Saving Cosmos Seeds

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Last spring I grew a bundle of new flowers and vegetables. 🌸 Apricotta Cosmos was a surprise favourite. Today I'll show you why & how to save the seeds from this dainty delight - even in the middle of winter. That's right. It's not too late to save seed.

Apricotta cosmos flower arrangement with Alpen Cherub dahlia.

I'm a pretty good vegetable gardener. Saving seeds is not one of the things I'm pretty good at. I forget, I put it off, I can't be bothered, I'm too busy.

Seed saving time overlaps with omgi'msosickofthis time.

However - that changed last fall with the Apricotta Cosmos. I needed no persuading, motivation or medication to save the seeds. I couldn't wait to do it. Because look at them.

There are quite a few cosmos varieties that are available, one of my favourites being cupcake blush which you can see in my English cottage garden in 2022.

But even though I really did love cupcake blush - I didn't save any seeds from it. The MOST I was willing to do with this flower was to wish it good luck on reseeding itself for the next year.

Even with its hit or miss colouring, Apricotta Cosmos compelled me to save its seed. This is what I mean by hit or miss colouring. The below photograph shows how it doesn't always produce apricot coloured flowers.

This bloom is heavy on the rose colouring, but as the bloom ages, the colour will soften.

Table of Contents

How Flowers Varieties are Created

Growing a flower that is identical to its mother plant takes years. You grow the plant, save the seeds from the most perfect blooms with the characteristics you want, and continue doing this for years.

Save the seed, plant it, save the seed plant it ... this is the process of stabilizing.

That's the short version of of how varieties are created. If you want to be very strict about it, once a flower blooms on a plant and you realize it isn't producing the colour, shape or size you want, you should pull the entire plant out.

Getting rid of it entirely helps prevent cross pollination with the other plants that ARE growing out the way that you want.

I didn't pull any plants last year, but I did make sure to save seeds from the blooms that were a good representation of the apricot coloured variety, not the bright pink or rose blooms.

Last weekend I grabbed the small mason jar filled with dried cosmos flower heads from the fall and separated the seeds.

Each Cosmos bloom might have 1 or 5 or 30 seeds inside. Cosmos seeds are very easy to identify once you know what you're looking for.

Cosmos seeds are hard and look very much like caraway seed.

Method

Because seed saving time corresponds with clean up the garden, stack the firewood, preserve the harvest time, I save entire flower heads in jars, until I feel like I have time in the new year to separate the seeds.

It doesn't take long to save the seeds, but I enjoy doing it much more after having a couple of months off from the season.

Pick flower heads that are dry or nearly dry. If you're going to sort the seed later, leave the flowers out on the counter until they are completely dry before storing them in a glass jar.

Apricotta cosmos dried seed head, petals removed.

On seed saving day pull any dried petals off the bloom.

Then gently rub and crush the flower in the palm of your hand. Blow gently on the pile to help reveal the hard, dark seeds.

This particular bloom contained 3 seeds.

Cosmos seeds harvested from 5 flowers on marble table. — Seeds on the left, leftover flower guts on the right.

Store your seeds in a paper seed envelope or jar.

This is the amount of seeds I got from 5 dried blooms.

Here's the Exciting Part

A little deflated by my small seed harvest, I decided to head to my garden yesterday to see if I could someone scrounge more cosmos flower heads.

As long as the flowers are still there, there is a chance you can still save seeds.

So finish reading this post, and then if there are any seeds you wish you'd saved but didn't, RUN outside to save them.

Winter Harvested Seed

Dried Cosmos plant with viable seed heads in the winter garden.

There were still a couple of stragglers in the garden which I was excited to see.

I found 5 cosmos flower heads at the garden. Some were on the ground and some were still on the plant, blowing in the winter wind. Of the 5 flower heads, 3 had seeds. I got a total of 25 more seeds.

Which will hopefully produce many more of these.

Next fall I'll repeat this whole process.

Planting Seeds

Cosmos readily self seed, and can easily be directly seeded in soil outside in the late spring, but starting them indoors and planting them out once it's warmer gives you better control. That's what I'll be doing. Seed starting instructions can be found here if you'd like to get going right now.

If you already have some experience and know how to start seeds I do have some information for you as well with a few seed starting tips for intermediate gardeners.