Seed gathering now

7:00am Saturday 18th October 2008

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BEFORE you ditch those tired summer container plants, cut down your perennials or dig up the bolted veg from your allotment, spend a little time gathering seeds to give you an abundance of flowers and fruits next year.

Self-seeders include annual poppies, foxgloves, lady’s mantle, aquilega and love-in-a-mist, which will pop up all over the place in future years.

If you want a more organised display, collect the seeds before they self-sow, so you can control where they appear in the garden.

Saving seed is an economical way to build up numbers of species to create drifts, but remember that seed from highly bred plants won't come true and should be viewed as experimental only.

Seeds from many plants, including nasturtium and nigella, should be stored in paper envelopes in a cool, dry place until you are ready to sow them under cover in early spring.

Choose a still, sunny day to gather seeds, looking for seed-heads that have turned brown and seem on the verge of splitting.

Collect semi-ripe seedheads of rock plants and perennials in paper bags, hanging them in a dark, well-ventilated place. Seedheads from some species will open, releasing the seed into the bottom of the bag, making it easy to collect. Others need to be prised open to extract the seed.

If you have a lot of early-flowering plants in your garden, they may have already self-seeded. Look around and you may be able to save some of them, increasing your stock without having to sow seed. You can dig up the seedlings, pot them up and label the pots. They should be treated gently, like unrooted cuttings, until they become more established. Place the pots in a cold frame or in a shady part of the greenhouse. Alternatively let them grow on a shady windowsill indoors.

Newcomers to saving seeds may be worried about how to handle them. Some gardeners have a variety of sieves with different sized holes to filter the dust and other debris from the seeds.

The most important thing about saving seeds is to keep them dry.

Ideally, store them in small paper envelopes in airtight jars in a dark, cool room. To keep moisture at bay, pop a sachet of silica gel crystals into the jar.

Gardeners who have an abundance of particular types of seeds may find a number of seed-swap forums and websites such as Seedy People (www.seedypeople.co.uk) and Over The Garden Gate (www.overthegar dengate.net) useful to put them in touch with other seed-swappers.

The Tree Council is also encouraging gardeners to gather up tree seeds.

This is the best time in the year to gather seeds from many of our more common trees.

Conkers, acorns, birch cones, beechnuts, ash helicopters, rowan berries and apples are just some of the fruits and nuts ripe for gathering in the autumn and nurturing to grow into trees.