Chaos Gardening

I call it "Chaos Gardening."

I like to let my garden surprise me. Mystery seedlings spring up and, a lot of the time, I just let them do their own thing. Is this the progeny of a vegetable I planted last season and let go to seed? Did a squirrel bury this as a snack and then immediately forget to come back to eat it later? Was this a seed spec that blew in on a breeze from across town? There's only one way to find out! Let it grow.

There is a kind of soft, velvety plant that springs up around the neighborhood. It shoots up this big tall stalk that hosts a kind of honeycomb of yellow flowers on the upper region. For the very first time, I just searched for "plant identification tall stalk yellow flowers clustered" and amazingly Google Images actually showed me exactly what I was looking for! Wow, why didn't I do this ages ago?

It's a "common mullein" (Verbascum thapsus)

One of these planted itself in my cardoon pot (that plant is a whole other story) and I didn't take any photos of it in its glory, so just imagine long, soft velvety grey-green leaves ascending up to about my hip, followed by bushels of small-ish yellow blossoms all clustered one on the other like a litter of sleeping puppies.

So I was sitting on my back steps and I look over to my left and for the first time I notice the seedpods that were left behind when the flowers died off.

Lookit those little guys. Like a buncha little Muppet mouths.

I mean, you see it too, right?

S'not just me?

So anyway, I notice these little partially split open seed pods and I'm like "Where there's seed pods... there's usually seeds." (Because I am wise like that)

At first I twisted off each pod husk from the stalk, but that process caused too much movement along the entire plant that sent those tiny pepper-sized seeds sprinkling to the ground below. Then I brought in my tiny, sharp formerly-paper-detail scissors which were demoted to garden snips after a decade+ of use had sufficiently dulled their blades. Those were just the right size to slip behind the pod and cut through the attaching stems with a very satisfying clip!

One by one, I got 'em all. Every last one.

Eventually I figured out that it was most effective to just hold the dried out bud over my collection jar and shake it like a little pepper shaker until it ran out of seeds. Little clutches of seeds would get stuck in a curve of the husk, though, so I'd have to crack it open-- which resulted in a bunch of plant debris falling into my jar as well.

But that's what the Seed Sifter is for! Well, actually, I think it was originally meant for steeping tea? But when I found it at Goodwill I knew it was destined to sort seeds someday and that day was at last upon me. (See, Matt? I wasn't just buying more trash to hoard!)

So I sifted and I shifted and I was left with this mostly shmutz-free collection of tiny common mullein seeds!

Of course, at the time I didn't know that's what they were (are) called and it didn't occur to me that I could find their name with the right cluster of search words on Google, so I labeled them to the best of my abilities at that moment.

Now I know that it's also called Aaron’s Rod, candlewick plant, flannel plant, flannel leaf, great mullein, miner’s candle, shepherd’s staff, torch plant, velvet dock and, ahem, cowboy toilet paper.

I'm not, like, super duper sure I'm going to plant this on purpose next year. I liked it well enough but I didn't, like, love it. But it was there, within arm's reach of my seat on my back steps, so what was I supposed to do? Not painstakingly harvest its thousands of spec-sized seeds by hand for the next hour or so? Phht! What kind of Chaos Gardener would I be if I passed up opportunities like that? I let my garden grow how it pleases and it gives me back little treats and surprises. Chaos Gardening keeps my mind curious, my fingers busy, and gives me a valid reason to save all our empty miniature spice jars so when Matt accuses me of "hoarding trash" again I can say "It's for storing future seed harvests!"