Random plant event: Abutilon seeds

Wow. That was fast. It seems like just yesterday I was noticing the seed pods for the first time.

Of course, I wasn't really looking for them until recently, so by the time I noticed, they probably were pretty far along in the process already. Since then, the 'Bella Vanilla' and 'Bella Red' have also flowered, and I've been crossing flowers left and right, which means there will be lots more seeds in the near future. (At the moment, the 'Bella Pink' has six developing seed pods on it, mostly 'Bella Pink' x 'Bella Red' crosses, because 'Bella Red' flowered first.)


Once the seeds are ready to go, the seed pod splits open; you can see the seeds through the gaps. I put a sandwich bag over the branch containing the pod and tied it very loosely with a twist-tie. (Like, very loosely. I pretty much just folded it in half like a hairpin: I didn't even close the loop, for fear of damaging the stem. The sandwich bag just needed to be there; it didn't need to withstand hurricane-force winds or anything, so just barely folding it was enough.)


Not too long after the pod began to split, the seeds started to fall out, and then I sort of flicked the pod through the bag until the rest of them fell out. I wound up with forty seeds from the one pod --


-- though somehow when I planted them in a plug tray, I wound up with a count of 41, so either I missed a hole in the tray or there's one seed that didn't make it into the above picture.

I didn't know exactly what to do with the seeds, so I basically guessed. Wet down a bunch of soil, made holes of various depths, put the seed in, covered the seed up. It's in a bright but cool spot under some fluorescent lights in the basement, under a plastic dome. The seeds were very fresh, so if this doesn't work then I may have to give up on Abutilon propagation. I'll let you know.

On the other hand, if it works really well, and I get, say, 90% germination, then that leaves me with 36 more hungry mouths to feed, plus another couple hundred on the way once the other seed pods mature. If I really worked at it, I could have a thousand Abutilon plants by Christmas.

Not that that's the plan, or that it would be in any way a good idea. There are still whiteflies outside on the pineapple sage, tomatoes, and coleus, all but howling at the door to get inside (it's faint and very high-pitched, but it's howling), and if they were to succeed, it'd be beyond stupid to have a thousand Abutilons in here; I'd be fighting whitefly forever. So I don't know what my plans are for the Abutilon seeds, but I intend to accumulate a bunch of them anyway. Maybe they'll come in handy somehow.