Given Seeds

I have been eye balling the Bowles Black Violas. They had a ton of seed pods and it had been raining on and off (more on) for days and days. Today is the first VERY hot day. After I finished planting another crop of peas and the rutabagas I was walking past the violas and there was just an awesome amount of opened seed pods ready to fly their seeds. I scrambled to gather as many as I could because the moment was NOW and I had to leave to go to town in 10 minutes. My daughter came out, perfect timing and helped to gather and finished the gathering while I was gone to town. I like that part: teaching my children to save seed. When I finished my business in town, (Rockland) I stopped by some folks I know. They have a couple of expired Mountain Bluet patches. And they let me harvest a BUNCH of seeds. My son helped with those. And home we go.
Too cool.

Marigold Seed

In the greenhouse in the center row my husband and I constructed a long bed approximately 3 feet deep and 3 feet wide and something like 38 feet long. In the center we made a slightly raised bed on top. The raised bed is housing passion fruit and cantaloupes, watermelons and European cukes, the climbers. On the outside of the raised section are planted Papayas and Pepino Melons. Because they are shallow rooted and nematodes spell death for them, I planted marigolds in between every tree and bush. It's nice to see such bright colors bordering the bed.

Everyday I walk about between garden chores to do my most favorite chore: searching for seeds. I never collected seed from marigolds before. I found expired blossoms and picked. I read that the seed needs to be black if they're ready. I opened different ones and paid attention to just how expired they were. I gently moved all the dead blossom forward and pinched it while holding on to the stem end and wiggled a bit. It loosened and out came black seeds with their whitish tops. Then I put the greenish brown package down, (the seed holder is a little package full of gifts). I gently pinched the black seeds with one hand and the expired blossom with the other and wiggled some more. They separated effortlessly. I continued to do this until I had a nice pile of marigold seeds and a nice pile of seed packages. Then I went through the pile of packages and emptied the seed that remained inside.

9 blossoms produced a 1/2 a jelly jar of seed.