I love hostas. I have one whole garden in front of the house that’s almost all hostas, and have several others tucked away in odd corners. They come in all different sizes and leaf shapes, with foliage colors that range from yellow to dark blue-green, even variegated. They range in size from small, compact plants to bloody huge. Once they came into flower this year I was sitting on the front porch watching humming birds coming in to feed on them. They generally tolerate low light conditions well. They’re a great plant.
They get a bit pricey, though. Depending on where you buy them, the variety, the size of the plant, etc, you can spend anywhere from $8 for a common variety on a late season sale, up to $40 or even more for some varieties at some of the more trendy (i.e. expensive) nurseries.
I’d like to add about ten more plants to the front hosta garden to fill in holes, plus I’d like to put in another bed of hostas surrounding the old tree in the back yard to make it easier to mow the lawn back there. I’d probably be looking at a couple of hundred bucks in plants if I have to buy them.
So we’re going to try growing them from seed ourselves. Once the seed pods started to dry on the plants, we snipped them off and kept them in a dry place until the pods did this:
Once the pods split open like that after they’ve dried, it’s simple to get the actual seeds out. Just use a toothpick or similar pointed object to slip the seeds out of the dried pod into a container.
About twenty minutes of seed shucking resulted in a whole jar full (well, okay, it’s a tiny, tiny jar) of hosta seed for future experiments and hopefully a hole host of hostas (note the clever use of alliteration as your author pretends he knows what he’s doing).
Hmm, wonder if I can grow hostas in pots in the windows during the winter? Now that could be fun. Maybe I’ll try that too. Now if I can talk MrsGF into letting me tear out the walls in the living room and replace them with floor to ceiling glass….
Still, it gives me something to do with all those dopey little empty pimento jars we have sitting around for some reason. Where do those even come from, anyway? I don’t remember ever even buying pimentos. I think people are breaking into the house and leaving empty jars here.
grouchyfarmer 