Rudbeckia seed
20 August 2025 10:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeThe first of my rudbeckia flowers has finally died and gone to seed, and I managed to extract a decent handful of good seeds from it based on this half-remembered method: https://growitbuildit.com/harvest-rudbeckia-seeds-black-eyed-susans/
I didn't follow any of their instructions, but I started off by simply brushing off all the stiff black bits sticking out of the central seed cone (the vast majority of which is not seed at all but dead petals). After that I put the seed-head in a jar and started flipping the spines of the cone between my fingers, which produced more black bits in the bottom of the jar, but -- as promised -- with a much higher percentage of actual seed, since most of what little still remained in the seed head at this point in the process *was* tightly-wedged seed and not other dead bits. I hadn't even known what I was looking for beforehand, but it was now possible to detect little greyish-black square-ended wedges in amongst the slim black pointy-ended petal bits, and deduce that these were the seeds.
Commercial seed:
So I now have a brown paper bag of bits which, as before, contains *some* rudbeckia seed, but also a little paper packet which contains largely rudbeckia seed only :-)
I didn't follow any of their instructions, but I started off by simply brushing off all the stiff black bits sticking out of the central seed cone (the vast majority of which is not seed at all but dead petals). After that I put the seed-head in a jar and started flipping the spines of the cone between my fingers, which produced more black bits in the bottom of the jar, but -- as promised -- with a much higher percentage of actual seed, since most of what little still remained in the seed head at this point in the process *was* tightly-wedged seed and not other dead bits. I hadn't even known what I was looking for beforehand, but it was now possible to detect little greyish-black square-ended wedges in amongst the slim black pointy-ended petal bits, and deduce that these were the seeds.
Commercial seed:
So I now have a brown paper bag of bits which, as before, contains *some* rudbeckia seed, but also a little paper packet which contains largely rudbeckia seed only :-)