Harvesting and Storing Seeds from your Garden

Sometimes you have a plant that does incredibly well in your yard.  Other time you pick up a plant that you like the look of, but have no idea what it is.  This happened to Liz and I a few months back when we started planting the back yard after the summer heat broke.  We have a pact that we will not plant flowers before October 1st due to the pounding the plants take in those last few dog days of summer.  As you can imagine, we are pretty excited to load up on plant when October arrives and we hit the local nursery the first weekend in October.  There we found this

wonderful specimen that was not labeled but had incredible flowers.  So we loaded up a few in different colors and planted them in some 20 inch terracotta pots that we keep on our back porch.

To say they have gone nut would be an understatement – blooming well right through the mild winter and weathering a couple nights of frost.  So for us, these are certainly keepers, but we have yet to see them back in the nursery.  So I have been harvesting the seeds from what I now know is Nicotiana or Flowering Tobacco.  Who would have guessed…

The Process of Harvesting Seeds

There is nothing all that magical about gathering seeds from your plants. You just need to know what to do and not do, and take your time.  In fact, we have been gathering seeds off the Nicotiana plants for the better part of a month.  Here’s how it works:

1. First, if you are a zealous dead-header, you are literally throwing away your seeds.  Slow down with the dead heading and let the seed pods develop.  With our plants, we tend to start thinking about seeds as we reach the end of the growing season.  If the flowers are starting to slow, it might be the time to cut back on the dead-heading.
2. Once the flowers die off, typically the seed pods will form behind where the flower bud was.  These seed pods need some time to develop so you are best to just leave them alone at this point.
3. Seed pods are ready when they turn brown or are starting to open.  It’s important to monitor them closely or you might loose the seeds to birds or spilling out onto the ground. The latter is not too bad since they very well may germinate the next year if conditions are right.
4. Pluck the seed pods from the plant carefully ensuring you don’t spill the seeds or tear off too much of the plant.  All seeds are different, but the usual approach is to break open the pods and pour the contents into a small envelop.  I like vellum or glassine envelopes from Xpedex.  They are small enough for the seeds to not get lost in, and semi translucent so you can see where the seeds are.  Pour the seeds in the envelop and seal them up.
5. If the seeds are still moist, you most likely picked them too soon. In this case, place the seeds in a paper envelop until they are completely dry. Keep seeds in a dark, dry, cool place until it’s time to plant next year.
6. The last step is to label the seeds.  This may seem so obvious, but proper information is often left off the seed packets.  Besides the variety of the plant, you should include a harvest date, and I like to include any special instructions on the envelop like, “plant in late summer indoors, blooms well all winter. Prefers sun and ample water.”

Experiment with your plants and gather their seeds. You may find that you can sustain many years of gardening without ever setting foot in your local nursery. Not that this is likely, but it’s a nice thought that you can recycle the plants that bring color and joy to your yard.

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