Gathering Butterfly Weed Seeds

Here in my gardens in Western Kentucky, it's time to harvest seeds from my Butterfly Weed. The pods have opened and I want to have seeds to plant next spring. Follow along and I'll show you how to gather them.



You may remember my Butterfly Weed in June when it was in full bloom with its beautiful orange blooms.







Being true to its name, the butterflies do love the weed.



In July, the weed was still going strong and the butterflies kept coming.




Now it's mid September and the weed has stopped blooming.  A few weeks ago, I started seeing the pods form on the weed. I forgot to take a pic of the pods at this stage but  here is one from the internet.




The pods start drying out and turn a light brown. You can gather the pods, bring them in and cut them open to see the seeds. 




I didn't  get the pods removed before they opened. You can see there is some fine fluffy white stuff in the pods so it is a little tedious to separate the seeds. 






The seeds will blow around your yard if the winds gets them before you do.


I removed the open pods and put them in a plastic bowl to bring inside.


The seeds can then be removed from the fluffy stuff and put on a napkin.




An envelop can work to store the seeds. Since I try to gather other seeds from my garden, I always label the envelopes with the name of the plant and the date. The seeds will be ready to plant in the spring. 

I'm thankful that I was able to gather seeds for spring planting. Thanks for stopping by - Judy.

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10 comments:

  1. Your butterfly photos are gorgeous! Great info!

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  2. Thank you for the instructions with pictures. I am going to try this right now!

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  3. So cool. Pick the right plants and get the visitors you want!

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  4. ...I love butterflies and milkweed. What lovely images.

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  5. I need to get some Butterfly weed, it's beautiful. Thanks for showing how to harvest the seeds.

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  6. I love these plants Judy, They add so much color to the garden not to mentioned the butterflies. Thanks for the tutorial, I really should do this. Smart girl..........

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  7. I love my butterfly bush. I hadn’t considered saving the seeds before. Good tutorial about how to do it!

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  8. Our daughter saves seeds like that and I think it is so neat. I never thought of doing that back when we gardened. Beautiful pictures of the butterflies on that plant (really it's awfully pretty to be called a weed).

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  9. I am always experimenting with collecting 'wild' seeds and planting them in my garden. Now that we have the first autumn at our new house, I am trying some new things - hoping they will turn out! So glad to see I am not alone in this propagation effort!

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  10. Mine aren't quite ready to open yet, I check them every day! I love your close-up photos.
    Don't forget to chill them before planting them. I didn't know that last year when I was given some milkweed fluffs, so they didn't grow.

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