I visited Margaret Roach’s podcast as I do once a month. Our topic was harvesting seeds from our own plants. You can check out the podcast, here: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGqQSGvBKTrGgRfQjTPvDbTXlzl
All flowering plants bear fruit and all fruits have seeds.
We think of fruits as being juicy, like peaches. But many fruits are dry. These are things like pods, capsules, nuts, spiny orbs, papery coverings, etc.
It’s usually easy to harvest seeds from dry frits if you catch them at the right time. For example, a ripe marigold seedhead after the flowers fade. Pick the dried flower, which looks kind of like a miniature shaving brush, grab the dry florets and pull. The seeds are at the base of each former floret that is now dried fluff.
But other plants make it harder to harvest seeds. Nicotiana, flowering tobacco, columbine and poppies, for example, have tiny seeds in dry fruits. The seeds spill when they are ripe. The nicotiana fruit split along seams. The tiny poppy seeds spill out of dried capsules open at the top when they sway in the breeze.
You must be on guard to harvest those seeds. I watch the fruits and when they start turning from green to brown, I get ready to harvest.
Seed heads that are cones, like Echinacea and Rudbeckia are harvested in the fall after they are dry and usually nearly black. Pick the seed head, hold it over a bowl and rub it with your thumb. The seeds will fall off the cone but be sure to leave plenty for the birds.
Some dry fruits like daylily’s will split open and drop their seeds. I cover the fruits with brown paper bags and tie them closed when the fruits start to turn brown. After a little while longer, I will cut the stems and invert the bag, tie it closed and hang it in a dry breezy spot indoors (left), let the fruits ripen and the seeds fall into the bag. If they are hardy annuals, biennials, or some short-lived perennials, I collect the seeds from the bag and sow them as soon as they are dry in the place I want them to grow next year. That’s the case with hardy annuals like Verbena bonariensis and larkspur, short-lived perennials like the columbines or biennials like verbascum or mullein.
Some fruits disperse their seeds by surprise. Impatiens fruits explode shooting their seeds dozens of feet into new territory.
Seeds I hope to sow in late winter, from the vegetable garden or in the case of hardy perennials, get cleaned and dried and put in labeled envelopes and stored in a closed jar in the refrigerator.
Moist fruits often rely on animals for dispersal. Removing the flesh around seeds is often important to help seeds germinate. A winter season with fleshy pulp being softened by freezing and perhaps eating by insects, slugs, or fungi will do the trick. Sometimes, the digestive acids in an animal’s stomach etch the seeds to help moisture get through the outer seed coat.
Seeds get cleaned and dried for storage and sowing at the appropriate time.
(Some of the normally acid-etched seed will need to be scarified – nicked or filed to let water in — before sowing. Many other hardy plants need a period of cold to initiate germination.) Harvesting seeds from your own tomatoes is a process that is familiar to many gardeners that grow their favorite heirloom varieties year after year. This involves letting the seeds and pulp rot in water for a couple of days. You can find a lot about that online.
Examples:
Dry:
Cosmos, black-eyed Susan, purple cone flowers, sunflowers and zinnias, for instance, are exposed. If a plant has a cone, like rudbeckia and echinacea, pick the seed head, hold it over a bowl and rub it with your thumb. Moonflower and morning glories have a dry pod with seeds inside. We eat dried beans when their pods split open along a seam on one side of a slender pod. In some cases, we eat the green pod and all. But the dried beans we boil and eat are the same seeds we use to grow new bean plants.
Some moist fruits:
Jack-in-the-pulpit, holly, heirloom pumpkin, tomato, squash, crabapple, service berry, chokeberry, elderberry, pepper, and others.
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