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Seed saving starts with a decision made in late summer: stop deadheading two or three of your best plants and let their flowers go over. Everything after that is patience. The petals brown and shrivel, the base of the head swells and hardens, and after three or four weeks the whole thing is straw colored, dry and papery, and it detaches with a gentle tug.
Do not pick early. A head taken while the base is still green holds immature seed that looks convincing but will not germinate, and it goes moldy in the envelope. The base of the head must be brown and completely dry to the touch, not just the petals.
Pick on a dry afternoon after two or three rainless days. If a wet spell arrives when the heads are nearly ready, cut the whole stems and hang them upside down somewhere airy and under cover to finish, which works almost as well.
- Choose the plants, not the flowers Mark whole plants that were healthy, well shaped and free flowering, and take seed from those. A single good flower on a poor plant tells you little.
- Stop deadheading them from late summer Tie a loop of string round the marked plants so nobody, including you, tidies them up out of habit.
- Pick when the base is brown and dry Squeeze the swollen base of the head. It should feel like paper, not springy. Green at the base means it needs another week.
- Dry them indoors for another week Spread the picked heads on a tray in a dry airy room out of sun for a week before cleaning. Seed packed away with any residual moisture goes moldy.
Cleaning the seed takes two minutes a head
Hold the dry head over a bowl and pull the papery base apart with your fingers. The seeds come away as a bundle of thin black slivers, each with a pale tuft at one end, all packed together like a tiny broom. One large African head can hold well over a hundred seeds and a French head thirty to fifty.
Rub the bundle gently between your palms to separate the seeds from the dried petal bases, then tip everything onto a plate and blow across it very lightly. The papery chaff moves and the seed stays. You do not need it surgically clean, but any soft green fragments left in the packet will hold moisture, so pick those out.
Sort by eye as you go. Plump seeds with a firm dark shaft are good. Flat, pale, twisted or very short ones are empty and will not germinate, so discard them rather than diluting the packet.
| Seed appearance | What it means | Keep or discard |
|---|---|---|
| Long, firm, dark shaft with a pale tuft | Fully filled and ripe | Keep |
| Flat, pale, papery along its whole length | Never filled | Discard |
| Short and twisted | Aborted early | Discard |
| Dark with gray furring | Picked damp and gone moldy | Discard the whole head's worth |
Saved seed will not come true
Marigolds cross freely with the help of bees, and most garden plants are hybrids to begin with. Seed saved from a garden plant gives a mixed batch: some will look like the parent, many will be taller, shorter, paler or single where the parent was double. This is worth knowing before you plan a bed around the results.
That variation is not a problem for most gardeners, because a drift of mixed marigolds looks perfectly good and costs nothing. If you need consistency for a formal planting, buy fresh seed for that and save your own for the informal areas. If you want an exact copy of a particular plant, the only way is a cutting.
Store cleaned seed in a paper envelope, not plastic, somewhere cool and dry, and write the year and the parent plant's height and color on the front. It stays viable for two to three years, with germination dropping gradually rather than suddenly.
Record the height, flower size and habit of each parent plant alongside the year on the envelope. When you sow it two seasons later you will have forgotten, and that note is what makes a home saved packet usable rather than a lucky dip.
Cuttings root in about two weeks
Marigold cuttings are unusually easy and are the answer when you want a true copy of a plant, or when you want to carry a plant through winter indoors in a frost free spot. They root fastest in warm weather, so take them from midsummer to late summer while growth is still soft.
Take a shoot three to four inches (8 to 10 cm) long from a non flowering side branch, cut just below a leaf joint. Strip the lower leaves so the bottom two inches are bare stem, and pinch out any bud at the tip so the cutting puts its energy into roots. Push it into damp gritty potting mix, keep it out of direct sun and lightly humid, and expect roots in ten to fourteen days.
You will know it has rooted when a gentle tug meets resistance and the tip starts growing again. Pot it up then into a three inch (7.5 cm) pot and grow it on in full light.
- Take material from a non flowering shoot A shoot with a bud on it will try to flower instead of rooting. Look for soft green side growth low on the plant.
- Cut just below a leaf joint Roots form most readily at the joint. A cutting severed halfway between joints roots slowly and rots more often.
- Strip the lower leaves Any leaf below the compost surface rots and takes the stem with it. Leave two or three leaves at the top only.
- Keep humid but not wet A clear bag over the pot held off the leaves with a stick is enough. Standing water in the tray is what kills marigold cuttings.
Marigolds also self sow readily where the ground is left undisturbed, and volunteer seedlings appear the following spring once the soil warms. They are easy to recognize by the divided leaves and the strong smell when crushed, so leave a few and thin the rest.