How to Harvest Rose Seeds
- 1). Pull on sturdy leather gardening gloves. Gardening gloves will protect your hands from being scratched by thorny rose bushes.
- 2). Label paper lunch sacks with the name of your rose using a pencil. If your rose is a hybrid plant, then you should also label the sack with the parent roses that were crossed to create it. Your rose seeds will produce rose bushes like one of the parent plants. Because of this, it is important to know what you may be getting with your rose seeds.
- 3). Examine your rose bush to locate the rose hips. The rose hips will be located at the tips of rose canes. They will consist of what appears to be the swollen, rounded tip of the rose cane. Rose hips are ripe for picking after the first yearly frost in fall. They will turn orange or red at this time. Grasp each rose hip between your thumb and first two fingers and twist to remove it from the cane.
- 4). Place the rose hips in the bag and carry them indoors.
- 5). Cut each rose hip open with a knife and scoop out the seeds to harvest a small collection of seeds. If you have collected more than 20 hips, this can be time consuming.
- 6). Place the rose hips in a blender and fill it halfway with water to harvest a large amount of rose seeds, advises Texas A&M University's horticulture department. Blend the hips until they are a pulpy consistency. Then dump the pulp onto newspaper to allow it to dry. Do not mix rose hips from multiple rose types. Label each newspaper with the rose type.
- 7). Pick the seeds out of the pulp when the rose pulp has dried. Discard the pulp and newspaper.
- 8). Divide seeds by variety and place in zipper-top plastic bags with a piece of damp paper towel. You can store the seeds in a refrigerator for up to 12 weeks before planting, according to rose breeder Paul Barden, on his Old Garden Roses and Beyond website.
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