Saving Petunias

Petunias are one of my favorite flowers because not only do hummingbirds love them, and the bees love them, but they are so pretty and there are so many lovely varieties!  In past years I have always gone to a garden nursery and purchased plants and spent lots of money.  About 4 or 5 years ago I decided to do things cheaper, and bought seed packets of petunias and started my own plants.  Well, NOW I am getting even cheaper yet!  I recently learned that a person could save seeds on your own and plant them!  Duh......(sometimes I feel a little slow minded....too obvious, ya know?)  Regular petunia seed can be saved just fine.  Hybrids and wave petunias will grow also, but they will not be the same as what they were originally.   It might be a slightly different color or size, but it will still be a lovely petunia.   So today I went around to all my gone-by plants and collected seeds.  I'll give this a try next spring and let you know what happened!  I have successfully saved seeds from pansies and pumpkins and herbs, so why wouldn't petunias grow?   So - next year's hanging baskets of lovely petunias should be free!  And THAT is my goal - to spend as little as possible growing my flowers, fruits and veggies.
     Seed saving is kind of a lost art anyway.  Early settlers to this country saved seeds from the homeland, Indians saved seeds and taught the first settlers how to do this, and greenhouses save seeds for selling.   Harold and I took a class on seed saving for vegetables last year.   We got some seeds from that class (dry bean seeds) and I planted them and they grew just fine.  I prefer to grow heirloom varieties of veggies and open-pollinated types.  You can save the seeds from those plants.   Hybrids, no.  It seems like everything folks grow these days is hybrid.  We always like to plant Golden Bantam corn, an heirloom open-pollinated variety that is naturally sweet.  But most folks like that super sweet sugar enhanced variety of hybrid sweet corn.   We will be saving corn seeds this year for next year's garden. 
     Anyway, back to the petunias...........
Here is a photo of the petunia seed pods, ready to be picked:

Lots of dry seed pods from my pink petunias.

Another view of petunia seed pods.

A tub full of pods

When you squeeze the pods, the seeds fall out.

I discovered that there are many sites on the internet for downloading seed packet templates that you can print out.  Some are really pretty and some are just plain.   Just type in "printable seed packets" and you'll get a whole bunch of sites.  Here's a couple that I printed out:

Seed packets to cut out.

 And here is one I filled up with seeds:

Now I can't wait until next February or March when I try to grow these seeds I saved!