Seed Saving & Drying Gomphrena + You Can Eat It Too!

Hello everyone! We are back out on the front deck today and I am going to harvest gomphrena, definitely to dry, hopefully also to save some seeds. So let me show you which pot we are going to empty today. This pot here is what I'm going to pull. So there are three snow white gomphrena plants. They are in a 12 inch diameter planter and I think that was the perfect amount to get fullness that I wanted. Now when I harvest the plants to dry, typically I'm harvesting them at a different time than I would harvest if I wanted to get seeds from them. So most of these look in a perfect place to dry. So the heads of the flowers, they haven't elongated too much, they're still pretty compact. When you want to harvest the seeds, I'm trying to look, here's a better one here. You want to harvest the seeds, you kind of want to see something that looks like this, where it's browned a little bit on the plant and it has elongated more. So we'll see if I can find some seeds in there. But this plant is also just not looking great from the colder weather, so I'm ready to pull it. Plus it's not an irrigation, so that also makes me ready to get it out of the garden. I also feel less bad pulling plants when I know I'm going to use them inside. Now these I do need to empty out, but I don't feel like emptying them out right now because I still love how my flower cart looks. So we're gonna leave those until they look absolutely terrible. Now gumphrena can be messy, it's probably one of the messiest plants in the garden, and when I was making a mess over on the back deck, someone recommended using a tarp. Now I, this is not a tarp, I do have tarps, but this is a small potting mat that I've also used to paint on. So this I'm going to put down here, and then I'm trying to think if it's better to wheel the plant on there. I think that's probably going to be the best bet. All right, you know what, now I'm just going to pick it up and set it down. There is some of the thumbersia growing onto it, but not too bad. Now I'm just going to chop off the gumphrena stalks. I'm going to put them on the table for now, and then I will work on stripping the leaves and figuring out which ones I can dry and which ones I can potentially get some seeds off of. I don't need too many seeds, luckily, because I don't have a lot of space, so I would rather have more that I can dry than I can save for seeds. And I think I'm going to leave the root, oh, oh my gosh, I forgot I planted a strawberry plant in here. Uh, it still looks green, it didn't produce anything, so I'm gonna leave that in there because I can usually overwinter them and they'll come back. I was saying, you know, I am going to leave the root ball in here anyway to use as insulation for plants I'm overwintering out here, but now I have a strawberry plant in there. Not as much of a mess as I expected, honestly, so let's put this pot back up here and scoot you over there. I think what I'm going to do now is leave that down there, and when I dry them, I like to have as many just single stems as possible, so let's see how my plan works. That one is not worth saving, so I'm just going to chop that off and let that drop down there. This one is worth saving, so I'm going to remove all the leaves. You can leave the leaves on if you want, they don't look very pretty when they're dry. The flowers stay basically how they are here, maybe a slight difference in color, but not much, but the leaves just look like dead curled up leaves and they're much harder, in my opinion, to remove once they're already dried on the stem, so that's why I like to dry these now. We'll toss them on that chair. We'll keep working on this main stem. It should get pretty repetitive, so I'll probably speed up at some point. These, probably not going to be able to get seeds from, but I'll keep them just in case. Seed pie will be here. There are definitely some of these that I can harvest to dry, so just like that. This one is not a single stem because there are so many flowers coming off of it, but there's at least one main stem with four different flowers, so this is what I'm going to go through. So I'm just going to keep going through that process, putting my piles aside for either seed saving, drying, or going to go as garden waste, and it's going to be the same thing over and over again, so I'll probably speed through this and then I will show you what I do for drying and seed saving. And we're done with that portion. The largest bundle is the waste, so a lot of them were kind of in between where I don't think they were ready to harvest seeds, but they also weren't looking pretty anymore. I definitely did not stay on top of harvesting as regularly as I do, and then this is what I'm going to bring in. So I have two bundles there that I'm going to dry, and then those are the ones that I'm going to attempt to save some seeds. So let's go ahead and bring these inside. No, I did not do a costume change for the video. It is actually a new day because I ran out of time after harvesting all of the Gomphrena. I know that it looked like it was a few minutes, but it takes a while to cut all the stems and strip all the leaves. So what I'm going to do today is first I'm going to wrap up the two bundles that I have to dry. We'll get them onto the curtain rods, and then we will get into the seed saving. As I'm bundling these up, one thing about Gomphrena that you might not know is that it is actually edible. I have eaten it in the past. I've made tea with it as well. It doesn't really taste like much to me, like it's not something I would grow just to eat, but what I really like it for is to use as botanical sprinkles. So I mean, maybe not the snow white because it's not the most fun color, but if you're decorating cookies or a cake and you want a botanical theme, if you have a bunch of colorful Gomphrena bracts lying around, those are going to be really pretty as some sort of botanical sprinkle. Now again, they don't taste like much either way, so it really won't affect the flavor of whatever it is that you put them on, but it's a way to make them really pretty. In fact, do I still have a jar? I don't have my jar anymore. No, I must have used it all. Now there are a lot of other flowers you might be growing that you don't know are edible. I've gotten into the habit of just googling is XYZ plant edible. Zinnias are edible. I feel like they have slightly more of a flavor than Gomphrena, but still nothing that would make me want to eat it. I just learned that Dahlia tubers are edible and you can actually cook them very similarly to potatoes and I think these to be grown as a food crop, so that's very interesting. Hostas are grown as a food crop, so I would say based on whatever you're growing in your garden, just do a quick Google