Collecting our own seed
How Me and Iris Save Our Seeds Every Autumn — and Why You Should Too
Today I want to talk about something that costs you absolutely nothing and yet is honestly one of the most satisfying things we do up on the plots all year.
Seed saving.
Now I know what some of you might be thinking. Seed saving — isn't that a bit old fashioned? Isn't that the sort of thing your great grandmother did out of necessity because she couldn't afford a trip to the garden centre? Well. Yes. And also no. Because your great grandmother, whoever she was, was considerably wiser than the marketing department of every seed catalogue currently landing on my doormat.
Let me explain how we do it. Me and Iris. Every autumn, without fail.
It Starts With Iris Spotting Things I've Nearly Walked Past
I'll be honest with you — Iris has a better eye for this than I do. There. I've said it. A sixty year old man with decades of gardening behind him, and a seventeen year old girl regularly notices the seed heads I've nearly deadheaded by accident and strolled on past. She'll stop, pick one up, hold it to the light and say "Dad, these are ready" — and nine times out of ten she is absolutely right.
That is the thing about seed saving. You have to slow down and look. You have to let things go slightly past the point that looks tidy and presentable, and just resist the urge to cut them back and bag them up for the compost. The seeds have to ripen on the plant. Properly ripen. None of this picking them off half green and hoping for the best. You want them dry, papery, rattling if there's anything rattling to be rattled. That is your signal.
Iris has an instinct for it now. I like to think I've taught her well. She might tell you she figured it out herself. The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in the middle.
What We Collect — And There's Quite a List
Right. The main ones we go for every year are marigolds, calendula and asters. These three are our absolute staples. We grow them in abundance on both plots — partly because they look wonderful, partly because they attract the right insects, and partly because Iris likes them and what Iris likes on this allotment tends to get grown. She has her father's stubbornness, put it that way.
Marigolds are possibly the easiest seed you will ever save in your life. The seed heads are enormous, they dry on the plant beautifully, and when you pull them apart you get these long, slightly spiky seeds that are absolutely unmistakeable. Iris finds this part deeply satisfying. She'll sit there and pull seed heads apart like she's being paid for it. Methodical. Patient. Nothing like her father in that respect either.
Calendula is similar — lovely great fat curved seeds that look a bit like little crescent moons. You cannot confuse them with anything else. Again, they dry on the plant brilliantly if you leave them alone long enough, and we always end up with an absolutely ridiculous quantity of them. I mean genuinely more than we could ever possibly use. Which brings me to a point I'll come back to.
Asters take a bit more patience because the seeds are much finer and can blow away on you if you're not careful. Iris has learned to collect those heads into a paper bag while they're still on the plant — she just pops the bag over the head and pinches it off. Very little waste that way. Simple trick, works every time.
But we don't stop there. Not even close.
We also collect petunias, nicotiana and zinnias every year. The nicotiana in particular gives you thousands upon thousands of seeds from a single plant — they're tiny, like dust almost, but they germinate beautifully and I have never had a bad batch from saved seed. The zinnias are gorgeous to collect — the seed heads look almost architectural when they dry, and when you pull them apart each seed is like a little arrowhead. Very satisfying to hold.
Petunias are the fiddliest of the lot, I will not pretend otherwise. The seed capsule is small and you have to catch it at exactly the right moment — leave it too long and the whole thing opens and releases itself before you've got anywhere near it. But we manage. Between the two of us we manage fine.
The Greenhouse Is Key — And I Will Not Be Told Otherwise
Now. This is where I will probably disagree with some people and I make no apology for that.
A lot of folk will tell you to dry your seeds on a piece of kitchen paper on a windowsill. Fine. Yes. That works. But for us — and this is what I have found works best on our plots, with our seeds, in our climate — the greenhouse is the answer.
What we do is this. We bring the seed heads in on paper bags or little envelopes — never plastic, plastic will sweat the moisture into them and you'll end up with mouldy seed, and mouldy seed is no good to anyone. Paper only. And then those bags go into the greenhouse and they sit there. Just sit there. The warmth during the day is enough. The airflow keeps the moisture away. And over a few weeks, everything dries out completely and naturally.
It is the most low maintenance thing we do on those allotments, I think. You bring the bags in, you label them — and I cannot stress labelling enough, because I have absolutely been the person who has had four unlabelled bags on a shelf and spent twenty minutes trying to remember which is which — and then you just leave them to get on with it. The greenhouse does all the work.
Once they're fully dry, we move them to tins. Old biscuit tins mostly, the sort that stack up nicely on the shelf. Cool, dark, dry. They stay there through the winter and they come back out in spring as good as the day we collected them.
The Results Speak for Themselves
I said this to someone up at the allotments last year and they looked at me as if I was exaggerating, but I am not. Our germination rate from saved seed is genuinely very good. Better, some years, than the germination rates I've had from bought packets. And this year has been no exception. We have not had many failures at all. The marigolds in particular have come up like a carpet. The calendula the same. The nicotiana germinated beautifully — every tray of it. I was proper chuffed about that.
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Is it always perfect? No. You'll always get the odd batch that's had too much moisture in at some point, or seeds that just weren't quite ripe enough when you collected them. That happens. You learn from it, you adjust, and you do it slightly differently next time. That's allotment gardening, isn't it. The whole thing is one long learning curve and the day you think you know everything is the day the weather humbles you rather spectacularly.
But the failures are genuinely rare. And when something does come up beautifully from a seed that you collected yourself, from a plant that you grew yourself, from a plot that you've worked and fed and cared for — there is a feeling to that which you simply cannot buy in a garden centre. It just cannot be replicated.
The Problem We Have — And It Is A Good Problem
Here is the thing.
We collect buckets of seed. I mean that quite literally. Between the marigolds, the calendula, the asters, the zinnias, the nicotiana and the petunias, by the time we've finished our autumn rounds of the plots we have more saved seed than we could realistically sow in a decade. Maybe two decades. Possibly ever.
We use what we need. We sow generously because we can afford to — when seed costs nothing it tends to make you a bit more free with it. But there is always a significant surplus.
Some of it we give away. The other allotment holders are used to us turning up with a handful of envelopes by now. There's one chap two plots down who has asked specifically for our calendula every year for three years running. We always oblige. Some goes to neighbours. Iris gave some to her mates
last year, which I thought was genuinely lovely. Seeds being passed from a seventeen year old to her friends. Some of them will have had no idea what to do with them. But some might have planted them. And that is exactly how this whole thing started for me — someone handing me something and saying "just give it a go."
Why Bother? Because It Matters.
Look. You can buy seeds. They are not expensive. I'm not standing here telling you the allotment will fall apart without saved seed. It won't.
But there is something in the rhythm of it that I think is worth preserving. Collecting in autumn. Drying through winter. Sowing in spring. Watching the same varieties you grew last year come up again — from the same plants, from the same plot. It connects things. It joins the seasons together in a way that just buying a fresh packet every year doesn't quite manage.
And watching Iris do it — watching her get genuinely absorbed in the process, being careful, being methodical, knowing exactly what she's looking at and why — that is worth more to me than I can really put into words. She is learning something that will stay with her. Long after she's grown up and gone off and done whatever she goes off and does. She'll still know how to save a seed head. She'll still know to put it in a paper bag. She'll still know to label it and keep it dry.
Her great grandfather would have smiled at that. I know I do.
Right then. That is seed saving, Tudor style. Give it a go this autumn. You've got nothing to lose and an absolutely alarming number of marigolds to gain.
More soon. Get your wellies on.
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