Lettuce Seeds & Sea Urchin Eggs?

So last year I bought a packet of Lettuce seeds that was a Mesclun Mix from the Livingston Seed Co. Even with my distaste for mixed bags of seeds I had a reason: I couldn't find packets of the individual seeds I wanted. So mixed pack it was. The only problem we had is we didn't really like a few of the greens. My solution: separate the seeds, start each and attempt to identify them. So I spent around 4 hours splitting up the seeds and getting them planted! Of course, I did take a few breaks and ate dinner, but it was a time consuming project.


But I didn't mind, it took me back to the days of science labs and I had a flash back to an assignment I had at Occidental College the summer between my junior and senior years of high school. I got to go down to LA to study oceanology for 5 weeks. Monday through Thursday we had class in the morning and a lab afternoon, where we dissected fish or went to the beach and did field research. On Friday we got to spend the day on their 85 foot research boat, The Vantuna.  The head professor specialized in invertebrates and one day he used us for some of his research. We had to count how many eggs from a sea urchin there were in one square inch. So we sat at microscopes with hand tally counters and clicked for every egg we saw.  Talk about a long time staring at the same thing.

So really separating the lettuce seeds wasn't quite so painful.  At least they looked different (for the most part).  Some were white, some were brown, some were small black balls that rolled very easily.  Others were pyramidish while others were several colors of the brown spectrum and round, but they would not roll.  Well I got them seperated into 6 groups and then looked at the package.  There were supposed to be 8 varieties.  There was only one group I figured could be separated further, so I divided them into smaller and larger seeds.  But that still left me with only 7 groups.  By this point it was 10:30 pm and I decided that was the best I could do.  I planted them in my germination tray, carefully labeled my legend and stored the seeds in their own bags.

I spent a few hours yesterday trying to identify the seeds online, but very few people actually take pictures of the seeds.  So after a while I got 2 or 3 pretty well identified and gave educated guesses to the others.  Now we will have to wait and see if I am right.  To see the pictures of the seeds click here.

For info on the lettuce varieties click here.

Sea Urchin photo source