Plant Life cycles and seeds
Just briefly, some notes from stuff I am learning about plants…
A Plant Life Cycle
A plant life cycle describes how long a plant will live:
- Annual: A plant that usually germinates, grows, flowers and dies in one year, e.g. lettuce. (An Ephemeral is like an annual and has more than one generation in a season).
- Biennial: Has vegetative growth in the first year. In the second year, the plant will grow and form flowers, then set seeds and dies. E.g. carrot.
- Perennial: Can live for many years and usually produce flowers and seed each year after maturity. Woody perennials have permanent top growth. Decidous plants lose their leaves in Winter and Evergreens are evergreen! Herbaceous perennials do not form woody tissue.
- All plants in the above life cycles produce flowers and seeds, which means they can be propagated by seed.
- Seed propagation contains risk as the seed will be made up of a combination of the parents’ DNA. With plant sexual reproduction their is no guarantee of the seed parentage due to cross pollination.
- Asexual reproduction, done through cuttings, bulb division, etc is the same as cloning a plant so the resulting plant is more predictable.
- Growing supermarket veg and fruit can be risky as a lot of these varieties are F1 hybrids. E.g A good tasting parent is combined with a disease resistant parent to create an appealing fruit. The fruit resulting from this seed would probably throw some good tasting fruit that aren’t disease resistant, or disease resistant fruit that taste like crap.
- In a flower, ovules develop into seed and the ovary develops into fruit.
- Pericarp is the tissue that surrounds the seed. It can be fleshy, or hard and dry.
- Fleshy examples: Tomato, citrus, rosehips, apples, watermelon, stone fruits.
- Dry examples: Poppy, kowhai, lily, dandelion, sunflower, bean, cone, maple and nuts.
- Try to leave the seed on the plant for as long as possible
- The colour usually changes to brown
- Too early and the seed may not be viable
- Explosion: Gorse and Broom
- Wind: Pohutukawa, Dandelion, Maple, Swanplant
- Animals (external): Pittosporum, Cleavers
- Animal (internal): Elderberry, Rowan
Conditions for good seed germination:
- Appropriate temperature
Seed storage: For dry seed storage (opp to seed germination):
- Low moisture
- Cool temp
- Air tight (ziplock bag within an envelope)
- Low light (dark)
Fell free to pull me up on any of the above…
- Annual, Perennial, and Biennial Flowers (proflowers.com)
- Increased Growth and Germination Success in Plants following Hydrogen Sulfide Administration (plosone.org)
- Perreni-al, Annu-al, Bienni-al and Any Other -ial You Can Think Of (davesyardbarber.wordpress.com)
- Indoor Seed Starting (gardeninginsubherbia.com)