Good to see you over here Katie! Katie is a most excellent swapper and has gone above and beyond with her preparation of difficult seeds. I thought you weren't going to be able to join this time Katie, so this is a nice surprise. I contacted docmom on gardenweb (Martha) about this swap also. I have swapped natives with her in the wintersowing swap and she is a regular on the butterfly board over there too. Hopefully she will be able to join also.
I was able to get some black chokeberries picked. There is not a whole lot of info on saving those seeds, but it seems like one method is to treat them like tomato seeds and clean off all the pulp and dry them. I did that before, but never tried to germinate any myself. I got it at a local native plant sale several years ago. I was able to find an old picture where I could see the plant tag, and it is the variety 'McKenzie'. It is very pretty, but almost fruits too heavily. The weight of the fruit brought the branches to the ground this year. I harvested over a gallon of berries and put them in the freezer this summer to possibly do something with them, and there was still a ton of fruit on the shrub. It seems it is like rhubarb though and only really edible with a ton of sugar. Robins are the only birds I have seen eat them, but not very enthusiastically.
I had forgotten I bought seed for the New Jersey Tea shrub and Wild Columbine in the spring that I can pinch some extras out of to add to the swap also. I had been collecting seed from my own Wild Columbine, but realized maybe it was crossing with some other columbines I have and the seed wouldn't come true.
