CAST YOUR NET WIDE FOR PICK OF THE PODS

Gather seeds from wildflowers and annuals

Saturday August 9,2008

By Alan Titchmarsh

aving your own is a great granny habit to revive.

Any time you are wandering around, admiring your garden, keep an eye out for any seed heads worth harvesting.

A good few plants come true from seed – in general, the botanical species, such as wildflowers and alpines, and old-fashioned hardy annuals including poppies, pansies and nasturtiums.

The conventional wisdom is that seeds of named hybrids are not worth saving as they don’t come true but collect a few good seed pods if you find them and take pot luck.

A lot of their seedlings will turn out to be a mixed bag, quite unlike their parents, but you sometimes come up with real stunners. If you are not fussed about labelling everything accurately, then who cares as long as they put on a good show?

Look for full-sized seed pods or capsules starting to change colour, usually a tad beige.

But the time to strike is just before they split open and the seeds are shed naturally. Tie small paper bags loosely over likely pods while they finish ripening to make sure you don’t miss out.

Once they are virtually ripe, cut them off and take them indoors.

They will often split open in a warm room. Otherwise, open them gently and store the seeds in paper envelopes – with their names on – in a drawer in a cool room until sowing time.

Annuals are best kept until spring but fresh seeds of hardy perennials and alpines should be sown in early autumn and left outside in a protected place for a cold spell, which helps germination.

Treat seeds of hardy trees or shrubs the same way but gather them slightly under-ripe and sow them straight away.

Grannies – or grandads – often saved their own vegetable seeds but this is not the place to economise. When you only have a small area, it pays to grow named varieties from bought seed as they will have heavier cropping than “mongrels”.