Recently, I’ve been reading lots about the benefits and importance of seed saving. It’s funny isn’t it, how once you start focusing on something, it seems to pop up everywhere. There was a Gardening Australia episode on the Millennium Seed Bank at Mount Annan in NSW, various seed illustration courses, and of course typing ‘Seed Saving’ into Pinterest brings up thousands of links.

At the moment we only have a few plants in pots (all this will change soonish when we move onto our humble piece of acreage) but I thought I’d make a start and see what seeds I could save. I didn’t have any vegetable seeds to save but I was able to collect several different types of flower seeds: snap dragon, sweet violet, nasturtium and marigold seeds. Marigold seeds were the most prolific and from one punnett of marigold plants, I’ve collected thousands of the seeds. The kids had the most fun collecting the marigold seeds as they were easy for little fingers to manipulate. The trick is to wait until the flowers completely dry out – you’ll know they’re dry when the top of the stem starts turning brown, then it’s just a case of opening the seed pod and out will fall the seeds.

Here’s a couple of photos:

 

 

I’m sure my tomato plants will thank me next year when they’re surround by an abundance of marigold flowers.