Cirsium Thistle Seed

Sufferin’ succotash! Have you ever tried to collect the seed of Cirsium texanum, the smallish flowered pink thistle of these parts? Crumby has. Last year Crumby decided to reintroduce the thistle we are discussing to the CB from which it had died out. Well, we never had many in the first place.

The easiest way to collect thistle seed is to get yourself a bag and some hand snips. Then you just cut the flower heads off your thistles and toss them in the bag or sack. If you are lucky, when you poke around in the sack a few weeks later, there will be plenty of ripe seeds inside. Yet chances are, your bag will contain mostly awns, chaff and mush. That’s because, apparently, every vermin under the sun eats thistle seeds.

Yet, because Crumby collected quite a lot of seed heads, he did manage to get a little seed from which five plants subsequently developed. Crumby didn’t bother to separate the good seeds from the mush. He just buried the lot of it.

This year though, deeming the previously employed methodology wasteful, Crumby has set about examining the seed heads in the field, cleaning the seed by hand, head by head, and storing the good seed in an old pill jar. Finding good seed is hard work. Generally speaking, when an average amateur botanist like Crumby first approaches a seed head, it looks something like the adjacent. Mercy! Covered with Leptoglossus phyllopus teenagers. Then once you shoo off the vermin, the insides are filled with more vermin busily eating, pooping and fornicating on the seeds. Merciful heavens! Plus, your fingers get all stuck by the thistle prickles. Nevertheless, Crumby is determined to persist and make forward progress until he has in the neighborhood of 200 seeds.