📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Saving Marigold & Calendula Seeds
- 🌼 Direct Sowing vs. Indoors: While many gardeners start marigold (Tagetes) seeds indoors using the paper towel method, others successfully broadcast dry flower heads directly onto the soil in spring and let the rain do the work. Marigold seeds can remain viable for many years (up to 8-9 years in some cases).
- 🧬 The Genetics Problem: If you save seeds from store-bought, compact, double-bloom marigolds or calendulas, the next generation will likely look completely different.
- 📉 Losing Traits: Instead of uniform, dwarf plants, saved seeds often produce tall, spindly plants with single (non-double) blooms. This happens because most commercial bedding flowers are F1 hybrids that revert to their wild/parent traits in the F2 generation.
Aleksan9ra (Ludmila) wrote:
Elena, I did the paper towel germination method without soil and I really liked it. They sprouted fast and uniformly. My marigold seeds are store-bought, and there are only a few seeds in each packet, so I want to make sure they all germinate. I’ll just wrap them in a damp paper towel…
I haven’t bought marigold (Tagetes) seeds in years. I just clip the flowers when they fade and dry them. They grow perfectly. When I get to the dacha, I literally just toss them on the ground and they do the rest themselves. Naturally, I toss the seeds into the same flower beds where they grow every year. Since they are my own saved seeds, I have a ton of them to broadcast.
Here is a photo!
Galya, they are very beautiful! I usually have a lot of my own saved seeds too. I generally collect seeds everywhere I can in the fall. But last year I sowed them three different times, at different times, from different sources, and not a single one germinated. I threw out all the packets with my old seeds and decided to start fresh from scratch. I’m just doing an early trial sowing right now; I’ll sow a much bigger batch in April.
I’ve noticed that you get completely different plants from saved seeds. The ones from store-bought packets all grow uniform and nice and short, exactly as advertised on the packaging. But from saved seeds, it’s a total free-for-all. Some stay neat and compact, while others shoot up tall as a beanpole. It’s just like growing out F2 tomatoes—you get what you get!)) That’s why I save some of my own, but still buy fresh packets too.
Uralochka66 (Tatiana) wrote:
But from saved seeds, it’s a total free-for-all… It’s just like growing out F2 tomatoes
Tanya, that’s exactly how it is. Two years ago I bought a fully double-bloom calendula (pot marigold). The flowers were stunning: huge, double blooms that flowered for a long time. I saved the seeds and sowed them, plus a ton of volunteers popped up on their own, but out of all of them, only one single bush actually had double blooms.
I definitely broadcast them heavily on the soil. I don’t really pay attention to them, and if they come up too thick, I just transplant the extras to a different spot. My seeds are usually quite old too, I just hold onto the fresh ones. I actually threw out a batch on the flower bed thinking they were dead because the seeds were from 2012, but they germinated! I don’t bury them, they just sit on the surface and the rain usually waters them in. 😆
Oh, and yes, originally they were English seeds, and the name was a French marigold, “Janie” or something like that. 🤷♀️
