Collecting seeds for next year
Even though its still in the upper 90 degree range here in the valley, it’s still Fall and things have run their course. All the water and sunlight won’t make some things live any longer than they were meant, and the time to collect seed has begun. I had already started drying the last seed heads for the carrots about a month ago and have been waiting to collect them until I have other seeds to pull and the sunflowers are ready. I only grew 4 sunflowers this year since I wanted to give more space to the other things in my planting boxes. One of the sunflowers was planted in square container pot and actually did the best, growing to about twice the size of the ones in the planting bed. I think next year all the sunflowers will be in containers. The largest one was actually good sized for a ‘dwarf’ Sunny variety.
Once I cleaned the dried flower parts off of the seeds I could see that there was a fair amount of good sized hulls, this year might be a good harvest!
It takes a few minutes to get all of the seeds out of the flower, but it was a Saturday afternoon and I didn’t have anything else too pressing to do. I got this one cleaned out, and the other three smaller ones which were this size…
And I ended up with a enough to fill the bottom of one of my water buckets like this….
Not a bad haul for 4 little flowers. I went and got my paper envelopes to put the seed in and decided to do the carrot seed also. I had a bit of a time with the carrot seed since it grows in bunches and isn’t nearly as easy to strip from the plant as sunflowers. Thats not even mentioning that the seeds are a bit prickly and cling to everything like small burrs. Who knew carrots were such a pain. I ended up with this much seed before I gave up on just put it in envelopes.
If you enlarge the pic by clicking on it you can see the prickly parts on the seeds. I also took the time to harvest the ‘ugly’ peppers from my pepper plants (bell pepper and hot peppers) and set them out to dry. I will usually leave the sun blemished peppers on the plant to make seed and give the ‘pretty’ peppers to friends and family. They look nice laying out in the sun, can’t wait to get the seed from these.
