Collecting seeds
Saving seeds from year to year allows you to keep your favourite plants, save money
Learning how and when to collect flower seeds or vegetable seeds is a big step towards inexpensively maintaining your garden.
I save paper envelopes to store them because they’re a good size, they let the seeds continue to dry, and I can write the name or description, and year on them. I store the envelopes of seeds upright in a cool dark place, leaving them open so that they can thoroughly dry out.
Plants reproduce in many ways and only some produce seeds.
Mosses and ferns are plants that don’t produce seeds, but they do produce spores. You often see fern fronds that release powdery brown spores. Spores need to settle to the ground, and grow a little shoot that meets another one, before they can produce a new plant. But if you want new plants, it is easiest to just dig up a young plant near a mature one.
The biggest group of plants is the ‘flowering plants.’ They produce flowers, that when pollinated, produce a fruit of some kind. Some fruit are just a little capsule or covering for the seeds, like a pea pod, some just form a skin over the seed and some are fleshy and edible like rose hips or apples.
So to find the seed, look for where the flower has finished blooming. There may be a pod or capsule or just a cluster of seeds (like dill or dandelion). Often the seed head dries up and turns tan or brown when it is ready to collect and store.
The seeds in nuts, like acorns or hazelnuts, should be left in their shell when collected, and put just under the surface of the soil where you want them to grow.
The third main group of plants is the conifers. They are the trees that produce their seeds in cones, like spruce, pine, and larch. When you take cones inside to dry a bit, they often open up and let their seeds fall out. The seeds can be planted outside right away, before they dry out too much.
I bear in mind that some plants produce seeds that will grow into plants identical to the parent. Many other types will produce varying-coloured flowers or varying quality of fruit. This just reflects the variation that comes from reproduction (the way our children will inherit only some of our characteristics). The variation can make it interesting or be disappointing.
Another consideration is whether it is actually worth your while to collect a particular kind of seed. Some plants, like forget-me-nots, just seed themselves and come back next spring from the winterhardy seeds. Others are just easier to divide the roots to get new plants, rather than starting from seed. Lupines need the winter chill to germinate and others, like the seeds of marigolds and nasturtiums, need to be taken in for the winter because the cold usually kills them.
So, in a nutshell (pardon the pun), plants make seeds in a variety of ways and the seeds come in a variety of shapes and sizes. You can do a bit of research, but you can always experiment - just collect a few seeds and plant them and see what happens.
Some plants just have fussy seeds that take a long while or need very special conditions to germinate.
Generally try to plant them in the same type of conditions that the parent plant was growing - it might work or it might not. I don’t mind - it’s the journey.
Caroline Cameron lives in Strathlorne, Inverness County, and offers gardening and hiking guide services around Cape Breton Island. She welcomes your gardening comments and questions at strathlorne@gmail.com and on Facebook at Nature/Nurture Gardening & Hiking.