So far on #seedsavingformarketgrowers we’ve been talking about seeds from vegetable crops.
But you know what also goes to flower and sets seed that can be saved? Cut flowers!
In fact cut flowers are some of the easiest crops to save seed from.
Unless you’re the most rigorous dead header, you won’t be harvesting all your blooms and you wind up with some flowers drying down full of mature seed. That is seed you could be saving.
If you are pretty assiduous about cutting all your stems, and you want to save some seed, you’ll have to intentionally leave a few flowers on the plant to set seed.
If you’ve planted your crops early enough, you should be able to get seed from most annual cut flowers.
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Of course the same seed saving rules apply.
1?? Plant annual cut flowers early in the season, so they have time to produce mature seed.
2?? Only save seed from open pollinated varieties.
3?? Crossers gonna cross.
Not all flowers are crossers. But most of them are. And that means if you grow two distinct varieties of the same species within 1000’ or so, you will see some crossing.
Of course that only matters if you want to save distinct varieties.
If you love a diversity of colours and shapes in a planting of one type of cut flower, then ignore those isolation distances and save those seeds!
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Now, there’re a lot of cut flower species out there.
I have a lot of theoretical and practical seed knowledge about most vegetable species, my flower seed knowledge is a lot more limited.
But I do have years of practical seed experience with a select group of cut flower seeds. (Though ironically not with most of the flowers in this picture of Remée’s flower garden @fermetournesol.)
And that’s what we’re going to see in the next series of seed posts.
Bring on the cut flowers!!!!