search on if it's edible and probably more flowers than you expect are. So I have my two bundles here. I'm going to put them to the side for now and then we'll see how many seeds we can get from the Gomphrena. This is the Gomphrena that I'm going to attempt to get seeds from. Honestly, I maybe should have left these on the plant a little bit longer because you want them to completely dry out on the plant. That way, the seeds are mature and I believe I read if you wait for them to completely dry, it's a 90% germination rate, but when I'm also harvesting to get things to dry, again, those usually happen at different times. Also, these are technically not petals. They are bracts, which are a little bit different. They're actually a modified leaf and inside of the bract is the true flower, which is the fuzzy part, so the bracts are there to protect the flowers. I also like to work on some sort of surface. Usually, I'll try to get either a white piece of paper or a white paper towel. Most of the time, it's easier for me to see the seeds, but since we're working with, well, I guess they're more brown now with the white petals. I think the seeds are also going to be pretty white as well, but this way, at least I'm keeping them contained. I think I see here already a few that have fallen off. Let's see how close we can get in here at this little Gomphrena bract. If I take off the bract, inside here, that is the Gomphrena seed, sort of. Actually, the fuzzy part, like I said, is a true flower, so the seed is technically inside of the fuzzy part. I have read both ways that you can either save them with the fuzzy part on them, which is easier, because then you can stop at this point, or you can take the seed out and the seed is very tiny. From what I was reading, it said that storage is better with it out of the fuzzy coating, but not everything I read said that, so whenever I am online and I read things that differ, I like to test it myself, so I think I'm going to test some in the fuzzy coating like this, and then some I am actually going to take the seeds out of them. So we'll get all the fuzzy coating ones off first, and then I will remove the seeds from some of them, and then we'll see if there's any difference in germination next year. So what I'm going to do now with the rest of these that the seeds just haven't magically fallen off of is just loosely run my fingers along the bracts here, and I was worried I didn't let some of them stay long enough, but I think I'm going to get a good amount, definitely more than I probably need, so I'm just going to keep working through all of these gomphrenas. Here's my pile of bracts, and I actually brought over, this is technically the lid of a bowl, because I want to put the seeds into that bowl. So my pile of bracts here, but not every bract is going to have a seed in it, so you want to kind of squeeze it to see if you can feel anything, or see the little brown spot that's inside of the fuzzy coating, but there's nothing in this bract, so I'm not going to be able to get a seed out of that one, but let's go ahead and find somewhere I see that spot. So this one, the bract's actually already coming apart, so it'll be pretty easy to take that seed out and add it to my bowl. Here's some more, where you can see the fuzzy part in there is already coming apart from the bract, so we'll get some more seeds. I wonder if you can hear my cat yelling, up here Penelope! Up here! All right, well I'm going to keep looking through this, probably give my cat some rubs, and then I will catch back up with you once I have the seeds that I want to save in this bowl. These are the seeds that I have harvested, this is going to be more than enough for me for sure, but now what I'm going to do is, at least a few of them, I want to get the seed out of the Now I will say, from my past experience, gomphrena seeds do take a little bit longer than the rest of my seeds to germinate, and they grow a little slower too, so I start these about eight weeks before our last frost date, but also soaking them for 24 hours before planting helps germination. Every time I've gotten gomphrena seeds, they are still in this coating, so I'm wondering if taking them out of the coating will help them germinate faster. So anyway, we will find that out next spring, but what I'm going to do, see how easy this is, is take out one like that, and then let's see if we can get to the seed inside of it. So there is the seed right there, which is super tiny. I might only do this with maybe four other seeds, because it really is easier to just keep them inside of the fluffy coating, but I still want to have a little bit of something to experiment with, and I'll put them all in the same envelope to store them, since they all are the same variety, and I'll be able to tell which ones are in the fuzzy coating and which ones aren't. So let me get the rest of them out that I want to get out. Those four little tiny specks are the gomphrena seeds removed from the casein, and honestly, that's enough. It's not really super easy to remove them, so most I'm going to save like this, and then we will plant these four as well. Now I need to get an envelope and label these so I don't forget. Here's my envelope, snow white gomphrena, and I think, although there are holes in this lid, I should be able to easily enough pour the seeds into that bag. Get the little fuzzy ones that are stuck, and then let's get these little tiny guys in here as well. Seal this up, and that's it. I have my snow white gomphrena seeds for next year. So that's going to be it for this video. I didn't save as many seeds in the prior years, just because it takes me so long to get through a seed packet, since I don't plant that many seeds, but also because I don't plant that many seeds, means I don't have to save that many seeds. So even if I just grab like four heads of the gomphrena and save the seeds from that, I should have plenty for what I need for next year. So I'm saving, let's see, I already saved celosia seeds, saving more of the gomphrena, saving, oh, I have the floret zinnia. There's one zinnia left in my garden, does have powdery mildew, but I'm letting the flowers dry on that so I can save the seeds, and I think those are the main things. I have some sunflower seeds. Yeah, I'm not sure what else I have. I think those are the main ones, but I still have so many seed packets left over from previous years, more seeds than I have space for, and yet somehow keep buying more seeds. So that's going to be it for this video. Let me know if you have any questions, and then come next March, because I will probably start these mid-March 2025, we'll see if there's any difference in the germination between the two different types of seeds. So thank you so much for watching. I will see you in the next one. Bye.