The 10-Year Rewind – Part 6 – Harvesting Coriander Seed

Every day this month I am looking back on the 10 years since I started this blog in June, 2008. Part 6 is this one — Harvesting Coriander Seed — from October 2009. It's my second "top rating" post of all-time, in terms of the number of people who have read it. 

As the weather warms up in our Aussie spring, coriander (or cilantro if you prefer that name) gets seriously seedy. This herb isn't really worth bothering to grow in our hot summers. But it is worth harvesting the seeds now, and that's what I've been doing this morning. However, I have also been tracing the plant's progress from leafy to flowery to seedy with my camera, and I thought I'd celebrate this quite beautiful little event.

Freshly harvested green coriander seeds. They smell nice but do look a bit like a insect-egg colony when clustered in a bowl like this.

Just a few weeks ago they were just a bunch of small but pretty flowers.

And a few weeks before that you could tell that the seed-making season had arrived. The broad leaves we use for cooking were giving way to the fine, spindly leaves of coriander that's about to go to seed. Once you see those skinny leaves, your coriander is on the way out.

When the whole plant is in flower it looks like a blowsy cottage garden perennial (or at least from a distance it does), and it still smells as nice as ever if you happen to brush past it while weeding or harvesting other vegies or herbs.

While the flowers, from a distance, look white, up close the buds have a stronger pinkish tinge.

Once opened the flowers blow about and flutter in the slightest breeze, as they're sitting atop stems of very fine foliage. The seeds form about two to three weeks after the flowers.

I'm keeping the seeds for two purposes. One is to use them for planting coriander next year. This year's crop was my best ever, and while it may simply have been kind weather, I'm not taking any chances. I want to grow this plant's babies. The rest of the dried seed will go into the kitchen, probably into something slow-cooked and either Greek or Moroccan.

The seeds themselves are almost translucent, but not quite.

I did a bit of Googling and it seems the tried and tested paper bag method of drying seed is good enough for quite a few people, so that's what I'm doing.

The brown paper bag hangs on a nail inside the shed, and hopefully the seeds will be dry in a few weeks, but I'm not in a hurry. The brown paper bag method worked well for the zinnia flower seeds I saved last autumn, so I can't see why it won't work for these coriander seeds too. Fingers crossed, though.

Planting time for my next batch of coriander is next year, in April or May, once the summer is well and truly over and the cooler weather of autumn has arrived. Autumn, winter and early spring are the coriander growing season here.

Coriander the easy, seedy way

I really ought to have a bit more faith in myself. There I was a few weeks back, filled with doubt that my coriander seed-saving skills were up to scratch, and so I sowed my seeds really thickly, hoping that maybe a quarter of them might sprout.

Doubter! Now I feel foolish, because it looks like three-quarters of the little blighters want to enjoy the autumn sunshine, and now I have a two-inch high glut of too-much baby coriander to manage.

All the babies are as cute as these guys. After the first long baby leaves soak up the sunshine, the next to come are the ones that look like proper coriander.

It's not a huge glut, it's still a small glut, but it's as crowded as a Hong Kong vegie market down there.

Late last year my coriander did what all coriander does when the weather warms up. It goes from leafy to flowery to seedy in the space of two weeks. So I let the plants go through their life cycle, waiting for them to then start dying down and the seeds to go from bright green to showing tinges of brown ... and then I pulled up the plants, snipped off the seed heads and put them in some brown paper bags and hung these up on a nail in my shed.

Totally forgot about them I did, but as autumn arrived I knew it was coriander seed planting time once the warm part of autumn was over.

Instead of painstakingly plucking individual seeds off the stems, I just closed up the bag and gave it a very good shake. Sure enough, a hundred or so seeds fell off and these were the ones I planted.

I use an easy method for planting them. I just clear a small patch of soil of weeds, dig it lightly with a fork to fluff up the soil, then I scatter the seed randomly, fairly thickly from my hand, medieval seed-sowing style. You know, just casting them out.

