Yup, that's my kid.

[Caspian]

Oh neat! I've never seen an albino sprout before, though I've heard that sometime you can find ones that have matured into full grown plants by tapping into a near by plant's root system. Essentially a botanical vampire Plants are crazy, man.

Right now I have cipollini onions, three different lettuces, chives, purple basil and oregano started in my first seed flat. Probably going to add more herbs and early flowers that need longer growing seasons next week, and a couple more weeks after that I'll get started on the 6-8 week plants like peppers and tomatoes. We're up here in zone 5b, so a lot of stuff does well, but the growing season is juuuuust short enough that there are a lot of things that benefit from starting indoors then transplanting out. I did direct sow some summer squash and the last of my old dragon's tongue beans last year since I was unprepared for garden stuff due to the move. They did pretty well! The season was short but I got 4 or five nice squashes and a handful of pods from only one squash plant and four bean plants.

Nice! I love home-grown veggies and herbs, but they are something I've never done any good at growing. Down here in the high desert of northern Nevada, we're theoretically in zone 5, but the soil is horrible and anything that can't survive well into zone 4 won't survive here. I used to live over in the other WA state - the western one! Anything and everything will grow there. I'm smack in the middle of the worse drought area currently, but we had a nice wet winter, which helped a bit. I'm just hoping hard that we don't end up having a 'Spring' like last year, where it was hot during the day and below freezing at night - it destroyed all my fruit tree blossoms. My trees are still young, but the apples should be getting a little fruit, and even they couldn't manage a single one.

I've read that about albino plants, as well! Look up Vampire Redwood, if you haven't already. I suppose I could try to splice the roots of one of these sprouts into something else, but they generally only live as long as the nutrients in the embryo last - the seed. About the time the first true-leaves are coming in, they die. As I recall, I think redwoods are naturally prone to forming a communal network with their roots, but citrus... I don't think they really do. Albino mandarins would certainly be interesting! But if any of these sprouts ever bear fruit, it's highly unlikely that it will be much like a mandarin, since there's no way of knowing what donated the pollen other than that it was probably citrus. To my knowledge, the only way to get a true-to type sprout from a citrus seed is to have one that's polyembryonic - more than one sprout from the same seed. In that case, usually the larger, more vigorous sprout is supposed to be a clone of the plant the fruit came from.