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How to collect nasturtium seeds at home
When your favorite flowerbed blooms: the eye rejoices, and the soul sings. But how do you collect nasturtium seeds to provide yourself with extraordinary flowers for the next year? If you do not want to spend money on custom-made seeds of untested quality, it is more convenient to prepare them yourself and plant them correctly.
How to harvest nasturtium seeds correctly?
Correct collection is a guarantee of the safety of seeds for the next 3-4 years: as long as they are preserved without loss of properties. This is not just a great help for yourself as a florist, cook and home doctor. This is also a good gift – it makes it easier to save money on a live bouquet, and the result will delight you for a long time!
How to collect nasturtium seeds at home?
Bright orange, pink, yellow, variegated flowers attract the attention of everyone whose eyes have noticed such a flower bed. Unpretentious perennials, once imported from Chile, can easily withstand severe frosts up to 20 degrees, but humidity and lower temperatures can destroy nasturtiums.
These plants continue the genus by self-sowing; to extend the life of flowers, seeds can be collected, because they:
- fallen, lie on the ground. It is enough to pick them up, dry them slightly on paper;
- The maturity of the seeds is checked by touching them with a hand. Mature ones will fall off on their own – they are located one by one in a flower box, consisting of three parts;
- store them in a cool place, a prerequisite: dryness, otherwise they will damp.
It is also important to remember where these nasturtiums came from in the backyard. If they are grown from hybrid varieties, the seeds will not germinate.
When can you harvest nasturtium seeds?
As soon as the petals of the flower have fallen, they count 40-50 days and begin to collect the seed. The color of the grains will also tell you about the correctness of the selected period. It takes on a shade from greenish to brown – mature.
Features of collection and further use:
- If the weather forecasts promise frost, the plants are cut and hung, paper is spread under them so that the fallen seed does not have to be collected all over the floor.
- After drying for a month, it is placed in paper envelopes or cloth bags.
- The seed is planted either directly into the open ground on the sunny side of the flower bed, or into a plastic glass with the bottom sliding out or easily cut off. When planting in the soil, you will have to leave the container for a while – the plant is having a hard time transplanting.
Nasturtium is not only admired. It is useful for other purposes as well. They use everything except the root system.
Note to housewives: the plant is used as an additive to teas – it fights microbes, eliminates intestinal parasites, provides a daily dose of vitamin C, but lowers the main male hormone – testosterone.
The fruit of the flower is often used in the process of pickling vegetables, replacing expensive capers, and they are also used in salads. Piquancy, aroma, the right bitterness – why not an exquisite spice?
But even from the aesthetic point of view, nasturtium is an ideal flower. This unpretentious gift of nature will decorate even an inconspicuous flower bed. The main thing is to collect the seeds on time.