Pros:
- Massive quantities of flowers for about 3 months
- Bees love the blooms
- The plant doesn't need any care to thrive
- We've transplanted a few of the seedlings. They're true to their parent in terms of color, but the parents seems like a double bloom and the children seem like single bloom
- If you want a hedge, this seems like a good option
Cons:
- Seeds! So many seeds. Each of its hundreds (thousands?) of flowers will produce 10+ seeds. They all don't germinate, but it's a numbers game. If you want to avoid pulling volunteers up you're best off pulling the seed pods off the plant before they open on their own
I pulled ~2 gallons of seed pods off a week prior to this picture. My wife dumped them in the compost, so no epic 5+ gallon photo ๐ญ
No idea. The green seeds are not that big, but they are soft. Once they're mature they turn pretty hard. Green they would be hard to process/remove from the seed pods.
I guess being that small even if they were edible it wouldn't be worth it shelling them and such. I do lament there being no full 5 gallon photo ๐
If they're edible dry, it should be fairly straightforward to build something to crush the pods and then sift out the seeds. Perhaps they could be milled into a type of flour? I still don't think the yield would be that high, but at least some use would come of them.