How To Collect Black Eyed Susan Seeds

black eyed susan

(Image credit: Nadezhda_Nesterova)

last updated 1 August 2023

Collecting seeds is an easy way to expand your garden. Best of all, it's free! To collect black-eyed Susan seeds, wait for a dry fall day and clip the seed heads off your plants. If they're still green, lay them out to dry on a newspaper for a couple weeks. Once the seed heads are good and dry, pop them off the stems and place them in a glass jar. Then close the lid and shake shake shake!

Hold a sieve over a sheet of paper and dump the contents of the jar into it. The tiny black-eyed Susan seeds should fall through onto the paper. You'll get a little bit of chaff as well, but that's okay. When you plant your seeds, the extra bits will just go back into the ground. Once you've separated your seeds, put them in a paper envelope and store them in a cool dry place, then plant them in the spring.

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Laura Walters is a Content Editor who joined Gardening Know How in 2021. With a BFA in Electronic Media from the University of Cincinnati, a certificate in Writing for Television from UCLA, and a background in documentary filmmaking and local news, Laura loves providing gardeners with all the know how they need to succeed, in an easy and entertaining format. Laura lives in Southwest Ohio, where she's been gardening for ten years, and she spends her summers on a lake in Northern Michigan. It’s hard to leave her perennial garden at home, but she has a rustic (aka overcrowded) vegetable patch on a piece of land up north. She never thought when she was growing vegetables in her college dorm room, that one day she would get paid to read and write about her favorite hobby.