Collecting Coleus Seeds

I love collecting the seeds from my plants.  First and foremost, it saves me money so I am not having to buy those seeds the next year.  Second, I love experimenting!  If the plant is not an heirloom, chances are, the plant the seeds produce might be slightly different from the plant you collected the seeds from.  This can be a negative sometimes, but I don’t mind experimenting with free seeds.

I have included a YouTube video at the bottom of this post that walks you through the seed-collecting process I do if you’d like to see it in action.  To collect coleus seeds, you need to make sure the plant has flowered and most of the flowers have dried like the picture below.

Notice there is a lot of brown on the stem.  I put a Ziploc bag over the stem and snip it off so I can get the seeds inside where it’s a lot cooler.

I run my hand up and down the stem so the dried flowers fall off, and then I go through and separate the seeds from the dried flowers.  It can be a tedious process, and I’m sure there’s an easier way to do it.  However, I don’t need to collect a lot, so this method works for me.

Coleus seeds are TINY!

In the video below, I walk you through the process of collecting coleus seeds and how to store them until next year.  I have 2 more varieties of coleus I’ve grown this summer, and I am waiting patiently for them to flower and dry out so I can collect seeds from those plants.