All of our hard work earlier this year has given us some beautiful flowers (and butterflies and birds) to enjoy over the summer, but alas, they are beginning to fade a bit.
(even more so after Sandy whipped through here...)
So, we decided to do some seed harvesting for next year.
Last fall when we were in our backyard playing I casually began to pluck off seeds from some of our plants thinking that it would be a good experiment to try - flowers from seeds. The experiment worked and gave us many "free" flowers!
Why not try it again.
And get Violet and Henry involved!
We grabbed some cups and carefully cupped the seeds off of our plants.
(Cosmos)
(Salvia, firecracker)
(morning glories)Impatiens hide their seeds in a fun little spot, a little seed pod off to the side of their flower (see it in the middle of the picture below). We learned about this in a seed book that we got out of the library, a great accompaniment to this project.
With a tiny bit of pressure the pod pops open and shoots the seeds out. These were a ton of fun to collect!
Here are some of the seeds that we collected.
Once collected, we labelled evelopes with our seeds names
Put the seeds into the envelopes and taped them up.
To make it more fun we added pictures of the flowers to the front of our seeds packets.
And now we have our own seed packets for flowers for next year's garden! They may not all work. It is still a bit of an experiment, but we learned a lot, enjoyed examining and collecting the seeds, and are hopeful for a lush garden again next summer!
