Seed Scams. There Are No Blue Roses, Blue Sunflowers, or Cat Face Flowers 

Would be cool to see a control test of regular sunflower seeds beside them

Thanks for the video. My parents fell for a similar trick by a Chinese seller that promised them exotic flower seeds but sent them tomato seeds instead :(

People saying you have to proof the sunflowers arent blue are just trolls, you prove it in the video already

jojo plant

There are some flowers that look a lot like birds. Unless they were ai or photoshopped. But I think they were real 😂

I'm astounded that anyone would even find them cute, they fall DIRECTLY into the uncanny valley to me and make me feel a bit queasy

these snapdragons hit different lol

There is a thing called "cat face orchid" but it looks like an owl to me.

Might be under the shoe tree. 😂

My brain: *The Good Word starts playing*

This is a cromulent conment

@@oz_jones 😂 excellent. Was the 'Conment' intentional ? It definitely goes along with cromulent and this vid. 👍

Only 5.99 plus shipping!

Did he back down after that or double down?

Surprised he got seeds at all

Confidently wrong, serves him right

They GREW chinese cabbage!

My neighbor thinks I'm stupid because I told him I am growing purple tomatoes created in a lab. I bought them online, 20 dollars for 10 seeds. I can't wait to give him some. It's actually real though🤣.

put some respect on the sheep plant, marco polo said he saw one lol

Do you mean Vegetable Lamb of Tartary?

@@folkmar00 What the fuck did I just witness. Now the barnacle geese don't even seem weird.

@@Chiaros Wait, barnacle goose? .... Oh damn.

omg have you seen the elephant ones?

Oh i have to see this

​@@bobisnotaperson woah I love your art . Crazy to find you in the wild small world

Oh, I remember the ebony dark’ness dementia raven melon with purple streaks

STOPPP I REMEMBERE THAT ONEEE

​@@eddie-rooalexandria's genesis-ass melon

Don't even need that. Flower hybrids existed as early as Wild World, so you can just run one of the older games on emulator and get your blue roses.

that's right! So is for the money tree. :D

As a bonus, this method also comes with Animal Crossing.

Doing that was one of my favorite parts of that game. Finally getting a possible crop of carrier red roses and testing them out for having the wrong genotype, multiwatering them with friends, finally getting blues... Good times

Playing Minecraft Pocket Edition from 2011 to 2013 yields a comparable result.

It makes me sad to hear that happens, but thank you for being honest with those customers. A lot of other people may not have taken the time to explain to them that those things don't exist and can't possibly either. I just hope that the next nursery they go to does the same thing you did, and hopefully they learn.

That’s so sad, gosh… I really hate what scams like this do to people. I’m glad you’re honest and try to explain what’s actually going on.

Boy, I'm going to be the most skeptical old person ever if I live that long, lol.

My wife works at a nursery too, and we just watched this together. She said she’s had similar customers, and she tries to tell them in the most simple language possible, “those pictures aren’t real. Someone made those on a computer and lied about having seeds to make money.” Some people have been receptive, but others tell her you can google the flower and find other pictures, or they look too real to be ‘paintings’, or simply that no one would do that, so they must be real. AI images plastered all over Facebook with fake stories to farm engagement really aren’t helping these days, because now they have a whole backstory that also ‘must be true.’ Her aunt has lost thousands of dollars to text scams just last year alone, and she called us in a panic after falling for another one last week. She always says it has to be real because the English is good, they used her name, they said it’s from (insert major corporation she banks with here), etc. and won’t accept that scams are getting better now. She constantly shares AI photos on Facebook, forwards us emails about opportunities she’s been given, buys dangerous knockoffs on Wish because the picture showed the real brand, and so on. Even after losing so much money she still thinks it’s riskier to ignore a text from ‘the bank’ or pass up a ‘great deal’ on name brand products, than to give a stranger all her personal information or write off an amazing photo as fake. She would buy these flowers. And if she ever actually got seeds at all and they didn’t grow what she wanted, she would blame herself and try buying them again from someone else. It really is that much more heartbreaking to actually SEE the real people these scams take advantage of.

I’m glad my batshit grandma hasn’t come to your nursery. She’s obsessed with proving to me that a primary red Iris exists. Nope. They’re photoshopped. She acts like I’m the one gaslighting her and she will not hear me about AI and photoshopped flowers online. 😂

Well if you plant catnip, you'll think you grew cats.

