October 2004

Here we are, or rather here are Waita and Karo Sioux on the last day of October. Waita doin' the work, Karo being the 'Nosey Parker', which she's good at....

This is the first year of growing lilies that we have let a fair number of them go to seed. The vast majority of them developed nice, big, fat pods, some even bigger than the one you see here and as they started to crack open we took out all the contents, sorted the chaff from the seed and took a great many of those seeds and dropped them in 5½" pots in lots of 9. We'll see if they'll germinate after overwintering outdoors in the shelter and will keep you posted on our success or lack of same in the spring. We also took a goodly number and put those in the freezer; these will be sown in the spring.

If all, or even the majority of the seeds we planted actually germinate, we will be overrun with lilies! I figure we have somewhere around 300 seeds we potted and if they DO grow then we'll have to wait probably at least another year, but more than likely 3 years from seeding, before we can determine what sort of colours we have. We simply let mother nature look after the pollination and we may just end up with some interesting new colour combinations. The seeds have been labelled as to what variety the pod came from, what pollen actually fertilized the contents of that pod is anyone's guess.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves though, the seed has to germinate first.