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With love and passion, everyone can have a nice garden...Elaine Yim

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Count The Garden By The Flowers, Never By The Leaves That Fall.
Count Your Life With Smiles And Not The Tears That Roll.
..... Author unknown.

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Saturday, April 28, 2012

I wanted "Shirley Poppy" but it's surely Buttercups now!


These seedlings are grown from the seed packets that I bought at an orchid nursery.  
I've been keeping a close eye on this batch and with high expectations. 
I've been dreaming of the lovely poppy flowers popping out in your gardens in Spring...


I wanted this plant. According to the label, "Shirley Poppy" seeds will germinate 2-3 weeks time, reach a height of about 45-50cm and will be flowering in 50-60 days time. Flower colour is red. The temperature should be 25C with full sun. There are no details of the expiry date.

The 25C is a bit tricky because the daily temperatures in my climate average is about 30C now.

“I wanted "Shirley Poppy" but it's surely Buttercups now!”, a copyrighted post, was written for My Nice Garden blog by Autumn Belle @ http://www.mynicegarden.com/ on April 28th, 2012.





Suddenly I realised that the leaves look familiar, so I bring the pot of seedlings next to my Turnera ulmifolia plant. Now, do you see a resemblance?

What did I do wrong?
Maybe I mixed up the seed packets and germinated the wrong seeds. But then, I never bought any T. ulmifolia seeds!


This is Turnera ulmifolia aka Yellow Alder or Yellow Buttercups.


Turnera ulmifolia is a host plant for Tawny Coaster butterflies. 
Buttercups and butterflies.
So I'm not going to have poppies after all!


Have you ever experience this before? 
I mean growing seeds from seed packets that turn out to be another plant?
Do you label your plants with name and date during germination stage?

26 comments:

  1. Oh, I'm so sorry your seedlings turned out all wrong. I'm not good at labeling but I'm promising to do better. If I hadn't labeled my coreopsis and gomphrena I wouldn't have known which were which until one bloomed.

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  2. Papaver rhoeas need either cool nights or a large difference in day-night temperature to germinate. Could it be that the Papaver did not germinate but the Tunera seeds fell into the pot and took over?

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  3. I just found out that I can't even comment on my own blog post. I had to change the comment settings to "full page" before I can say anything here!

    Nell Jean, lol, if I am growing coreopsis and gomphrena from seeds, maybe I'd like to do away with the labels as I'd love some surprises anyway. Like an expectant mom not knowing the gender of the baby until birth, yeah? This time I did faithfully labeled my pot and recorded the date.

    Sean L, so Shirley Poppy is Papaver rhoeas, the native wildflower of Europe? I like your explanation!

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  4. They usually germinate in spring or autumn, when the temps are lower. Perhaps putting the seed tray in the fridge at night and taking it out during the day might work? I have germinated English daisy seeds before by putting a transparent plastic plate 5cm above the seed tray and putting a big block of ice every night for two weeks. Oh dear, you are having trouble with the comments again? Sometimes changing it to something else, saving it then change it back might reset it.

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  5. Whoops! Surprise! LOL! Well they may not be the poppies you thought you were getting but they are beautiful anyway.Have a lovely weekend.

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  6. Sean, Wow, using ice blocks for 2 weeks sounds like a lot of work. If put seed tray in fridge will be so near to our food items. How about putting them in a cool air-conditioned room?

    Regarding your last sentence, do you mean that I should change the template?

    I forgot to mention that earlier when I set my comments to 'Embed below post' for reply to commend thread, it was showing US Pacific Time and not our local time eventhough I have already set the comment timestamp to local time.

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  7. Lona, I'd love to be able to grow some of your garden plants here in my garden.

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  8. Poor Autumn Bell :( It is like being told you are expecting a girl and you give birth to a son!!

    I love all kinds of poppies.The red Shirley poppy are striking. Sean L is right about cool temperature or temperature difference. I would put seeds in a ziplock bag in the vegetable drawer in fridge for a week or so. Then sow outside. They are a bit finicky. You need to mix them with a bit of sand and only lightly cover them with sand. They do not take kindly to being transplanted, so seed where you want them. But once they established they often reseed. Mother Nature will then paint them all over your garden.