​@@joannpelas5101can confirm, planted catnip and now have five cats who regularly visit me

The emperor's new orchids? 🙂

Lucky, they just sent me regular ol’ orchid seeds.

Maybe you didn’t water them enough.

"_Meat eating orchids forgive no one just yet."_

Sounds a bit like the old wardrobe of a Chinese Emperor I picked up for a _Steal_ at just £99,- (Including shipping)... 😉

Toe beans, obviously.

Most likely nothing. If they didn't even resolved to photoshop - I doubt that they will make any effort to mockup seed package.

​@@irregularstuff5290I suspect they'd just dropship some super cheap seeds. Prevents refunds, takes a long time for flowers to bloom.

Hell awaits for those who scam. But, for those who do with AI, will be met with hell, plus unbearable pain, no breaks.

​@@mikekuppen6256I so desperately want to make little art flower decals for the toe bean seeds and cat flowers

I wish you would have helped her.. poor woman

@@iamfish9223 I initially kept telling her they are photoshopped but she wouldn't listen. What more could I do at that point?

@@Qualia. You said "I just don't think so but if you do, you do."

@@iamfish9223 I also told her it was photoshopped. She's an older lady and my co-worker. I wasn't about to give her a lecture. You'd have to understand the context and the kind of person she is. If it was anyone else I'd push harder but with her it was a lost cause. She's kinda kooky but with a lovely heart.

@@Qualia.if she really was convinced you two could’ve bet on it. Easy hundred dollars 😂

will those seeds sprout?

​@TheAechBomb I've actually had bird seed sprout where i live a few times, but i do think it's not really *supposed* to. it's fun to have sunflowers pop up in weird places randomly though

@@TheAechBomb Yes they can and do sprout. The birds and squirrels don't give them much of a chance, though.

​@TheAechBomb I often sprout my black oil sunflower seeds on purpose for my chickens in winter. Just to give them some greens in the cold season. But on the ground the birds and squirrels tend to really wipe them out. I do occasionally plant out a few handfuls of the black oil sunflower seeds they mainly grow multi bloom stems. Like one big plant with many smaller blooms. Not like the big giant headed ones. But I do cut and dry them at the end of season to toss out for the birds in winter or to my chickens.

​@@TheAechBomb Oh my, will they ever. Feeding my chickens has bred out my native sunflowers. They're all different, now

Useally by the time amazon does the page get converted

Then don’t buy anything from Amazon and encourage others to do the same.

​@@mdb45424I'm pretty sure Amazon doesn't ever do anything. Last time I got scammed on there I told the Amazon customer service person that instead of a refund, I'd rather them force the seller to put the correct specs on the product page. The rep told me: sellers are in full control of their product pages, and we don't have the power to make them alter the page info. As to how true or false that is... Who knows. Either way, they knew the product was lying about the specs, they don't care because they get 30% of all sales. The page is still up, selling a "100 watt" USB C cable that clearly says "33 watt" on the cable itself. Sigh

I have noticed that they recently added a note on some items that says "frequently returned item," so that's something I guess. But they allow sellers to fight negative reviews way too easily and sometimes not post them - I had a seller claim my review was violating guidelines when it wasn't and Amazon refused to post it.

I reported some impossible plants on Amazon and they honestly did not care.

Wizard can make a money tree no?

@@mr.jitterspam9552 I'm pretty sure that would be illegal, not to mention bad for the economy.

​@@nonojustno1766yep, very illegal unless he works for certain major banks such as the federal reserve, at which point it's just called a harmless hobby...

Suppose that they're getting their funding from the one, singular Nigerian prince who is actually going around giving people money?

thank you for the slightly usefull gardening tip even though I don't do gardening.

@@Ensign_games Try it, you'll like it!

@@BronzeDragon133 ye who doesn't like a kitty in their garden

I'll have to look for it! Blue is my favorite color and as you know is rare in many flowers. I had good luck with dahlias last year, just some plain simple yellow ones I grew from seeds I got on Amazon. I almost bought one of those dark goth dahlias from Eden Bros (I think it was them) for this year, chose the Pooh (red and yellow like the bear) instead.

@@skeNGk Try ageratum; Hawaii blue, blue mink, or any of the other blue cultivars. They're true-blue and, treated well, blossom all season long on small bushy plants. While full sun to part sun is acceptable, I find that full sun produces the best plants and best color. Mine explode all season long on wide, short bushy plants that can reach 12"-16" across, but I tend to feed a lot. Collect the puffy seed balls at the end of the season, store in an envelope, and seed generously in April of the following year for free ageratum. The seeds are tiny, black, dustlike particles. Delphinium (gorgeous, but a short season bloomer), some Clemaits (a bit leggy and tall, but sometimes a repeat bloomer) and morning glory (invasive) can also be true blue, but I prefer things that bloom longer and don't try to take over.

