harvesting seeds
Maybe this is a good year to pick up seed harvesting again, although my plants volunteer enough so I don’t have to. I just dig up the babies if they sprout in the wrong place and move them to a better home.
For successful seed harvesting, wait for a period of dry weather after the seeds have fully ripened.
Seed harvesting works best if you have lots of heirloom plants in the garden, since hybrids won’t come true from seed. Some people believe them to be sterile. That is not true, unless they’ve been specifically bred to be seedless.
The hybrids’ offspring will look nothing like the parents, it usually reverts to the original look of the plants used in the crossbreeding.
Some plants, like snapdragons, hollyhocks, nicotiana and cleomes, are so eager to propagate it’s a waste of effort to save their seeds, unless you want to naturalize them in a different part of the garden. Their tiny pepper shakers sprinkle poppy sized seeds everywhere within a ten feet radius.
Others, like tomatoes, will sprout in the most bizarre places, far away from where the parents were planted.
If you’re just starting saving seeds, marigolds, nasturtiums, moss roses, love-in-a-mist, larkspur, four-o’clocks, sweet peas or bellflowers are good choices. Not only do they come true from seed, but they germinate reliably and require very little care.
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