How to Harvest & Dry Seeds

After you have collected your seeds in a big bowl such as this, you want to turn - when you collect them, you just cut them using a good pair of scissors, and you just cut the stems with the seeds on them. And then you just- you turn that every few days and open it up. And that allows it to dry thoroughly, evenly, and naturally. And what happens is, in the turning process, you’ll see that the seeds fall out in the…this is a marjoram, so it’s falling out with the marjoram, and now I’ll separate the herb from the seeds.

Now this, if you harvest a very large amount of seed at one time, like this larkspur I harvested, this would never fit in a bowl of course, so you lay it on a sheet or a clean piece of fabric to dry. And I’ve turned this every few days, so it’s nice and dry now, and the seeds are just falling off - you can see them just falling off. So all I have to do is kind of scrunch it up and it just falls right off.

But let me show you exactly where the seed is falling off from. It’s these little, where the blooms were, the little centers to the flowers. And when that dries, it just cracks open and falls out. So I don’t know if you can see all these seeds here, but look at all this. This is enough larkspur seed to plant a whole field, literally. Because you’re not going to believe this. This is about a fourth of my larkspur yield this spring, and all of this came from one seed three years ago, that I just kept spreading out.