25 August 2016

mushrooms and purslane

My husband called me outside to see these interesting mushrooms that came up around the mailbox.
Never seen anything like them. Very pale with hints of yellow-green.
Because of them I was looking closely at things in that patch, and saw that my flowering purslane here is producing seed. The seeds are in these little cups
I started collecting them, tipping out into a tupperware.
This one you can see the cap on the seed cup starting to come off.
They are very very tiny and gray, wrinkled texture. I tried to find out more about saving flowering purslane seed- I want to know if I plant these next year, will I get more plants with the same color flowers or will they revert to another form.

But all the info I found online about purslane seed is for the common purslane grown as a food item- the leaves and stems are edible, so are the seeds I found out. Some people collect them en masse- uprooting the plants and sifting the seeds out over a screen. Those seeds are black. Are mine gray because it's a decorative variety of plant? not sure.

I'm saving as many seed as I can so I can grow more of this in other parts of the yard next year. I bet a lot crop up on their own around the mailbox, so I could always just transplant them too.

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