Do you love planting foxgloves in your flower garden every year? Learn how to collect foxglove seeds so you can plant more every year!
Foxgloves are a popular annual flower that can be found in home flower gardens and landscapes all summer long, and are common flowers to buy from local garden centers. They are perfect for filling a flower border around your home or to fill in the back of your flower garden. I love them because butterflies love them and are just beautiful in a mixed flower garden border.
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They help bring in beneficial insects and pollinators and are great for bringing more butterflies and hummingbirds to your yard.
Foxgloves come in all sorts of colors and varieties- from pastel to bright colors.
These beautiful flowers can get up to 3-4 feet tall- and look great in the back of your flower garden.
Though foxgloves are usually grown as biennial flower, they go to seed very readily. While you can allow the seeds to drop and see if new ones will sprout the following spring, you can also collect foxglove seeds to save and plant the following year.
Learning how to collect foxglove seeds will save you money- you’ll never have to buy flower seeds (or plants) again! And you’ll get to plant so many more in your flower garden.
How to Collect Foxglove Seeds for Later
Collecting and saving foxglove seeds is very easy and in just a couple of minutes you can have tons of seeds. Which will turn in to tons of flowers you can plant next year for free!
Here’s how to do it:
With many of the flowers I grow, such as echinacea, cosmos, and zinnias, I pick the blossoms as they grow or deadhead them after the blooms have faded. I don’t always do this with foxglove s, but if you do, when you are ready to collect seeds you will need to leave the flowers alone and allow them to die back and allow the seed head to form.
The foxglove seed pods will form where the flower blossom was after the blossom has dropped.
After a few weeks you will see the seed pod swelling where the blossom used to be.
It’s not ready yet though!
This is the green seed pod. It is still immature and the seeds are still green inside.
You want to wait until the foxglove seed pod is completely brown and dry before collecting foxglove seeds.
It will look like this when the foxglove seeds are ready to be collected:
As you can see the pods are brown and dry and beginning to crack open.
You can even see some of the seeds inside the pod.
When the seeds are fully mature the pod will crack easily and allow the seeds to spill out.
You can collect seed heads by snipping them off the plant with scissors or simply pulling them off the plant with your fingers. You can also burst the pod directly into your hand or container.
Pull all of the seeds out and place them in a container.
Before storing it’s very important that the seeds are completely dry.
If you aren’t certain the seeds are 100% dry you can keep them in an open container or lay them on a tray covered with paper towels for a few days to allow them to dry before storing them.
How to Store Saved Foxglove Seeds
Make sure the foxglove seeds are completely dry before storing, otherwise you might end up with mold in your jar which can ruin your entire seed collection!
It’s best to keep your dried foxglove seeds in an airtight container with an airtight lid. This prevents the seeds from collecting moisture from the air around them.
Mason jars are perfect for storing seeds!
Another option is to seal the dry seeds in a plastic Ziploc bag or a sealed envelope.
No matter which container you choose, be sure to label your container with the name of the seed and the year collected.
Seeds are best stored at a temperature of 35-40 degrees, so storing them in the refrigerator or freezer can work well to keep them dry and mold free, thus expanding their shelf life. You can also just store them wherever you store the rest of your garden seed collection!
If you don’t want to collect them, you can always leave the seeds on your foxgloves and see if they will self-seed the following spring. Or harvest them and immediately sprinkle the seeds around your garden area where you want them to grow next year. I usually do a little bit of both!
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please edit and mention foxgloves are toxic. gloves should be worn. kept away from adults children and pets