Fall Seed Collection

After reading Dr. Seuss’s “Oh Say Can You Seed” all summer long, we welcomed Fall as a great opportunity to do some collecting. Over a two-week period, my oldest son and I meticulously sought out all the best seed caches for our collection. In the end, it looked pretty cool:

Here are the details (from top left to bottom right):

1. Unidentified Weed – This bean-like seed came from a head-high weed that produced dozens of pods, each with two seeds in it. They kind of smelled.
2. Crape Myrtle Tree – We collected these seeds by swatting at our crape myrtle with a plastic baseball bat. The seeds floated down like mini-helicopters and landed on a Frisbee. They are now known as the Frisbee seeds.
3. Wild Blue Aster – I love this wildflower, and it grows under the power lines near our house. These seeds came from a wildflower bouquet we picked for Jen.
4. Live Oak Tree – These acorns are abundant in the Lowcountry this time of year. The big surprise was the larvae that crawled out of each of them. One by one, I picked them out of the container and took them outside, where I assume they wanted to burrow into the ground.
5. Pumpkin – These are the only non-wild seeds we included in our collection. They were so plentiful and unique…we just had to have them.
6. Unidentified Berry – I should know the name of this shrub, as they are everywhere in Charleston. They have thin,  yellowing this time of year, and are covered with red berries.
7. Palmetto Tree – These seeds are everywhere right now too. It’s so cool thinking that each one of them can grow a giant Palmetto tree.
8. Unidentified Weed – This weed produces long, slender pods that contain about 25 seeds each. The seeds remind us of the food we feed our Beta fish.
9. Unidentified Weed – These seeds came from a weed that has 3-inch pods with 8 seeds in each. I like them because they look like tiny Chinese throwing stars.
10. Redbud Tree – I love redbud trees, so I planted one in our front yard – they remind me of Indiana. Similar to the live oak seeds, each redbud seed had a very small insect larvae living in it. They had all hatched before we started the collection, but we saw them this summer.
11. Ornamental Grass – Not sure what species this is, but it’s variegated and is about 4 feet tall.
12. Jelly Palm – These seeds appear on the ground after the fermenting orange fruit decomposes. We like to crack these shells open to get at the three beans inside.