How To Grow Sweet Williams From Seed | Winter Sowing Guide | Perennial Garden

My dream garden
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Oct 25, 2026
In this video, we’ll guide you through the process of growing Sweet Williams (Dianthus barbatus) from seed, including collecti …
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So my sweet Williams are finished flowering and they have set
a lot of seeds. So I'm going to show you how I collect them.
And what I look for is that they're all brown
on the top here. I'll come a little
bit closer. So the top here it's all brown and the
top actually started just to open up. That means it's
they're all ripe. And notice I collect them in very dry weather
because I don't want these seeds to start to rot or anything.
So what I do now, I just tip them over
and a bunch of new Sweet Williams here, really black ones, very
easy to recognize here.
So you will have a bunch of like hundreds, maybe 500 of this area here.
So there's actually two ways you could sow them.
One, you can winter sow them, which I'll show you
in a minute. And the other way is you can actually
also sow them here now in end summer, as soon as
you collected the seeds, you can start to sow them.
Because they are biennials,
so that means they will create,
like grow the green foliage the first year, and then already
by next year, you'll have really beautiful flowers.
So I'll add a few more. I will actually
keep them in this coffee filter,
the ones I'll keep for my winter sowing, always with the name
on because in that way they get a lot of air
and make sure they don't rot and
then I'll go and show you in the greenhouse. So I've gone in the
greenhouse just to show you how quickly
these sweet Williams they have sprouted.
This is a week ago and look at them just come up
from the from the soil here they
are done really well.
So if you want to see a video about how we did these ones
you can click here but if you
also want to see a whole process on how we winter
sow them another method then see here.
For this we're using regular potting
soil because it's the cheapest.
We did add water beforehand that'll help our
seeds not get lost and tossed around in the tray.
Oh and if you want to see a
great video on how to winter sow click the link here.
Good job Lars. So here
have my seeds of my Sweet Williams,
Studendernelige and I'll sow them with
everything dried flower bits here
doesn't matter they will still germinate
really nicely I'm just gonna they have
really black ones here here's the main
seed so I'm just gonna sprinkle it over here go
and then I'm gonna add it just a
handful of of soil on top this there we go
and not to forget a name tag so
remember what variety it
is and then I'm gonna pop it right out in the our
greenhouse and I'll keep the the surface here
not dried out like moist with my
spray over in the until spring is coming
and then it will when it gets warmer it
will start to germinate
and once they're bigger the smaller plants we can plant
them out in the garden now it's time
to place these in the glass house they're
going to need sunlight
and they're going to need to be watered once every two
weeks with a little sprayer.
Just keep an eye on them. Once these seedlings start
to sprout they'll be ready to plant out directly
in the garden come springtime.
So it has been three months
and these sweet Williams have sprouted in the tray
and as you can see they have really grown
and have the second set of leaves.
So I will take a group of this and repot in a bigger pot
and then out in the
garden. If you don't have the time
or the space to repot you could also take them
right from this tray out in the garden.
