Marigolds provide our gardens cheerful and abundant color all season long and are extremely easy to take care of from seeds. If you learn how to harvest and save their seeds, you won't have to buy new plants or seeds for the next growing season, as you will have your own seeds. Harvesting and saving marigold seeds is quick, simple and easy. You simply have to remove the seeds from the blooms and let them air dry before storing them over winter. Read on to learn how easy it is to harvest, and save marigold seeds for beautiful blooms next year!
If you want to collect marigold for seeds to sow next season, it's better to pick the final blooms of your plants. As the best quality of marigold seeds can only be collected in summer. Direct sunlight and the high temperature help the marigold flowers to grow healthy and fertilize appropriately!
How to Harvest Marigold Seeds
- To harvest marigold seeds, simply pick mature flowers from a healthy plant with lovely blooms, and then dry and store the seeds carefully. Remember that removing mature flowers always encourages the marigold plant to grow new flowers.
- It's crucial to wait for the right time to collect marigold seeds.
- Wait for your marigold flower heads to begin turning brown.
- Before harvesting seeds, select the healthiest blooms. Healthy marigold flowers will develop healthy seeds and ultimately results in healthy seedlings next year.
- You can harvest if there is still a little green left on the base. If you wait until it is completely brown, it might have started to rot or mold.
- When the marigold flower head begins to die off and is mostly dry and brown, grasp the flower head "the petals only", and carefully pull the flower petals from the flower.
Marigold seeds are underneath the petals and look like white and black rods. They are long, slender, pointed, and with dark color on one end and light on the other side.
How to Dry and Save Marigold Flowers
- At the end of the marigold flower head, you should see a cluster of seeds.
- Let the flowers dry for at least 7 days.
- After 7 days of drying in direct sunlight, separate the seeds from the flowers.
- Each flower will have hundreds of tiny seeds.
- The healthy seeds should look dark black and firm.
- Separate these seeds from the petals and spread out on a paper to dry in the sun for a couple of weeks.
- Don't leave the seeds attached to the petals, as the rotted petals will rot the seeds!
- Set out a paper. Your collected seeds will need to be scattered over it to dry over the next couple of days.
- When your seeds are completely dry, place them in a paper envelope to store over until next growing season. Don't place them in a plastic bag because that will retain any residual moisture, which can cause the seeds to mold or rot and you will lose your seeds.
- Label the envelope, so you can remember what's in it.
- Store the envelope in a cool, dry place.
- Plant your seeds next spring, and you’ll have a whole new generation of marigolds.
- Just remember when growing marigolds from seeds you harvested yourself is that your marigolds may look different than the parent plant from which the seeds were taken. This is because many marigolds are actually "hybrids" - making their seeds different from the parent plant. If the plant you’ve harvested from is an heirloom, its seeds will produce the same kind of flowers. But if it’s a hybrid, then the next generation probably won’t look the same.
- Marigold seeds stay viable for at least a year, and most will be viable for two years. Generally, after the first year, the germination rates start to fall.
- If you have some seeds left over, why not package them up in personalized paper packets and give them to your friends and your family as presents!
➡️ Here, you can buy marigold flower seeds to grow in your garden!
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Marigolds are wonderful flowers to include in your garden! They repel bugs, are easy to grow, are drought tolerant, and bloom continually over a long season. If you have your own marigold plants then you can have many seeds for free. Go out and harvest them!
Happy Organic Gardening!
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