Foxglove Seed saving and direct sowing!

How to save Foxglove seeds and direct sow them for blooms next year. The key is early sowing!

Many know that many Foxglove flowers are biennials. But many new hybrids can flower the first year. If you sow the heirlooms like I grow you can get them to bloom next season if you plant the seeds this summer.

So here is my trick. Many don’t plant their seeds until Spring but I plant mine as soon as they go to seed.

Foxgloves in Spring

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Here are the Foxgloves that will get the seeds collected from. This is in Spring while they are in full bloom.

Next to them is a beautiful white one. As they most likely cross pollinated, thank you hummingbirds and bees, there is no predicting what the seeds that get planted will look like. They can be either color or a variation of the two.

White and pink foxgloves growing at Flower Patch Farmhouse

When to collect seeds of Foxgloves

Here is the Foxglove stalk filled with seeds ready to be collected.

Pam at Flower Patch Farmhouse showing a foxglove ready to collect seeds from

The foxglove flowers have completed blooming and the lower seed pods are drying and splitting open.

The timing of the seeds ripening depends upon your climate and when the foxgloves bloomed for you. Mine bloomed in late May / early June and the seeds were ripening in July.

How to collect Foxglove seeds to save

This is pretty simple and is how I save lots of different seeds. Using a recycled plastic tub or other container, place it under the seed pod and clip it off with my hand pruners, letting it fall into the tub. Also you can use these cool snips, which are a bit less clumsy.

Go to another seed pod and do the same. When the seed pods are dry and splitting just barely bumping the stem will scatter seeds so be gentle and deliberate.

I get going hastily, as you will see in the video linked at the end of this post, as I don’t mind the seeds scattering a bit.

clipping foxglove seed head into a tub to collect seeds

How to mass sow an area

When I wish to just sow an area full of foxglove seeds I cut the plant stem below the seed pods.

Stem of floxglove done flowering and ready to be cut.

Carry it gently to the area to be seeded and shake the seeds out of the pods directly onto the soil.

See the blurry green stalk, that is being shaken above the area I want the seeds to fall. Thousands of seed fall onto the soil insuring I will get some beautiful Foxgloves here next season!