My Blue Moon rose is pretty close to blue, with a lilac tinge which I like.

Most seeds (except common British crops) are in the Low Risk category, though from outside the EU this will still need a Phytosanitary Certificate. The Government have just decided to continue pretending we are in the EU forever with import of Low Risk category seeds. Though they are looking into not bothering for most seeds from the rest of the world, as most will not carry dangerous pests and diseases. And customs are overworked as it is. Growing plants are a far more serious risk, unless aseptically grown like some orchids in test tubes. There is another scam of pretending to have rarely available seeds for low prices in huge lists of improbable offers and just sending any old rubbish. My Blue Moon rose was lilac tending to periwinkle but the flowers hated full sun and seldom lasted long, so I had to get rid of it.

It could be that the scammmers just buy the seeds from the nearby of order and reap massive markup. That shop in Birmingham could be under the impression somebody really wanted just their plain sunflower seeds. I am surprised that Mr. Atomic Shrimp didn't investigate that shop and how legit it was.

This is also why the price of certain exotic plants has gone through the roof in recent years

@@hiddenshadow2105 That looked like a warehouse to me. I imagine if you try calling it, they can't help you with any of those questions. All they do is receive and send out. But I guess it is possible they may be able to provide some useful information to help understand this all better.

Yeah, I think the shopping site template/framework they use must have a variety of such features, but the scammers have switched them ALL on. Jiggly buttons, expiring special offers, expiring carts, voucher popup, 'left in cart' reminders, configured to zero seconds, asking for tips, etc. But yeah, on any non-scam website, the jiggly button would make me click away and shop somewhere else.

Stuff like that is if nothing else a pretty good way to recognize anti-consumer practices that aren't worth dealing with, even if they aren't outright scams, but most of them are.

It doesn't work on *you* but I bet they've A/B tested it and shown it works on the average customer.

@@tomkandy well, this may not work on them, but nobody is inmune haha, just overlooking what they are indeed falling for.

I wonder if it’s a deliberate tactic to make the customer stressed so they’re more likely to make a rushed decision and not look at the listings too closely.

I mean, if it was just wasting money to see what would actually happen, I'd say a giant tomato plant is a win.

"We need to de-stigmatize and eliminate the culture of shaming people who fall for scams. " Funnilly enough the same applies to politics - look at Brexit for example and how Brexit supporters were verbally 'attacked' for their stupidity. So what did they do as a response? Simply doubled-down and made absolutely sure that they WOULD vote for the most damaging political and economic upheaval to happen to the UK for a very long time. The same happened in America when that orange child was originally voted for - his supporters just doubled and even tripled down when their 'stupidity' was called out.

@@SlartiMarvinbartfast It's a bit harder to apply this to politics though since you can't just stop criticizing those you disagree with entirely, not to mention the fact that while someome falling for a scam doesn't affect me so it's easy to distance myself from someone voting for a reactionary politician does very much affect me.

@@hedgehog3180You absolutely can stop criticising the people who in all likelihood want the precise same things as you - the best for them and the community they live in - and just disagree slightly as to how to achieve that. Maybe concentrate on setting out why your ideas, or the ideas you support are good.

@@PippetWhippetthis mindset falls apart when they really don’t want the same things as you, though. I’m all for bridging an artificial political divide but there are actual disagreements here, particularly where it comes to minority rights

💯

And sign it, the soul called Mr Barrister John Warosa 🤣

Excellent. Be sure to send then photo proof and offer to return the remaining seeds for postage reimbursement and a reasonable handling charge of say, $25.00.

And also, post their address so we can pay a "visit" to the cat flowers

@@ChesterManfred The drop shippers are passive income dumdums, not necessarily the people heading the scam. They may or may not know or care they get paid to ship scam products. The addresses of the real scammers are concealed bc they hire these middlemen. I believe passive income is a scam of its own & shouldn't exist, as is drop-shipping, but those are other issues beyond the scope of the current discussion.

that is indeed true and all of my bottany experience was just growing a single watermelon plant and it took a lot of time

I think it's easier for them to just send a random pack of seeds rather than manufacturer special blue ones just for the Facebook scam

I ordered. That’s what I Got. Dyed seeds.

