Hey, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm
Well, it's late November now and my head is already firmly into our my next selling season
So my roses are in the greenhouse. I've squared them away and they're ready for next year of selling
But one thing that surprised me in the past couple of seasons of selling is how receptive my customers have been to
perennials and shrubs and other plants that I can grow from seed that are really quite uncommon and honestly,
very few people have actually heard of
It's exciting for them. They find something that they can't find in the local garden center and for a backyard nursery
You really need that hook. You really need to get them to stop and look at your booth every single time
so what I want to go over in this video really quickly is
some of the places that you can find
Interesting seeds like these, some of the vendors and suppliers
Where you can find the information?
Also how to start them and take you through the step of stratification
Because a lot of these can't just be started
Quickly in the spring and finished for sale right away
Some of these require the extra step and that's why I'm starting in November like this because I'm gonna have to stratify these
Probably in my fridge over the winter
so next thing I'll do I'll show you some of the sites here and where to get some information and then we'll get back to
stratifying these seeds
and
I'll begin with a little slideshow here of some of the plants. This one here is
Belamcanda chinensis also
It could be called Iris domestica or the Blackberry Lily and it has these beautiful
leopard spotted flowers
Followed by the seed heads are notable, too
They have sort of shiny black seed pods that almost look like blackberries and are held into the fall.
Fantastic plant. I've sold a lot of those at the farmers market
This one here is Trollius
ircuticus and if you look down into it you can see the center's are dark so very cool
Trollius
This one here
Cassia marilandica
It's the yellow one in the front. You see that's quite a tall plant
Native to the East Coast United States so fully hardy in many climates
this one here Dianthus 'Dancing Geisha' and
The flower form is a novel which has caught a lot my customers by surprise and
Honestly, if you can get a good picture or a picture card in front of your customers with these varieties on it
It stops them dead in their tracks and they will shop your table
This one here
Monarda punctata or spotted bee balm
Monarda is not all that uncommon
Amongst perennial selections, but this one here if you can get in close you'd see that these are spotted
flowers really find details on those with that cool lavender color and it doesn't get
powdery mildew the way that other Monardas do and
Finally here. Or not quite finally, this is
Phlomis russeliana. I showed this one in my division of perennials video a while back
but it did start up from seed just the way I'm going to show you here and
now finally, this one is Saruma henryii
You can see on here. That's got fuzzy foliage heart-shaped with foliage pale yellow flowers
And it smells like ginger. It has an neat texture and fragrance to it
So neat plant and the feedback I've gotten from my customers on those has been outstanding. So happy to have that in my selection
So where would that find plants like these?
For that I'll show you a few different seed sites here that I've referenced
This first one here
Sorry, but it's all text-based. That's J.L. Hudson seedsman down in California and
Why I like them a lot. I mean it is all text-based. Not a lot of pictures
Which is not why I like it, but it has its downsides as well
But it has so many different seeds that you can't find pretty much anywhere. It's a it's a it's a seed collection
It does have a bit of an outdated
online system all sold by email so it's not quite an online store, but
anyway worth checking them out if for nothing else to get some good ideas on it and
The author of the site had some interesting ideas
about biodiversity and
invasive species, so it's worth browsing through the site just
Even for his insights on that
the second one here and it's probably the one I'll spend the most time on is Jelitto and Jelitto is based in Germany and
Is my primary source of information for
Perennial seeds and notice that all the ones that I had on my previous page there were perennials
I grow shrubs by seed as well
So anything that that is unusual or not common I'll grow by seed but here if you look amongst their perennial seeds
Just a massive selection from Jelitto
And see here it goes all the way through the alphabet and
92 pages
all
doubled-stacked down like that
so just tons and tons of perennials and what I love about it is that they don't just have the
Information for the selling the seed, but when you want to start the seed they have cultural information
So if you scroll down here, then you go down to the tab that says cultivation it will tell you here
How many?
How many grams of seeds you would need to get a thousand seedlings, it talks about how they recommend to
Start it. This one is a 72 cell tray. And then this one here talks about is germination requirement
So it has detailed germination requirements here
You don't have to go into those
Specifically until you buy a variety but many of them are considered cold germinators. So meaning that they'll need
Winter a period to convince the plant that it's ready to start the seeds for spring
one more site before I circle back to Jelitto here is
Botanically Inclined and
I love this site
I've been buying seeds from them for 3 or 4 years now and never disappointed. They always have a cool selection of
Interesting plants primarily there's a lot of North American natives here, but also
the
Owner of this site. She seems to specialize a lot in
Certain families
so you'll find a lot of stuff that are spring ephemerals a lot of stuff in the corydalis area of
The papaver family that kind of thing. So a really interesting
Website now. I'm going to circle back here. I'm not gonna take you too much time here
Browsing you through my my seed shopping here, but I want to show you the final picture. I showed you
for my little slideshow there with Saruma Henryii and
That's the Julito
Picture of the plant a little more mature I can see their their flower color looked a little deeper than mine
But I may have just caught it a different stage. Now one thing when you're shopping Jelitto is you need to know that they are
European and so they're selling in Euros
Which you may have to translate back and you can up here
Change your unit to US dollars, which would be the closest for me to Canadian dollars
But they don't they say in that little dialog I dodged past
That that's not going to be a fully accurate thing until they bill you
and in this case
You're talking about 6.84 from a package of seeds and a portion of seeds that they're selling here is typically enough to get you
Approximately 50 plants, so it's not cheap. I think that's probably
Somewhere above 10 cents a seed and you won't get fully
full germination, so if you're going to be selling
Specialty plants like this. You need to be charging a little more. So if I can sell an annual for
Two dollars. I might sell a perennial for four dollars in the same size pot
And if I go to a larger pot again, don't be afraid if you get up to a gallon to be charging, you know
ten dollars or eight dollars
Something a little bit more than you charge for an easier plant
Go ahead to "cultivation" and this one here says that it's going to need a
Warm compost or warm stratification period and they talked about with constant humidity or moisture
For at least six weeks and then cold for another six or eight weeks
And again that's going to mean moist
So it needs a warm moist germination period then a cold moist germination period please don't be freaked out
By these sewing instructions if you follow them step-by-step you get a little bit of experience with them dead easy
But you do have to give yourself a little bit of time
So in this case if you wanted to do the whole cycle
you probably have to start all the way back in October or September to give it a warm period and then a cold period
Before you can finally germinate the seeds and say February and you time it out to your own climate
Alright, that should cover it off for this part. I'm gonna go back to the seed table
All right, back to playing with seeds here
well, if you recall from the plants that I showed you online one of them was Saruma henryii and
from the instructions that we gathered it requires a
warm period
Moist in vermiculite and then it requires a cold period now beautifully this was actually shipped to us in moist
vermiculite so that first part that warm
stratification period is
Done now and the next thing I want to do is the cold stratification
And while I'm doing that I'm going to just transfer it into a larger container here
So a little bit of plasticware I'm going to throw some moist vermiculite pre-moistened to that
into the bottom of the plasticware
transfer over the seeds
Make sure I get all of them there
And then spread them out I
will label these
Close this up
Put it into the fridge here
And then I'll be checking on it in the next six to eight weeks just to check and see if anything is starting to germinate
After that, it's a quick transplanting spring. And now I recall from my previous years of experience with this and maybe didn't size up
Right away
It was probably not ready for April and May sales
but I did have some available for June and July of the same year of sowing so that's
covers off the issue of stratification and
Specialty perennials and shrubs. I hope you enjoyed the video. And if you have any questions, please leave them below