Milkweed Vine Pods

10 years ago

My neighbor has (had) a mature milkweed vine in his yard and growing up through his trees. I'd been eyeing the seed pods for the past month, thinking to myself that I was going to ask him if I could harvest them when they were ripe. Well, yesterday, he took a notion to pull the entire vine down out of the tree. :-( My husband ran over and asked him for the seed pods, but I'm not sure if they are going to be viable. What do you all think? Should I even bother with them? Only one of them shows the slightest change in color - the others are quite green.

I have a few of these vines in my yard that came up as a volunteers, but I used quite a bit of it to feed Monarchs this year so I didn't get any seed pods. I was hoping to plant some but give most of them away. I personally think they are pretty vine and the flowers seemed quite fragrant.

~Laura

Comments (4)

Connie Kru
10 years ago
Try taking some cutting from the vine and see if they will root.
wifey2mikey
Original Author
10 years ago
Probably would but I have not where to put them to overwinter. :-(

~Laura
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terrene
10 years ago
Did he pull the vine out by the roots, or cut the vine? Bummer you didn't get to collect the seedpods soon enough! Perhaps you could clip long cuttings of the vine and put them in water?

I often collect milkweed seed when the seed pods have started to yellow, and then lay them out in a tray to dry and the seed does fine that way. But if the vine's pods are still green, they are probably not mature enough. But it doesn't hurt to try. They will probably need to dry for a few weeks, until they start to split open on their own.

I am crossing my fingers we get a late frost here, because I want to collect some tropical milkweed pods which are still quite green, but I'm going to collect them either way. They rarely get mature enough with our short season. I am planning to over-winter some plants in the garage to get an earlier start on next year.
caterwallin
10 years ago
Terrene, I have tropical milkweed seeds that I'll be giving away, so in case you don't get any mature ones, you can always get them from me when I send you the others later on. I have quite a few kinds of seed and it takes me several months to get all of them ready to mail, which is the reason why I won't be posting about them until late next month (hopefully they'll all be done by then).

You have the same idea that I had one year about bringing tropical milkweed plants inside for the winter to get a jump start the next year in case I get some early Monarchs. I know I'm a little south of you by a few states, and even here my tropical milkweed plants aren't very big when I plant them outside in the spring after I've wintersowed them. My problem with bringing plants in is that I have various hanging baskets and pots outside of other plants that I don't want to freeze that I end up not having room for tropical milkweed in here. That year that I had brought about 20 one-gallon pots of tmw inside I ended up having to smash aphids all winter. It seems I can never find every last aphid when I'm checking milkweed plants and they end up multiplying constantly.

Thank goodness that we haven't gotten a frost here yet because I'm not even close to being prepared to bring in all of the plants that I want to. I'm glad to have blooming tropical milkweed yet because there was just a male Monarch here hanging out for a few days and he was nectaring mostly on the tmw with occasional trips to the two butterfly bushes and V. bonariensis.
Cathy