Not to Dread the Dreads

Dreads- as I call it.

This is a real beauty for any flower garden.  Funny story, I initially bought the seeds for this in the clearance area on the Park Seed Website.  They looked cool in the pictures and they were cheap so I thought I would give it a try in the greenhouse.  The first seeds only produced 3-4 nice plants, which were really tall, even taller than what they say in the description of 3-5 feet tall, one of the first ones was about 6 feet.  They formed a large dreadlock which was loaded to the gills with seeds. 

In the fall I cut off the dreads and placed them in an area to dry and around January I extracted the seeds- now keep in mind, their seeds are very small and are like beads, so this turned out to be a time consuming task.  However, I thought it was worth it as I liked how gigantic and colorful they were in the summer.

So with my hand picked seeds, I planted them in the green house for a second year, this time they produced like crazy- I was giving away Dreads to anyone who wanted one.

Funny thing, the year before, when the plants were in the flower beds, they had dropped a tremendous amount of seeds as well, so you can guess with the birds help I had these everywhere this year, but they are so pretty I did not mind.

When I trimmed them back this fall, I thought I should just drop the dreads in the flower bed and see if they will reseed again, so will have to see.  I did save some of the larger dreads for seeds this winter, they are so pretty and tall I thought I had to.

Not sure if you can tell, but can you depict the long dreads on these?  Crazy



A little bit about the plant- Their name is the Red Amarathus Caudatus- but like I said I call them Dreads- as they look like dreadlocks.

They will grow from 1- 5 feet is the average.  One plant may range from 12-24 inches wide- depending on the area they have.

They like allot of sun and a moist area to grow, but I will have to say if they do run dry on the water, you will start to see the leaves turn brown before the Dread does, but as I said they like the moisture, but not soggy.

They will start blooming from spring to fall and if you take it indoors will last allot longer.  This is classified as an annual.

I will have to say this is an attention getter in your flower bed, visitors will always ask what is that, or wow that plant is cool, and the birds love it for the color, unfortunately humming birds like it but there is not allot of goodies for them.

Experiment with this one, I think you will love it.

This is one of my runts from this year, but by mid August it was actually doing really well.