Hi! Instead of pinching the spended flower off, allow it to go to seed. You will find the seed pod where the bloom attaches. I save my wave petunia seeds and have great luck with them. They are not always true to their original but they are still beautiful. Sometimes I will get a red one out of all pink ones but I don't mind. Good luck to you.

How will I know when it goes seed? If I don't dead head they just fall off. I know I'm asking a lot of what would be basic stuff for the rest of you, but I'm new at the seed gathering thing. Thanks!

I also had great success with the seeds I harvested. I had 2 petunia plants in hanging basket. In end of fall, they died. I didn't even care about it. I just placed the 2 hanging baskets in the garage. Around December, someone(I think her name was Linda) invited me to join Winter Sowing forum. To make the story short, around January or February, I looked at the baskets again and saw tons of small brown pods about half centimeters long. I grabbed a bowl and started breaking the pods. I saw tons of little black stuff. I assumed they were seeds.

I think it was late January that I received seed packets from folks at WS forum. One of the envelopes included a petunia seed. That made me to conclude that what I did get were seeds. I sowed them early March via ws technique and had great success.

I wish I had a macro shots of the teardrop shape pods. I remember the shape was like that but not really that pointy.

Here is the only pic of my dead petunia in garage. She joined the pictorial when I was taking a shot at my Cityline Paris. LOL.

{{gwi:14794}}

Now, I'm asking myself, did I really plant petunia last year. LOL. I'm sure I did and iirc, the flowers were purple. We'll find out once my ws babies bloom. :D

Just leave some blooms on to dry up and the seed pod will mature on it's own. Or, you can do what our fellow gardener did and let the whole plant die and harvest the seeds then. The pod will be brown when it's dry but it shouldn't fall off. Only the spent flower itself will.

It's a tiny teardrop pod at the spot where spent bloom had been attached to the stem. The pod is green at first, then will turn yellow then beige. I usually watch when it begins to turn beige. When it starts to open at the tip, I would gather the seed pod. If I wait until it opens up all the way, most of the seeds will have fallen off.

If I especially like the blooms, I would wrap the pods with a tiny piece of nylon when they are still green. I use a tiny strip of nylon to tie it to the base of the pod.

I doubt that there will be any mistaking the seed pods, once they develop. They will grow once the spent flower has fallen. Kyla, the thing to remember is that these seeds (which are TEEENSY, by the way) must ripen while still on the plant, so don't be tempted to harvest them too soon.

If you're collecting seeds from hybrid petunias, remember that the progeny won't come true from seed, but you'll likely get some close ones.

Have you decided on what kind of container you're going to save them in?

If you are lazy (like I am) you can just leave your petunias out in the garden at the end of year and let them die a natural death. Then in the spring harvest the seed pods. The seeds are teeny tiny and you get a couple dozen per pod. I find them hard to work with and prefer the pelleted seeds from the store (but they are oh so expensive). I'm thinking of getting one of those seed sowers to work with these tiny seeds.