How to Save Your Own Cilantro Seeds from the Garden

I'm going to show you how to save a lifetime supply of cilantro seed, also known as coriander, simply by growing one or two or three cilantro plants, letting them go to flower and then saving the seed. So I've had cilantro growing in my kitchen garden for months now. Cilantro is a cool season plant. That means it likes it when the temperatures are below 75 degrees Fahrenheit. When the temperatures start to get hotter, cilantro does this thing called bolting, which simply means it flowers and produces seed. A lot of gardeners pull those plants out of the garden when they start to flower. But when you do that, you miss the opportunity, one, to take care of bees and butterflies and ladybugs. There are so many beneficial insects that love cilantro flowers. And cilantro flowers generally happen right around the time your tomatoes flower. So it's a wonderful time for those pollinators to also bump over to your tomatoes. So you want to keep your cilantro in the garden when it flowers for that reason, but you also want to keep it because you're going to get loads of cilantro seed, also known as coriander. You can use coriander in the kitchen for spice and cooking. You can use it for pickling, for putting into all kinds of garden-to-table recipes. Plus, you can save the seed to plant it again this time next year. Well, not this time, but six months before this time next year. So to do the seed saving is very simple. It's not complicated at all. The first thing you're going to do is simply let the plant go all the way from flower to seed in the garden. So you can see how tall the cilantro plants get. Like I said, this was planted in the garden probably around February. It is now June, so it's had February to March, April, May. It's had four months in the garden. The bolting process started about a month, a month and a half ago. So they flowered first, and then you get the formation of all these little seeds. So each of the flower, the little tiny florets, creates this little seed bundle, and when it turns dark brown, that's when it is time to harvest it. So you'll know because it's going to be really nice and dry and brown. The cilantro seed before that stage is green, and it doesn't have the ridges on it. You can tell it's still got moisture inside that seed head. That part is too early to harvest as a seed. So we're looking for the brown, and if you're ready at this stage, for me, I know I'm ready to take these out of my garden. So you can kind of speed up the drying process simply by taking them from the garden and hanging them upside down. I'll show you how to do that. So I'm just going to take some scissors. You probably want to have some prune or something a little bit tougher, and we'll see if this works. I'm just going to cut the stem right at the base of the garden. This doesn't disrupt anything that's growing near it. Got a little weed there, and then I'm just going to slowly pull these out, trying not to drop any of the seeds in the garden. Otherwise, you will have a ton of cilantro in your garden next year that you didn't necessarily want. So then, you really don't need these stems, so I'm just going to cut these down to about right here, and then all you got to do is, to finish up this process, is you just tie these up with twine. So I'll just take a little bit of twine and tie this bundle up. Once this is tied up, I'm just going to hang it upside down inside in a cool dark place. So this just ensures that the plant doesn't get sunlight on it, the temperatures don't change, and in just a matter of days, these green seed heads are going to dry out to form the true seeds. So just like this, I know it looks a little bit wild. You can cut more on it, but you really don't have to, and then in a few weeks, you're going to come back, and if you see the seeds looking like this, where they're all brown, they're all dried out, these are ready now to be stored. So to take them off the plant, you can like, you know, if you have tons of these, you can put them onto like a little canvas and just shake the plant. Most of them are just going to fall out. If you have less, like this, you're just doing like one from one little plant. I just simply take my hand like this, pull them off of the stem, and then you want to have a storage container that you can seal completely and store easily. So you can do even just like a little paper seed packet that closes up. You can even just do an envelope, like a business envelope. I am just using these little glass jars, and I'm just going to stick them right in there like that, and you can see it's going to a lot of seeds to fill this jar up, but soon, probably from just this one plant, I'm going to have several jars of these. So you can see in here, there's probably hundreds of cilantro seed ready to be planted next season or to use in the kitchen all year long. So I love using these for pickles, even sprinkling them on top of a garden fresh salad. They add so much flavor and give you that cilantro taste, even when you don't have fresh cilantro in the garden. So this is all you got to do to grow and keep enough cilantro seed to provide you cilantro for the rest of your life. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, and let me know if you're going to try it.