My dad has very kindly given me a dead allium. Now, being given dead flowers by people isn’t generally something to be proud of, but the purpose here is to collect the seeds from it as they fall off and then plant them. This, therefore, is the first confirmed project for Geek Gardener 2005!

The allium flower is fairly crispy already and lots of seeds have fallen off. I am keeping it in the Woolworths bag it was supplied in until next Spring when I will plant them. You can see loads of black seeds still on the flower, with the ones that have already fallen off in a crease in the bag the right-hand side of the picture.

Alliums seem to come in lots of different shapes and sizes, though if I remember correctly, this allium flower was a purple ball about the size of a tennis ball in its prime. Looking around the Internet at pictures, there seem to be dozens of varieties of alliums, and “allium” is Latin for onions! This one is an ornamental (ie. non-edible) variety. I think it is an Allium aflatunense and hopefully mine will look something like these.

It will be a long-term project too, since they don’t seem to do much in the first year, which means that their estimated flowering time will be April 2006. I wonder if I’ll still be weblogging this stuff then?