How many seeds from 1 marigold flower?

miagardener · Sun Apr 17, 2011 5:20 pm

Approximately how many seeds do you think one marigold flower produces?

rainbowgardener · Sun Apr 17, 2011 7:06 pm

I never counted, but about 15 to 20 seeds per flower, I think.

miagardener · Tue Apr 19, 2011 12:34 pm

I was thinking more 75-125. I've counted at least 50 from one head but never a full flower head before.

bullthistle · Tue Apr 19, 2011 6:27 pm

Depending on the marigold since I collected the seed heads from the dwarfs yes a 100 seeds would be on target.

miagardener · Thu Apr 21, 2011 8:55 pm

Well I did count at least 135 seeds from one marigold head so I guess the answer is 100 - 150 seeds per head.

applestar · Thu Apr 21, 2011 9:57 pm

Are they all viable? How do you tell?

rainbowgardener · Fri Apr 22, 2011 6:42 am

I don't know how you tell, but I have had very low germination rates, planting my home collected marigold seeds....

And I haven't counted, but I'm sure my marigold seed heads don't have 100 seeds in them. Maybe different varieties are different?

thanrose · Fri Apr 22, 2011 9:37 am

Absolutely different varieties will have different seed counts.

My experience is that the darker the seed portion, the better. If you have a matured flower head that has gone brown and dry, and you pull out the seeds from the sepal cup, any that are beige instead of black will not sprout. I have seen them where they are all black but I don't know that darkness equals viability, just that paleness equals immaturity.

And like rainbowgardener's experience, the viability from collected seed like that is not really high. I'll scatter these collected seeds more thickly, instead of 2-3 to a yogurt cup sort of thing.

If you dead head your marigolds faithfully, you will get a higher proportion of immature seeds. But if you leave the flower to dry up on the plant, you discourage more blooms. I dead head, but leave a few here and there to collect a few days later.