    In California, the golden yellow-orange California Poppy( Eschscholzia californica) blanket the hillsides in spring. They reseed and come back each year.

    NB even when you think germination has failed and you recycle pot/soil for other plants, they have been known to germinate when conditions are right for them. A nice surprise!

    NB if they do germinate, be diligent about snails. They LOVE poppy plants. Too many times, all I see in the morning is the slimy evidence that they have been feasting. Think your Zinnias!!

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  9. Mom on Blog, you read my mind! Aha, be rest assured that I will take good care of my yellow buttercup 'sons'. I usually propagate T. ulmifolia from cuttings, never expected/intended get them via seed germination. All along, I kept thinking about poppy when the first set of leaves had already hinted buttercups. I guess I was still starry eyed dreaming about poppies.

    Now I am very motivated by the answers/solutions given/suggested by you and Sean L. I am not giving up hope and will be buying Shirley Poppies again.

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  10. Jeszcze mi się to nie zdarzyło. To przykre oczekiwać innych kwiatów, a wyrosną inne. Chociaż to co będą, też są śliczne. Pozdrawiam.
    Yet to me it did not happen. It's a shame to expect other flowers, and grow more. Although it is what they will, they are beautiful. Yours.

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  11. You can sow them in sterile vermiculite in a ziplock back, then gently float the seeds onto soil when the roots show to prevent transplant shock, or use the ice-block method. The cool room should work if the temperature is low enough. If you have saved the template when everything is working OK, then reuploading it might help (could be the way the system interpret the CSS. Else try changing the comment location to something else (instead of embedded) and then changing it back.

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    Replies
    1. Sean, your method of changing the comment settings worked! However it is still on Pacific Time when the comment form is embedded below post - something the Blogger team haven't solved yet.

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  12. Giga, thanks!
    Sean, thanks for the great tips!

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  13. I never had this experience but I usually end up with no germination! sigh....
    Nice flower anyway!

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    Replies
    1. I too have many experiences of buying packet seeds that does not germinate. Perhaps the seeds deteriorate quite fast under our climate.

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  14. Happens to me sometimes... but lovely flowers in any case...

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    Replies
    1. Lrong, T. ulmifolia is also called 8 O'clock Flower in Malay because the flowers open at about 8am and closes before noon. I have a matured T. ulmifolia shrub in my garden with flowers that open until about 3pm.

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  15. I see you managed to get back threaded commenting :-) Cool!

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  16. Go to the dashboard, under settings, click language and formatting and change the time zone around, then change it to +8GMT time zone. Might work

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    Replies
    1. Sean, TQVM for your tips. Actually, I have already set the time to =8GMT in formatting as well as comment menu. The Pacific Time thingy is something that Blogger is still working on - I found this out at their Help Desk Forum.

      Delete
    2. Blogger can be sometimes buggy here and there, though they usually can resolve it if you report it to them. Hopefully Blogger can get the problem settled for you.

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    3. Sean, actually I haven't reported the problem to Blogger yet. I thought it is a universal problem!

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  17. Please can you tell me how I can get seeds for the buttercup? I live in India, but have a cousin in KL who I can ask to buy and post to me. Thanks

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    Replies
    1. Star Dust, it was most likely that the seeds had fallen from my buttercup plant. They don't sell such seeds in Malaysia either. I'll try to look out for seeds from my plant.

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  18. Those Turnera seedlings emerged massively here too, so after the first rains at the start of the rainy season, i pull most of them out. But their seeds scatter everywhere. In our area they emerged in quantities just like the balsams, and i am sure next year i will have a lot of cockscomb!

    I love that butterfly though, i haven't seen it here, maybe we don't have that!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Andrea, I think I read from Butterfly Circle website the this butterflies migrated from India, over Burma and Thailand before coming to Malaysia and Singapore - step by step! Now it is a PR here, hehe. Perhaps it couldn't fly over the ocean to the Philippines unless someone bring it over there?

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