Tobacco is an amazing plant.  The seeds are tiny, dust really.  It is not the easiest plant to start.  It needs really rich soil and moisture.  But you don’t want any mold.  The seeds are tiny, and the plants at first are so amazingly tiny.  They have tiny roots and can dry out in a very short time.  So the soil has to be damp.  The plant may double in size in a week, but still it is too tiny to have deep roots.  You have to be extra careful watering.  Finally it gets to be an inch or so long and now you have an over crowded pot.  Very overcrowded.  So you transplant them out.  If you were able to keep them alive this long, you probably won’t have any more issues with them.  after they get about a foot tall, they are one of the toughest plants in your garden.

Here is one as tall as me in flower.

Here are some seedpods on a plant about eight feet tall.

Carefully I snap off the  dry pods, trying to leave the rest of the plant alone.  It is easy to take still maturing pods off if you are not careful.

Here are some pods in a bowl.

This is about a fifth of a single plants worth of pods.  A lot of the seed has already shaken out.  No worry, there is still lots of seed.

After shaking the pods a bit, this is what I got.

I did mention that they were tiny.

Some of the pods still had seed in them so I pinched the tip  of the pod off.  In the center of the photo, the open ended pod or pod pair is dark inside due to the mass of loose seed within.

By pouring the seed through a screen, you can remove some of the chaff.

Here is the final harvest from one fifth of one plant.

This is a lot of seed.  Almost all of them will sprout, and they will keep for years.  After sprinkling them on fine rich damp soil, most of them will sprout.

This particular variety is a Native Indian variety.  I am still working on my curing method, I don’t have a sweat lodge to do it right, so I am still experimenting.

I can afford to experiment, I just gathered seed from about thirty more plants.

Bob