i will be waiting for an answer with you. I am in Southern MA and have a bunch of fresh seed I am wondering what to do with.

Hi,
The easiest way for me is to winter sow them. I've had great success with columbine that way. If you are not familiar with winter sowing I recommend visiting the forum.
You can direct sow, but I personally have difficulties with low germination. With wintersowing, they are protected and in a perfect enviroment to get a high germination rate in the spring.
Once your plants are established in your garden, you don't need to worry about future plants. Enough seed will drop that a few will germinate naturally to keep a little population of plants going.
Remy

Here is a link that might be useful: Winter Sowing Forum

I have grown columbines successfully by just scattering the seeds on the ground in the late fall. They reseed themselves all over the garden without any intervention at all.

Have never had much luck except letting them sow themselves in fall. Millions of seedlings all over from the established plants.

George

Scattering seeds can work great, but it depends on the garden. I know gardeners like you who it works wonderful for, and I'm jealous! When ever I try direct seeding, I don't have success. Like as an example, when I direct sowed poppies, and it was a lot of seeds from many gardeners, I didn't get any! I'm not sure if it because of the critters/birds, too much/not enough mulch,or something else. So I winter sow seeds now when I want to make sure I get plants.
Remy

PS If anyone does want winter sow poppies, you must transplant when very small and still cold out doing the hunk-o-seedling method. They look like they won't make it, but they are very tough.

For the first time I had poppies (p. somniferum) this year. I planted seeds in paper cups and by the time they were ready to transplant the cups had begun to deteriorate so I gently tore the paper a little more then put the whole cup in the ground. Never had any success with direct seeding and everyone says don't transplant so the cups were a successful experiment for me.