The cilantro has completely dried up. A closer look reveals these little balls on top of the stems. These are the seeds. You can cook with them when the recipe calls for coriander, or save them to plant next year. Cilantro will reseed itself and a fall crop will come up in most areas. I'm hoping that will happen here. I harvested some of the seeds and sprinkled some of them back into the pot.
Don't worry about the little bits of stems that come off with them. It won't matter if you are replanting them, but if I were cooking with them, I'd take out the stems.
The basil still has green leaves on the plant, but these little brown tops contain seeds. I pulled off the brown dried portions for planting next year. Each little brown pocket contains one tiny black seed.
There is a lot more dried leafy matter than seeds, but it's all organic, so it won't matter when you plant them.
As you can see, my garden is mostly herbs. We planned to move and I just planted things in flower pots.
These gorgeous peppers came from dried seeds that my mother sent me from her garden last year. Just before frost I'll pick some of the dried pods and save them for next year. These aren't hot and have about as much flavor as a bell pepper. They add color to salads, stir fries, and black bean dip. They also look beautiful and the colors make me smile.
This spring I planted Rosemary in a pot. Soon, something sprouted all around the Rosemary. I decided to watch it and see what it was. The plant grew to cover the Rosemary and bloomed. Before long, tiny bell peppers grew. I haven't had bell peppers in years and don't know where they came from, but I'll save some seeds.
They may have come from when I tried to grow peppers from a yellow bell pepper I bought at the grocery store. Nothing ever came up when I planted the seeds and I assumed it was a hybrid pepper. What a nice surprise to have free vegetables.
When I was a child, my mother and grandmothers and their friends would give each other clippings of flowers and other plants. It was a way of sharing and always reminded them of the person who gave them the cuttings. These days, I hardly ever hear of someone sharing plants like that.
When my grandfather died in the 1970's, someone sent a big Boston fern to the funeral home. My mother took the plant home with her. She still has some of that fern and has given countless numbers of them away. She used to have huge ferns on the front porch flanking the doorway. In the fall, she would bring them in, or when they got too big to handle, would split them up and give smaller ferns away. Those ferns have been borrowed to use at weddings and shared all around town.
This spring I bought several seed packets. Some of them only had five or six seeds in them. Some didn't sprout and one packet didn't have a single seed inside. It finally occurred to me that I could be saving seeds and money at the same time. It takes little time and the only equipment needed are some envelopes to put the seeds into for storage until spring.
If you are saving seeds from a vegetable or fruit, lay the seeds out on a paper plate or towel and let them dry thoroughly before placing them into envelopes.
About six weeks before the last frost, plant your seeds inside and watch them sprout. Be sure to label them so you can plant like plants together. It's a fun thing to do with kids and teaches them about gardening as well.
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