A friend bought 8oz of tea. He received 1 serving and was told its 8oz when you add water. This was on etsy

NICK: That's right. "Red wood." With a space in the middle. Wood that is red.

@@sarahberkner Literally just chuck the seeds in a vat of blue paint and boom, blue sunflower seeds.

that's exactly what I thought! they look just as beautiful as they are in nature.

I wanted to say the same thing. They are really pretty, you don't get many plants that have green and red leaves and are perfectly healthy that way.

Agreed

Fr i work in a garden center and whenever i see a pretty or weird looking plant, itsa coleus!

I love coleus and their weird patterns and colors.

You have to use the special plant food.

Amateur mistake. You have to send the seller another 20 quid for it to work

You can buy some fruit trees that produce a few different fruit. The difference is they are going to be an already decent sized tree with branches from other trees grafted onto it, not something that can be done from seed and only with varieties that are botanically compatible for grafting.

​@@niceguy191stone fruit and citrus are great for this! You can graft different varieties of cherry together pretty easily, and have trees that produce multiple different citrus fruits. It's mostly just based in how closely related they are, if they can successfully cross-pollinate each other they can generally be grafted

actually you can graft trees, alot is possible with plants that would be insane to do in animals. you cant get it as seeds though

It's not always easy - because sometimes, things that other people believe seem so obviously wrong, and our human nature compels us to point and laugh, but it's much more useful to point the finger the other way and consider: is there something else that *I am prone to doing*, which seems as wrong as this, to other people?

thus the moral of the story is the same as "write what you know" for authors: only buy stuff that you actually know what you're buying. if you have to buy something you're unfamiliar with, the internet is way too broadly available and accessible to use ignorance as an excuse, go google it.

Same. My line of thinking would be that other flowers are naturally blue so why not? Obviously that sounds really not smart when typed out but people don't question every single thing they ever think. Not something that not important at least.

@@Jenna2k That is a good point, though. I know _that_ roses, even when genetically engineered to be blue, can be a pale lilac at bluest (I read Wikipedia about it long before I watched this video), but I wonder _why_ genetic engineers haven't managed to get roses that are actually blue, since it's so easy for other kinds of flowers.

Even without knowing the signs of AI editing you can tell the cat flowers cant be real

@@eightcoins4401 MFs tryna sell SCP-1513 seeds as though they were real.

@@Luigicat11 Oh I might be able to answer this one! Simply: It's too expensive. I'm from a town in the Netherlands which is really big on flower export (yes it's a lot of tulips but also other flowers). These days specifically rose growers are struggling a lot, there's not the same demand for roses as years ago. There's no money for them to invest in an expensive, experimental project that might not even see the light of day. Especially since blue plant dye exists and is a lot more straightforward. Like look at 'Hoven & de Mooij' and look at their painted flower selection, it's all dye beside the glitter and wax ones. To be fair the rainbow ones are a trade secret as to how they do it exactly, they're the only company in the world that know how to, but a uniform color is just buying the specifically made dye and following instructions

I'd be interested to see a scan of one of those catalogs

Omg I knew I vaguely recalled seeing something like this as a kid!

Yep. Even 18 odd years ago, when we moved to our current house, we ordered a lot of plants after looking through the physical catalogues sent by Sutton's, T&M etc. The number of clearly edited images was crazy. Tomato plants would have the same vine of tomatoes copy pasted multiple times to increase the apparent yield. And they regularly sold "blue roses" where the leaves were oddly blue coloured in the photo 🤦🏻‍♀️

people act like scams are some modern thing, they are definitely not, they were found aplenty in any cheap publication for a goddamn century.

Bill Sowerbutts is truly a blessed name!

*insert homosexual botany joke here*

named "horseplay" followed by "gifts appropriate for the name" had me thinking of bondage and bdsm first, equestrian supplies second, and then you reveal it's actually stinkbombs and gag gifts lmao

@@iKadaj Yes, gaggifts were the word I was looking for! Thank you!

The difference between what Horseplay sold and what these DropScamShippers are selling is that Horseplay only took a small amount of money for these, and the seeds themselves were labelled as British origin Cress. Either way, you at least wound up with something tasty you could put in a sandwich. 😋 Having me pay 50p for a false promise of a handsome man in my life but a fresh and healthy sandwich filling: Reasonably OK. Having me pay £50, for a false promise of „unique“ plants that will make my social media blow up? Probably not...

