Harvesting Dill

Homegrown dill is delicious, easy to grow and easy to harvest. We’ll show you how! One thing to remember – you want to harvest almost mature dill seeds, not the green ones or the completely dry ones. The green ones won’t have the flavor you are looking for and the dry ones will have already dropped most of their seeds, giving you much less seed than you bargained for!

First you need a few simple tools:

Next, you might want to consider some accessories! Puppies make the job much more fun!

Seriously, though, harvesting the dill seeds couldn’t be much simpler, even with puppy assistance. What you are looking for is almost-dry seeds like this:

This is what the green or immature seeds look like, along with some very welcome Ladybugs!

Simply snip off the almost-mature seed stalk,

and drop it into the box you’ve brought. Some of the more mature and dried seeds are on the bottom, having fallen off when the seed head or umbel hit the bottom of the box.

This is what the seeds and one of the smaller umbels look like:

Once you’ve collected all of the dill seed, store the box in a room where it can finish drying for a couple of weeks. Then bounce the seed heads on the bottom of the box a few times to get the rest of the seeds to drop, empty the box into a storage container and you have dill seed for the winter and next year!