Gardening with Pat Duke: Collect seeds - and start a community group to share them

Since gardening is a thrifty activity at times, we can harness the exceptionally dry weather and start saving seeds for next year.

Some flowers are easier than others, such as poppies and foxgloves. Both of these are prolific self seeders but you might want to place them somewhere else in the garden that isn’t of the wind’s choosing.

Saving seed will help you be more sustainable and less reliant on the garden centres and seed suppliers.

All flowers and plants have seeds that we can save and use again, some are more fiddly than others but many are as straightforward as placing the seed in a paper bag and sticking it on a radiator, if you remember them.

It’s best not to use hybrid varieties but stick to heirloom varieties. These are passed along generations and are pollinated naturally by birds, bees and wind so you don’t have to resort to tickling them with a paint brush to fertilise them like I always assume they do in convents or monastic gardens when time is often on their side.

These are pure varieties of plants but they can be purposely or accidentally cross pollinated to create your own hybrid variety you can name after your Auntie Melinda or favourite place.

You will be in a position to choose the healthiest and most-colourful flowers to keep seed from and just tap the flower head so the seed drops into an envelope.

Make sure its marked or you might end up with amazing flowers but where you don’t want them.

If you don’t have a local community group for saving seeds, it’s well worth starting one with others you know who garden. They’ll have different seed to you and the more people put in, the more diverse your gardens will be.

It really couldn’t be easier and once you get into the swing of it, you’ll be triggered to go deep and learn about creating your own plants or even attend a seed-saving course or drop hints about one to your relatives.

On the plot

You might be thankful if you’ve adopted the no-dig strategy as this will be keeping moisture locked in more than traditional methods.

Plants that are surviving in this heat meet the threshold of good enough and can be left alone with minimal watering.

It might seem counter-intuitive to be sowing in this weather but if you’ve the space and water, just do it.

Spinach, turnips, spring onions, salad rocket and winter radish can all be nurtured from seed this week.

Don’t ignore herbs either, especially the hardy ones like parsley and coriander. Even rosemary can be propagated by taking cuttings and putting them around the edge of a terracotta pot.

The dreaded carrot fly is still doing its ephemeral rounds and touching the shoulders of healthy carrots. They are the sharks of the veg patch in that they can smell carrot from hundreds of yards away so you need to be very gentle when thinning out any late arrivals.

I find a well put-together, raised bed keeps them at bay as they can only be bothered to fly below knee height at the best of times.

Get busy with harvesting anything that’s ready.

I’m terrible for growing vegetables and letting them go to seed. Although this is quite attractive with alliums, it’s not so great with beetroot or cabbage.

It’s now time to get the maximum bounty from the veg patch and if you’re anything like me, you’ll be boring your friends with stories of whole meals cobbled together from home-grown produce.

There’s still plenty to do and it helps to have one eye on the coming season when you’ll need winter crops to be ready to put in the ground when, or if, it eventually rains again.