Walking through the fall garden, the flowers are gone with a few remaining blooms. The stems have begun to brown becoming perfect fire-starter material. The one joy to find left from the cut flower garden are the seeds, transporting us into the next growing season. Harvesting and saving cut flower seeds not only brings joy to fall gardening, but adds to our seed collections before buying more.
Dried Flower Heads
When searching for cut flower seeds for saving, look for brown, dried flower heads where the flowers were at one point. I wait for the dried stage, which also means that I’m looking for seeds to save on a warm, dry day with no rain or mist.
Harvest Cut Flower Seeds
For saving cut flower seeds, pick the dried seed pods before they turn upside down to dump the seeds to the native soil. Break open the dried pods to discover the seeds inside.
Other flowers have dried seed heads. Scabiosa, calendula, strawflower, and more have seeds that can be just brushed off the head.
Saving Petunia Seeds
Yes, this is a bedding flower, but Balcony Mix Heirloom Petunias can have long stem lengths for cut flowers.
To save the seeds, find dried pods that have not turned upside down. Take a look into the ones turned upside down. There’s no seeds, but you may see these dumped seeds stuck onto the sticky petals of the petunia. There should be other seed pods further up the stem that have not dropped and opened to disperse its seeds. Harvest those, open them up to discover A LOT of petunia seeds.
Petunia seeds are one of the smallest seeds I’ve seen, tiny, black specks. I’ll harvest a lot so that I’m not just depending on 10 seeds I may easily lose!
Saving Sweet William Seeds
Sweet William is a cut flower that my family’s old farmhouse has a whole patch of them that reseeds every year. For the most part, I am seeing if these will reseed on their own; nevertheless, I saved seeds to start indoors next spring.
To save the seeds, find a clump of dried pods that are still facing upwards. Inside, you can see disks of black. Remove the dried pod, and just turn it upside to dump the seeds into your hand, envelope, or container.
Sweet William seeds are small, but still easy to see and pick up. Harvest from a few different plants to have a good selection to next year’s harvest.
Saving Strawflower Seeds
Strawflowers are an easy flower to grow, harvest, and save seeds from. I never remember seeing strawflowers at my grandmother’s or my mom’s. When my grandmother passed away, we browsed through old pictures to remember her life. In one of the pictures when she was in her twenties with two young elementary age kids, they were posing near their home by a patch of strawflowers.
Like Sweet William seeds, I plan to leave some seeds to drop and seed off naturally for next seasons harvest, as well as save strawflower seeds to start indoors. The best stage to harvest strawflowers for seed is when the seed head has dried out completely. The top should be fuzzy. Take the fuzzies off to find the seeds below.
Strawflower seeds are a light brown in a small cylinder shape, looking rectangular from a top view.
Saving Larkspur Seeds
I love larkspur, but I’m going to be taking a break from them. All parts of the plant are poisonous, including the seed. Use caution around small children and pets. With having dogs that bury items in the garden, run through the garden finding birds, and just their curiosity, I’m removing any plant that is poisonous.
Saving larkspur seed is easy, whether reseeding in natural soil, or harvesting the seeds to resow the next season. For 5, larkspur is not supposed to reseed, but I’m going to see if any come up. I wasn’t able to remove the plants and stop them from seeding off. I did save some seeds as well to store indoors that will be discarded or given away since I don’t want to grow these with dogs around.
Larkspur has seed pods similar to petunias and sweet William. If they are facing upwards with the black seeds showing, they are good to harvest. Other ones may have turned upside down and dumped their seeds to the native soil, and thus will be empty if harvested. Turning the seed pods upside down should release the seeds, but you may need to crunch of the dried pod.
Larkspur seeds look similar to Sweet William seeds, being black and small, yet easy to pick up and see.
Saving Calendula Seeds
Calendula was a pale yellow flower I absolutely loved seeing in the catalogs. After growing it for a season, my mom reminisces about growing them. She came to my garden, saw my calendula seeds, and knew they were ready to harvest.
Where the flower petals once were, the flower had dried, leaving behind these large, curly seeds. Remove the flower head, then rub off the curly, dried seeds. Calendula can also be self-sown. Last year, we rototilled these whole dried calendula plant into the soil, and by the next season we had some beautiful volunteer calendulas with longer-stems than the ones started indoors, which also bloomed throughout the whole season.
Saving Scabiosa Seeds
Scabiosa was a cut flower that I wasn’t sure if I would love. I was actually expecting to hate it. I actually forgot I planted it- ha ha. It bloomed in shades of dark almost-black red, periwinkle blue, rosie pink, and a pale golden yellow.
To save scabiosa seeds, remove the dried flower head. Then, rub off the seeds. These seeds are so unique in shape. Instead of being a small dot like petunias or a small black disk like larkspur or sweet William, they have a coned shape to them.
Saving Bupleurum Seeds
I heard all the rave from other flower farmers and flower gardeners, so I took the leap of flower faith, bought the seeds and tried them out. First off, they thrive from being direct sown. Secondly, oh, they are much more than all the great reviews. It is an amazing filler and greenery in bouquets.
Bupleurum in zone 5 does well reseeding in the fall, surviving our winters, but the seeds can also be saved to be stored indoors. To harvest, wait until the seeds have turned black and dried. One can remove the flower heads, then remove the dried seeds. I held a container underneath the flower head, and then rubbed the seeds off the head, which fell into the container. Just a few plants produced A LOT of seeds. I love it.
I do have a few plants that I left to reseed into the native soil, so I will see how those turn out for next season.
Saving Sunflower Seeds
I harvested sunflower seeds this year form my Henry Wilde sunflowers, but they weren’t quite dry when I harvested them. I have no idea how they will turn out. One way I recommend saving sunflower seeds is to rototill the fallen seeds into the garden. This produces about a whole garden full of volunteer sunflowers, at least my wild Henry Wilde’s.
Last year, was our second year of not directly planting Henry Wilde’s into the garden, yet we still ended up with these branching, tall sunflowers throughout our garden, and into a second garden where we never planted them to begin with. And I don’t mean one volunteer sunflower in the second garden, but a whole patch that was overtaking my rudbeckia plants. I went through and pulled and yanked those sunflowers out of that area, moving some and giving others away, but also unfortunately having to throw some out. Our theory is that the rototiller transferred soil with the seeds from the main garden to the second garden.
Having this much success with volunteer sunflowers, I don’t see the need to save Henry Wilde sunflowers, yet I do desire to learn how to save sunflower seeds effectively for a healthy plant for the following season.
Saving Marigold Seeds
Marigolds are the first flowers that I ever harvested seeds from to use the following season. They were petite varieties. When their seeds developed and dried, I harvested and planted the next season directly into the soil. I had so many marigolds it was awesome.
After harvesting what I thought was all my seeds for this fall, while I was pulling out the dried stems of the marigolds, I plucked off the seed heads, brushed off the dried petals, and saved the seeds. Marigold seeds are large rectangular, light-weight seeds that are mostly black with a light tan coloring near the top.
Enjoy Saving Cut Flower Seeds
Other seeds can be saved from cut flowers as well. Leave a few stems to develop seeds early on in the season. Once fall comes, start browsing your gardens to find stems that have developed seeds.
Saving seeds can help with your flower seed budget for the following season, but it is also enjoyable to save seeds, interacting with God’s Creation. Leave seeds to seed themselves into the native soil, see what comes up if you rototill the seeds into the soil, or harvest the seeds to sow yourself the following season.
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