As the summer heat rages on, you may have noticed some of your early blooming plants already have dried seed heads. While you can leave them attached to the plant, providing habitat for insects and animals, you can also harvest those seed heads to increase the number of flowers in your garden for the next year.
I’ve already noticed a couple of flowers at the MUD site getting ready to be harvested. As sunflower season continues, some of the first blooms are starting to dry out, making it easy to harvest the sunflower seeds resting inside the flowers’ petals. There are also poppy plants in our bed behind the timber frame. Those have been drying out for a few weeks now, making August the perfect time to harvest them.
Take a look at all those poppy seeds in my hand. They all came from one shake of the dried seed head. There are hundreds of potential flowers in each seed head; all you have to do is collect them. It’s best to plant in the fall or early spring, as they like a little cold before growing. Don’t bury them deep; scatter them over the soil and lightly press them in, so the wind doesn’t take them away.
Now, sunflowers aren’t ready yet, but they will be in the coming weeks, and you’ll have to act fast before the birds eat them all. The seeds in a sunflower are inside the disc floret, the inner flowers (the dark part in the photo). Each flower produces a sunflower seed when pollinated. A single head can hold hundreds of little seeds. Often, when the flower dries out, the little petals will fall on their own, revealing the seeds, but sometimes you will have to lightly brush them off before the seeds show, at which point they can be plucked out. Sunflowers require warm spring soil for growing, so you’ll have to save them over the winter and let them dry out before planting them about one inch deep. Also, a little secret: all of the sunflowers in the MUD garden were volunteers. No one planted them; they fell to the earth and grew where they landed. Sometimes the best gardening practice is to do nothing at all!
You can find marigolds around town, and if you take off the dried seed head, you can crack it open to reveal these quill-like seeds. You’ll want to plant these a week after the last spring frost because they need warm soil to germinate. Marigolds are super easy to plant; just put two in a shallow hole to ensure at least one good sprout.
These are just a couple of examples at the MUD site right now, but you could have plenty in your garden that we don’t have! Foxglove and columbine can be collected very similarly to a poppy. Black-eyed Susans will dry out in the fall and can be collected similarly to sunflowers, as they are in the same family. Dried coneflower heads can be crushed or plucked by hand and have kernel-like seeds. You can even forage wild arrowleaf balsamroot! If you find a dried seed head while on a hike, you can shake it out onto your hand. Make sure you act as a mindful forager, only taking from healthy populations and never taking more than you need; always leave some for the next person.
If you ever have a seed head in your garden and are curious whether you can harvest it, when in doubt, give it a tug or a shake, and you may end up with seeds. When we think about the dispersal of seeds, the main things that come to mind are wind, birds, and other animals carrying them over long distances. I think we often forget that we, too, are animals, capable of interacting with our environment. Together we can increase biodiversity and blooms for pollinators. Happy planting!
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