I'd be inclined the leave the pods until THEY start to go yellow, which probably won't be too long...

With 'Gold Standard' being fairly unstable you might get something interesting, but, I wouldn't hold my hopes too high. Fun to try though.

Pieter

it should be fine. Pod will keep ripening anyway.

seems odd the scape would already be dry ... is there any damage down low???

ken

Gold Standard is mostly sterile. The scapes die back pretty fast when there are no pods...they start drying out from the top down. All podless scapes are already completely dry...the ones with pods did hold out longer, but with only one pod on each, there may not be enough of a signal to the plant to keep sendng energy to the scape.

I see something similar with Whirlwind. One of my plants is very mature and full of pods and the scapes are still green. The others (I know - why on earth do I have duplicates with so little space?) have the odd pod and the scapes have dried out.

I have 3 pods forming on Pineapple Upsidedown Cake, on 3 different scapes, and I expect to experience the same drying out of scapes from the top down.

So with these mostly sterile plants, we face not only failure to make pods, which may or may not contain viable seeds, but also failure of the plant to support these pods...at least I think so.

I think you are right but there is not much you can do about it, if the plant aborted seed development it is not going to happen. The pod will start shriveling at some point and it might have some viable seed in there. The only other thing I have done in the past for other perennials is to cut the scape with pods and keep it in the water with slight amount of sugar.

Somehow the pods on GS hung in there...

Pod 1 whose scape stayed green longest:

Pod 2 that had a shrivelled up scape early on:

Now who can tell me about the different seeds produced? I read somewhere that white meant not fertile- but what if the bump is black? And what about the minuscule seeds - they have bumps and wings but are soooo tiny. And what about that large thick coffee bean-like seed at the top of the first pic? Has someone studied and posted this info somewhere?

ConnieMay

Hallson Gardens has a forum for growing hostas from seeds. Those folks do this a lot and could probably answer your questions. Wish I had the space.

Hallson's seed growing forum

-Babka

Thanks so much Babka!

I wish I had the space too! Lol but that's not going to stop me. ;)

My seed pods are still very green. Today, I put little mesh gift bags over them to try to catch the seeds when the pods open.

there should be a very hard.. shiny black seed .. not just a bump as you call it ...

i used to put the dried seed in a teacup strainer.. and clean off all the wings and debris ... and all that was left was the hard shiny seed ... the dollar store version for me

http://peppercorn.net/tea-coffee-bialetti-teapots/tea-strainers-infusers-teapots/tea-strain-small-stainless-leaves-sieve

in your pic.. i doubt the round things you see are seeds ... and the wings dont look like they have a seed ...

btw.. i remove wings and stuff.. because that is the stuff that rots ... and brings pathogens to the seed media ...

ken

Ken,

what do you do with the teacup strainer to separate the wing from the seed?

grind the heck out of them with my thumb .. i was just coming back to tell you.. the seed is so hard.. it comes out of the grinding A ok ....

when fully dry.. the chaff just crumbles out ... but sometimes those round things just clog the strainer ... i usually harvested in october ... and didnt clean until late december ... it all was very dry ... no need to start too early ...

i do it over a dinner plate .. and pray i dont sneeze and spread it all over the room.. lol ...

ken

Thanks for the tips Ken. I will practice separating seed from chaff on some that I don't care about...until I get the hang of it.

With respect to waiting until October to harvest - I have some pods starting to open already...

It's fun to see these happen. But with Gold Standard you're likely to be disappointed. The MyHostas database records one named seedling from Gold Standard, a hosta that has been around for over 50 years. Which says that (a) it's mostly infertile and (b) any seedlings you do get probably won't be interesting. But if you get five or six seeds out of it, that's one cup worth planting.

http://www.myhostas.be/db/hostas/Gold+Standard

David

DTeager - I know you're right - which is what makes it even more fun for me to try... :)

This morning I watched a Cardinal land on the scapes of Empress Wu and Montana A. and proceed to eat the pods. I wasn't planning on harvesting seeds from either of those plants, but it made me nervously check to make sure the pods are still there on some others that I do want to harvest. Waiting until October is not an option in my yard.