@@dieseldragon6756 Of course there is a difference between what Horseplay seeds would sell, and these scam seeds. When people bought Horseplay seeds, people didn't really expect a gorgeous person to sprout from the seeds. The packaging clearly said and showed you what you would get if you grew them. I doubt many did. It was a novelty gift. 🙂 With these scam seeds, we don't know what we would get!

The multicolor corn (normal corn colors like yellow, white, deep red, deep blue) is where Barbara McClintock discovered transposons, the "jumping genes", and won a Nobel Prize.

Where I live there seems to only be predominantly one company that sell seeds in stores and you have to go online for any of the many things they don't sell.

​@@splendidcolorsI love it when seemingly "humble" things lead to such incredible discoveries. I feel the same way about a common local frog species, the platanna (Xenopus), which was the first vertebrate to be cloned and won John Gurdon a Nobel Prize.

@@4nn4h A lot of antibiotica is derrived from bacteria that just lives in regular soil, university labs would literally just go outside and dig up a bit of the front lawn to find new anitbiotica. Nature is really strange and diverse even in the places we don't expect, hell we're still constantly discovering new and weird stuff on the human body itself.

@@4nn4hfun fact about Xenopus: in the 30s-50s there was a common (and legit) pregnancy test which was done by injecting the urine of the suspected pregnant person under the frog’s skin and if they were indeed pregnant it would cause the frog to ovulate. This is because of the presence of hCG hormone.

But are they blue?Magic or not, if they are not blue it is a scam. Maybe we should ask the golden goose?

Doesn't matter how „Magic“ they are, their rate of growth will *never* outpace that of British inflation... 🎈🇬🇧😉

There is no blue rose.

My mom had a similar situation with a rose. She'd bought this fancy pale grayish purple rose (she no longer remembers it's name - this went down in the late 80s) that had been grafted onto some hardier rootstock rose. After planting it, the fancy part died, but the rootstock lived on. My mom has migraines, and one of the reasons she'd selected that specific fancy rose was that you had to lean really close to smell it, so she didn't need to worry about being bombarded by rose smell and getting a migraine every time she went near that end of the house. Since the rootstock was a complete unknown, that might not be the case with it. And thus began her campaign to kill the rose bush. First she dosed it with weed killer, then when they failed she tried several more weedkillers. After those failed, she poured bioling water on it. When that also failed, she cut the whole thing down, then buried it under rocks. When that also failed, she resigned herself to the fact that the mysterious rootstock rose (which she dubbed "Old Thorny") was apparently equipped to survive environmental disasters beyond her ability to produce. A little less than a year after her final attempt at killing it, the rose bloomed. Luckily, it turned out to be only moderately stronger smelling than the fancy rose, as most people need to be within a foot of the flowers to smell anything (I'm a freak, do I can snell it from 3 feet away, but it's by no means a strong smell). Because it turned out to not hurt her, my mom stopped trying to kill it, and eventually renamed it Old Faithful. Appearance wise, it has very dark leaves, and is tall, leggy, and sprawling, as if it decided to grow a bunch of thick flexible stalks instead of forming a bush. It's flowers are slightly larger than a silver dollar, and have fewer petals than most roses, but are a deep pink color that darkens to almost black as they age, which paired with the dark leaves makes quite the display. Do not approach it on windy says though - the stalks whip around but rarely break, and the thorns HURT if one of them smacks you. It's most recent accomplishments include when a parasitic vine started trying to grow on it, and the rose somehow killed the vine. We don't know how, but it fits with Old Faithful's track record. It also seems to have produced a small child with more petals and a paler color, but the same leaves and sprawling growth habit - which is why we initially mistook it for just another stalk until it started blooming. It has yet to be seen whether it posses the same refusal to die as its parent. We believe the other parent to be the Julia Child rose we got a few years ago, as that would explain the lighter color and increased number of petals

@@Amy_the_LizardSounds like the Florida Rose root stock, small flowers, less petals, leggy, faint if any smell and heat tolerant.

Oooh! You just made me realize if I taught my artistic Mom some Photoshop basics, she'd prob learn to see scams from seeing what's possible just pottering around the program. Thanks!

The store seems legitimate enough- but bonsai are just tree seeds, tree seeds have a remarkably low germination rate, which is why trees have so many seeds. Regardless, you cannot get saplings for a bonsai - only for a tree. It's work that makes a bonsai, not a tree. Bonsai, along with most tree growths are usually done from cuttings. Fruit trees are unlikely to bear fruit within the first few years- up to 10, unless you grow from a cutting. It may not be an explicit scam, but it's not sold in good faith to be helpful.

