Our wildflower seed harvest has begun in earnest!

We normally have some lovely student seasonal workers helping us with the harvest but as we won’t have as many people harvesting this year we may have to close the web shop a little more in the evenings and perhaps during the day to make sure that you have more wonderful wildflower seed to use for your projects in the coming months. (We also want to make sure that when we are open that we get your orders out as quickly as possible). We are so sorry for any incovenience that this causes and thank you so much for your interest in our wildflower seeds. The support you have given us as customers is very welcome for a small farming business like Scotia Seeds – thank you from all of us here.

We thought we would take the opportunity to tell you a little about our harvest.

Wildflower seed harvests are very different to other crops. We have hundreds of different species, with different flowering periods and harvest dates as well as different harvest methods. Many of our species will be hand harvested over a long period as many native plants flower and set seed over a period of weeks, or even months. It isn’t the first flowers that have their seed ready first either. Primrose (Primula vulgaris) is by far the earliest flower, from February or even earlier, and finishes flowering by May but it is not ready to be harvested until very late June, or usually July. The lovely little Violet (Viola riviniana) has seed ready whilst it still has other flowers on its plant and it is hand harvested from June all the way through July and sometimes later.

In 2019 there were 2 different wildflower species to harvest from in April, in May 3, 12 in June, 34 in July and then a peak of 65 different wildflowers with seed ready to harvest in August and 51 in September. In October it dropped to 29 with Heather (Calluna vulgaris) still to harvest in November. Harvest is a busy and enjoyable time here at Mavisbank, home of Scotia Seeds.