Then I get out a bag of seed-raising mix (it's a fine, sandy potting mix) and scatter this (also medieval-style) over the seed until you can't see them anymore. It does not need to be a thick layer of seed-raising mix. A quarter inch or about 5mm at best is all that's needed.

The huge, enormously difficult trick that you need to master is to remember to water the patch every morning, if rain isn't forecast. I use a light, fine spray setting on my hose attachment, so that the soil is well moistened but isn't washed away.

The seeds come up in about two weeks, and you'll have to wait another week or so before the seedlings send up those second pairs of leaves that actually look like coriander.

If you sow coriander seeds now, in autumn in temperate Australia, the plants should last you through the winter. 

In my case, due to the excess of success, I will have to "thin out" my coriander patch, pulling out some plants to give the remaining plants room to grow. If you leave them overcrowded, your crop won't thrive, so you'll just have to do what farmers do, and manage your crops. Just pull out the smaller, weaker plants — Charles Darwin would want you to — to let the stronger, fitter plants thrive.

And PS: if you save seeds this way, you almost certainly will have saved more seeds than you could ever grow at your own place, so give the leftovers to your gardening friends.

Successes and failures

This blog posting has taken a few weeks to happen, but at last I can report on a magnificent failure, plus two very satisfactory little successes.

Projectionist! The failure slide first, please...

A failure? Yep, nothing like what I was hoping for. This, folks is a pot of failed radishes, grown from a little punnet of "Micro Radish" sprouts which I spotted at my local giant market-dominating supermarket. The gardener in me said "go on, have a go at growing them into radishes". And when I also spotted some "Micro Chervil" sprouts and "Micro Coriander" sprouts, the grand experiment began...

Here's the punnet of micro radishes, cute and fresh little
zingers which are nice tossed into a garden salad.

Plucked from their punnet they sit in their own
little pot of growing medium, which is kind of
like compacted cotton wool, sort of.

And here's the failure in action: no little round
radishes at all. It's a nice pot of leafy greenery
with red stems, and the leaves taste peppery, like
mustard greens, so I can still use them in stir-fries,
but the experiment was to grow radishes, and
in that attempt I didn't do all that well.

However, I didn't collapse into a funk of despondence, because at the same time I was tasting bitter (or, more accurately, peppery) defeat with the radishes, I was also savouring some, well ... savoury success. The coriander and chervil experiments have turned out quite nicely.

At $1.49, my chervil sprouts are cheaper than nursery
seedlings. More usually they're $2.98 a pop, which is still OK.

The potted chervil is belting along, loving the deluge of rain
which has soaked all of Sydney to its sandstone bones.

Ditto, the coriander sprouts, they're doing well too.

The chervil sprouts look great in the punnet. You can see some
long, thin black chervil seeds still attached here and there.

The trick with planting them up is to divide the punnet into
clumps. Don't bother with trying to separate out individual
sprouts, that's too much like hard work, and it's also too
much handling of the tender sprouts. Instead, just break this
kind of clump into four or five mini clumps, and plant these.

Here's how that single clump looked after being divided up
and planted out. The next trick is simply to keep the sprouts
watered. Some Seasol or Eco-Seaweed once a week is also
a good idea, as these solutions encourage roots to grow.

It's the same story with the coriander. 

It's the same story with the coriander. Just
divide the punnet into several clumps, not
individual seedlings, then plant them out.
Water often, seaweed solution weekly.

Both the coriander and the chervil should last for months, if planted now. As I've said many times before in this blog, coriander loves winters in Sydney and lasts for months in the cooler weather. In summer it grows too fast and turns to whispy-leafed seedy stuff in a matter of weeks. So now is the best time to plant some coriander.

And chervil loves winters here, too. It's also one of the better herbs for growing in part shade or at least gardens that don't get a full day of sunshine (which is the case in many inner-city gardens).

At the prices the supermarket is asking for these mini sprouts, this way of growing them is easier than seed and cheaper than nursery-bought seedlings. Good luck!