I think that blaming scam victims, apart from adding insult to injury, is bad because it just drives a wedge between people and honest information about the scams. People are getting scammed because they're too timid to ask if it's a scam, for fear of being mocked.

​@@AtomicShrimpAnother problem is there are many "amazing/interesting" etc "photograph" pages on Facebook that churn out a lot of fake images, including these you've shown, repeatedly, and if anyone mentions they're AI or photoshopped or fake, even in response to someone asking in the comments, they're jumped on in various ways for pointing that out (often posting the policy that using such words in the comments flags their page or something and causes problems with FB). Often people do a basic search and of course find the pictures everywhere including these scam sellers, some take that as proof of reality and counter people trying to call out the fake stuff, and I'm sure some people who are very interested in them being real would then get drawn in to ordering them, or at least sharing the sites to others who might. I'm becoming increasingly suspicious that this may be the purpose of some of these "photo" sites because often that whole circus just seems a bit dodgy, though I can also see how many people would just post random odd stuff innocently. I would've thought they'd be keen for people not to be potentially scammed due to the images they put up, but many are pretty nasty about it including shaming people with a screenshot showing that the "complainer" hasn't posted anything even though that may not be required to be in the group, threatening to kick people out, and calling it virtue signalling, when all many people are trying to do is just stop people potentially being scammed. It seems many, many people aren't able to tell that even some of the quite obvious stuff isn't real, and it's understandable that there are a lot of reasons for that, but being unable to help is pretty disheartening. If I was more internet savvy and up to it I'd consider making a page to circulate the images along with their debunks or something. I wonder how that would go. I suspect badly, but I don't know.

Whereas in reality you can report adverts to Facebook that have 50+% of comments saying they've had their money taken and nothing sent, and they'll sent back a message saying that the advert doesn't go against their policies 😒

its a bit more fin to laugh at them though

Shady ads always existed in cheap dodgy places like comic books and the national enquirer. No, you cannot truly obtain a spider monkey for fifteen bucks. But the dodgy ads are everywhere now. There's no barrier to entry for any ad. RU-vid is just giving them the fuck away apparently.

I think he concluded that the shipping centre is likely innocent. But I saw a comment mentioning that importing seeds is a hard process, and yes it says straight from birhmingham, so there must be a local colluder.

@@XPimKossibleX thats true, though it is suspicious (to me at least) that the same place that sent these seeds also sent to me something not adressed to my name but to my address. could be a coincidence, but thats 2 odd coincidences from the same warehouse. not impossible by any means, but it does shed a little bit of doubt. I'm also familiar with the exact industrial estate that the warehouse is within, due to a bizzare twist of fate.

@@chaoticjexak crazy. it'd be cool if you asked around, but idk what you'd ask to get any info... and also stay safe, bring a couple friends in the car idk

@@chaoticjexak just means that they send a lot of stuff. I doubt they're the root of the scam, though an essential part of it.

What did you do with the package?

That's probably where they're making their money

It's possible that the shipping might not be refunded so readily as the item cost

I had a webshop on Etsy. I used to sell rare seeds of Hungarian vegetables such as Kalocsai pepper ( which is used to make thr famous Hungarian paprika of Szeged) etc. Shipping was in just an envelope with a stamp so cheap for me, free for the customer. Albeit, they couldn't track, but it always arrived. Even on the rare occasion they asked me to fast ship, i didnt pay more than 2-3$ for a faster shipping, so charhing 8$ for it is ridiculous.

They also asked for a tip 😂😂😂😂 what the hell?

@mikeirwin2183 Haha, I didn't even see that 😅

I also just reported a bunch of these shops on Etsy for selling fake products. Maybe a few listings will get taken down ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Lovely comment thanks for sharing

Give your rattie babies lots of love for us!!!

@@spacemeers1511 Tickle da ratties! Tickle da lil' fuzzballs!

At least you have cucumbers 😏

I actually like Melothria scabra, because I don't mind acidity (good size for pickling anyway) and in my climate it is less prone to fungal diseases than are real cucumbers (& muskmelons, including "Armenian cucumbers," same genus).

​@@erikjohnson9223my grandkiddos love the mouse melons lol I grow them about every other year. But if you don't care for cucumbers then I'm sure it would be sad lol I know Mr Shrimp does not care for cucumbers 😅 he's mentioned it often 😉

Makes great pickle and relish.

