Taqiyyah, this year I had great success germinating Chilean Tropaeolum species seeds - to be honest, for some of them I thought there would be no chance since the seeds were quite old and had not been properly stored. However ..... after the great success, I lost my Tropaeolum azureum seedlings to some kind of fungus (had not applied Captan
) and some others were eaten by critters - I do not expect the tubers were formed and will survive, but I pamper them (now!).
Down here it is spring now and I still have some T. tricolor blooming (they must have hybridized with T. brachyceras, since they have a bit of yellow on their 'belly').
I know our Tropaeolum species are grown in the USA, Europe, Japan, etc., but I do not know how they manage their seeds to germinate, since here they grow in an equivalent to a USDA zone 9. I sow them outoors during Fall and they do pretty good (provided you apply Captan to the soil mix) and germinate during Winter. A few of my seedlings (T. brachyceras and other yellow hybrids) even had a few flowers. In the wild, our Tropaeolums (depending on the species) Bloom from the second half of Winter to late Spring.
Where I live, there grew many wild T. tricolor (as you can see from the pictures I posted), but the ongoing drought (8 years in the row) has diminished thir population to just a few. It's sad
