Harvesting Zinnia Seeds
We’re going to harvest some xenia seeds today. The xenia seeds are in the middle of the xenia flower. You want to harvest the flower after the flower is totally dry and the seed is in the center part of the flower. So if we break that apart- see all these seeds? Those are all xenia seeds here. Hundreds of them in per flower. And we’ll put them in this bag to finish drying, they’re not quite dry. We’re doing this a little prematurely for this demonstration today. But it’s really best to let a few of your best specimens of plants of each species stay in the garden until you’ve harvested the seeds from it. Ideally what I would do is allow this entire plant to dry at the end of the season and harvest seeds from that. So we’re going to put these in the bag, and these seeds will be fine because they’re well dried on the vine. And so after they’re totally dry, I’ll separate them, take the stems and the leaves out of them, and that’s it.