Whenever a white person says ethnic food doesn't taste good, I take it with a grain of salt; they probably ate it wrong.

I've gotten that a few times

I'm pretty sure its the same format that scammers use in call scams. They would try random numbers in the hopes that its used by someone and that the person would fall for their trick. Good thing you did your research though!

Well, it's cheaper to send out thousands of text messages asking for info than thousands of letters to the same respective physical addresses. They just cast a broad net- send the same message to big chunks of phone numbers at once and hope they snag at least one person who will follow that link.

I got that years ago about having to pay £2,50 for a Royal Mail parcel's delivery. Every time I tried it jumped at £200 😮

Watch out for calls from "Revolut", your bank and also HMRC!

As a gardener, all being well, the sunflowers should flower this summer late July into August 🌻

he owns davinci resolve, he has demonstrated the ability to make a fake video, he should just recolor them blue (with lots of yellow objects in the scene)

Oh no! 😮

That's horrible! They should vouch sellers!

Sadly: Come 2030 the presence of super-high-res images and greater capacity for AI processing will eliminate JPEG corruption as a tell-tale sign of a doctored image... 😥

They now spray-paint cacti, succulents and heather in various horrific and metallic shades. If the plant survives long enough it just starts growing green, of course.

@@pattheplanter ugh, why?! Just get fake plants at that point! I've never understood that tacky stuff

@@iamjustkiwi There is a common cactus scam where an Astrophytum is treated with a small amount of weedkiller, making the new growth devoid of chlorophyll. This makes a star shaped "variegation" that draws in many buyers. Eventually the plant recovers from the poison and goes entirely green again. Some people just don't want to do an honest job, they have to feel they are getting one over on the customers, I suppose.

@@pattheplanter That is so sad! And it's plausible to have variegated plants. Lots of plants have striped leaves (including a variety of iris) and striped camellias have been a thing for ages, striped roses for maybe 3 decades. (I just took photos of a few varieties in a city rose garden, but I don't remember the dates they were introduced.) So a cactus with a star-shaped stripe pattern isn't implausible like bright blue roses are.

Poor plants :(

Been watching litterbox seeds for years and nothing has grown yet!

@@CarsandCats- my cat grows weird brown logs in hers.

I'm still waiting for my dog eggs to hatch

And water them with cat pee

I found some, but they don't taste like cats, or flowers. what am I doing wrong?

That's not necessarily true, exotic varieties are more often produced by old fashioned artificial selection and cross-breeding, which isn't genetic modification.

@@andremeIIo The genetics are still changed, just by chance instead of controlled, so not necessarily much different and definitely not better

@@andremeIIo While this is usually true, you can't cross breed and select flowers into being a colour that they don't appear as in nature. Roses literally do not contain genes that would allow them to be blue. You can't conjure new genes out of nowhere just by cross breeding- you would have to directly edit the plants genes. I would expect sunflowers are the same way.

Self defence tree sounds interesting though…. 👀

Yeah, I feel like the stupid "non-GMO" label makes it a lot LESS believable. In another life, I might see blue "GMO" sunflower seeds for sale and think, "well, they do have those crazy-looking GMO tetra fish, so maybe...?"

Yep, the practice is called atomic gardening, and is still used today, albeit to a much lesser degree due to modern genetic modification techniques subsuming much of its utility. Interestingly enough, plant varieties made through atomic gardening (or other methods of intentional mutagen exposure) are not actually considered GMOs from both a technical and legal perspective, since no genetic engineering is involved in their creation.

Your story about Ruby grapefruit has wandered so far from the facts that's it's inaccurate. Both Ruby (and its Redblush cousins) and Star Ruby grapefruits started as natural sports on lower branches of trees which had suffered from a hard freeze the previous year. Ruby was from a Thompson tree frozen in 1929 and like the Thompson was naturally seedless. It was very popular. Star Ruby was a sport on a Foster tree which froze back in the early 1930s. It was very seedy (40-60 seeds) so it wasn't grown commercially. But in 1959, Texas A&I Citrus Center irradiated a bunch of seeds to see if they could make it sterile; that is, seedless. Which they did. A seedling from one of the irradiated seeds was named the Star Ruby and was put into commercial production in 1971. But then there was a problem with some 65,000 unpermitted and diseased trees being shipped to Florida, infected with ringspot, which had to be destroyed. They finally tracked down the infected budwood, and in 1977, healthy, permitted trees were finally put into production. The Star Ruby pulp and juice are more intensely red and sweeter than the Ruby or Ruby Red.

