After reading Dr. Seuss’s “Oh Say Can You Seed” all summer long, we welcomed Fall as a great opportunity to do some collecting. Over a two-week period, my oldest son and I meticulously sought out all the best seed caches for our collection. In the end, it looked pretty cool:

Here are the details (from top left to bottom right):

1. Unidentified Weed - This bean-like seed came from a head-high weed that produced dozens of pods, each with two seeds in it. They kind of smelled.
2. Crape Myrtle Tree - We collected these seeds by swatting at our crape myrtle with a plastic baseball bat. The seeds floated down like mini-helicopters and landed on a Frisbee. They are now known as the Frisbee seeds.
3. Wild Blue Aster - I love this wildflower, and it grows under the power lines near our house. These seeds came from a wildflower bouquet we picked for Jen.
4. Live Oak Tree - These acorns are abundant in the Lowcountry this time of year. The big surprise was the larvae that crawled out of each of them. One by one, I picked them out of the container and took them outside, where I assume they wanted to burrow into the ground.
5. Pumpkin - These are the only non-wild seeds we included in our collection. They were so plentiful and unique…we just had to have them.
6. Unidentified Berry - I should know the name of this shrub, as they are everywhere in Charleston. They have thin,  yellowing this time of year, and are covered with red berries.
7. Palmetto Tree - These seeds are everywhere right now too. It’s so cool thinking that each one of them can grow a giant Palmetto tree.
8. Unidentified Weed - This weed produces long, slender pods that contain about 25 seeds each. The seeds remind us of the food we feed our Beta fish.
9. Unidentified Weed - These seeds came from a weed that has 3-inch pods with 8 seeds in each. I like them because they look like tiny Chinese throwing stars.
10. Redbud Tree - I love redbud trees, so I planted one in our front yard - they remind me of Indiana. Similar to the live oak seeds, each redbud seed had a very small insect larvae living in it. They had all hatched before we started the collection, but we saw them this summer.
11. Ornamental Grass - Not sure what species this is, but it’s variegated and is about 4 feet tall.
12. Jelly Palm - These seeds appear on the ground after the fermenting orange fruit decomposes. We like to crack these shells open to get at the three beans inside.

North Charleston Coliseum, North Charleston, SC, 2007.

The strangest thing about wandering around an empty coliseum is the feeling that there could be any number of people watching your every move. Like from a skybox or tunnel…or some creepy dude sitting up on the nosebleed section. I snapped a quick photo and bolted before something went down…after all, I was in the nation’s 7th Most Dangerous City.