below are playing with different colour ways.. still just with the 3 colours red blue and yellow.
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Three Colour Seeds