One year's seeding makes for 7 year's weeding

Saving seeds (for all of the various reasons)

One term that puzzled me when I first started gardening was ‘go to seed.’ Some things you didn’t want to ‘go to seed,’ like coriander and brassicas. Some things you desperately wanted to ‘go to seed,’ like sunflowers.

I am now very careful with what I let go to seed, and I thought I would help you with some mindfulness in this regard!

Firstly, collecting seed is quite a fun thing to do- not least when you forget about how big something has gotten (like beans- when they get too big they aren’t nice to eat), but also when you spend over $50 on seeds one year, and most are annuals, and all of them are starting to die off. It’s also really nice to give your friend a handful of seed heads- more recently, I swapped some purple poppy seed heads for some red poppies. It’s such an easy thing to do, if you are careful!

When to deadhead

If you cut the dying flowers off of a plant, you are deadheading the plant. This encourages more flowers to grow, as the plant stops putting energy into the dying ones. It also stops the plant from creating viable seeds which will grow new plants.