@@ixchelkali It seems you are correct. I will edit my coment

There are so many wonderful blue flowers out there so what a weird thing to bother faking! I hope your windowsill blooms spectacularly

Blue poppies are real. They are grown at garden near me called Lakewold. I think they're native to the Himalayas.

And that's the problem. You grew up believing that knowledge was to be found online. Had you bought some cheap books, all the charity shops have gardening books, or borrowed from the library, or even talked to some old people, you'd have learned. I have younger friends who come to me for advice on gardening and animals as those are what I know about. Oh and cooking, baking, making sweeties. I work on the principle that knowledge is worthless until I pass it to someone who needs it. There are also lots of great gardening magazines available in any supermarket, or websites like RHS, and Facebook groups. There's *loads* of information to be had. Sadly, younger people think that doing research is too hard, too much effort. In internet connected world, ignorance is a choice.

Good for you to have the humility to realize that you might get scammed. And the courage to share that with all of us

@@PhyllisGlassup2TheBrim You think a book has never been wrong? lol

Yeah, there were seed catalogues that used to have heavily edited imagery. Bakker was one of them.

@@AtomicShrimp Exactly! (I wasn't sure if Bakker was known in England, but it sure was here in the Netherlands)

mailorder scans have existed for as long as mailorder. It's a pretty obvious kind of scam to do. Free money!

and the when pigs fly visual joke at the end is inspired

Aren't there a bunch of creepypasta stories that start like that?

I´m just waiting for the first video on his at-home GMO efforts.

@@birdbird5337in blue sunflower fields?

Lmao riiiighhht? That’s what I’M thinking!

@@birdbird5337 my comment got removed for some reason ??? so ig I’ll comment again LOL What story?

I needed a good giggle today, thanks!

Yup. For international shipping, it's one of the best.

Yeah I was shocked! This year the wife and I decided to grow a garden and bought some seeds cause some things cannot be bought from seedlings and we started kinda late, also we learned some things don't transplant well like carrots. Holy cow those packages were expensive. 4 dollars for 20 ish seeds. The peas, tomatollos, and some flowers were ridiculously priced as well being 3.25. the last time we had a garden seeds were around a buck. Stagflation is a b*tch.

The pictures of the decade-old plants grind my gears. I've noticed it particularly in "bonsai kits" where they sell you the seeds for a tree and show a finished bonsai on the picture. The worst offender was a white cedar (Thuja occidentalis), whose picture featured a tree that must have been at least 40 years old.

@@4nn4h Absolutely! I don’t do bonsai, after having murdered a couple and figured out I was having more fun with Mediterranean and tropical plants. If you do, you have my utmost respect. I grow roses, however, and I swear I recognized decades-old trees I had seen in French castle gardens on some reputable websites. I can see in some of my friends how this over promising, under delivering scheme turns off beginners who want instant results. There should be warnings, just like for food. You will not obtain that fabulous cake from this pack of dry yeast without technique, dedication and experience. Ranting, sorry. Nice to find a like-minded gardener.

Amazon is also full of these fake seeds

Ebay used to be the place to sell crap. It connected people to people without a lot of middlemen. Now ebay takes huge fees off everything, and nearly everything is a storefront for someone in china.

i never buy from less than 98% feedback, but there's a lot who constantly make new accounts when their feedback starts to drop so they may have 100% or whatever but only sold like 10 things so far, so I go for 98%+ with 1k+ sales. selecting "usa only" to eliminate all china listings wipes out about half the scammers and then you just have to sort out the "pretending to be US sellers" who always have their "US SELLER!!! AMERICAN FLAG AMERICAN FLAG AMERICAN FLAG!!!!!" on their listings (then their shipping time is 3x longer than it should be for the state they claim to be in). they also almost never show up for "used" stuff, only "brand new" things. i pretty much only buy from ebay unless i need specialty item stuff they just don't have there, but when recommending it to people i have to also mention this long list of "but do this to avoid scams" which has become a reflex for me that I don't even think about anymore, and i'm reluctant to buy from other sites (amazon, etsy, etc) because I would have to learn how to buy there the way I've already learned how to shop ebay. it's pretty ridiculous that the place I feel most confident/safe buying from requires this much education before shopping there, though I do like their buyer-protection no-questions refund policy (but even then, you have to know how to tell that the thing you got is not what they said it was in order to even file for a refund in the first place).

Same. It'd be hilarious how different they turned out.