Collecting Basil Seeds

For the past year, I grew my basil in a pot so that when winter came, I could bring it indoors. My pot of basil did thrive all year long. With the early arrival of spring, I thought I would take the basil outside to repot it into a bigger pot. I started breaking off some of the long stems with flowers and noticed little black seeds inside of each flower. I was very excited at this discovery and immediately grabbed a little container to collect some seeds.

Each tiny flower contains 3-4 seeds. Now it became obvious to me that basil is a self-pollinator since this pot of basil has been inside of the green house most of the time. No bees have come in contact with the flowers.

Harvesting Green Onion Seeds

Most of green onions on the farm were grown from store bought onions. Green onions (a.k.a. scallions) you get from grocery stores come with roots. If you save about 2-3 inches from above the roots and stick them in the soil, they will start to grow. You will then have endless supply of green onions.

They will flower and each pompom looking flower is actually a cluster of small flowers. Bees love onion flowers. I often wonder what onion blossom honey tastes like. After the flowers dry up, you will see little black specks of seeds in each tiny flower. Each cluster of flowers probably produces nearly 100 seeds depending on the size.


I have grown some green onions from seeds. They grew very slowly in compare to just planting the roots from store bought onions. However, you do get more tender green onions if you grow them from seeds. I am collecting various seeds for the next seed exchange gathering in the fall.

Harvesting Seeds

It rained again two nights ago. Rain in June!??? I don't remember last time it rained in June around here. We grow drought tolerant plants around here because it hardly ever rained. I have been waiting for the last snow peas to dry out so I can harvest them as seeds for next year. The pea pods are now covered in mold. They look nasty. I decided to cut off some pea pods tonight just to see how they look inside.


Most of them look okay once out of the pods. Some of them have completely dried, while the big green ones need to dry out a lot more. I will leave them in the sun room for a few days. As long as we get some sun, they should dry up nicely. Last year I only harvested a few snow pea seeds, and I don't remember if they grew earlier this year. I used some older seeds that I purchased a couple years ago, the few I harvested, and a couple 6-pack seedlings from some nursery. I had snow peas every day for the last 3 months until I didn't want to eat them anymore.