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The downside to having a Rose of Sharon
(lemmy.world)
Pros:
- Massive quantities of flowers for about 3 months
- Bees love the blooms
- The plant doesn't need any care to thrive
- We've transplanted a few of the seedlings. They're true to their parent in terms of color, but the parents seems like a double bloom and the children seem like single bloom
- If you want a hedge, this seems like a good option
Cons:
- Seeds! So many seeds. Each of its hundreds (thousands?) of flowers will produce 10+ seeds. They all don't germinate, but it's a numbers game. If you want to avoid pulling volunteers up you're best off pulling the seed pods off the plant before they open on their own
I pulled ~2 gallons of seed pods off a week prior to this picture. My wife dumped them in the compost, so no epic 5+ gallon photo ๐ญ
Dumb ass question, but are the seeds edible (like pumpkin or poppy seeds etc)?
No idea. The green seeds are not that big, but they are soft. Once they're mature they turn pretty hard. Green they would be hard to process/remove from the seed pods.
I guess being that small even if they were edible it wouldn't be worth it shelling them and such. I do lament there being no full 5 gallon photo ๐
If they're edible dry, it should be fairly straightforward to build something to crush the pods and then sift out the seeds. Perhaps they could be milled into a type of flour? I still don't think the yield would be that high, but at least some use would come of them.