given that they sell the seeds, I would assume so, the question would be how long do they store for, and that would need experimenting.

I would imagine the seeds would keep as well as most other seeds, if properly dried and kept in a cool place or freeze them.
We all know freezing doesn't hurt them.

How long they would be good for, is hard to tell.
One would have to save a bunch, date, then try every year to grow and see what the germination rate would be.

I understand the finished product (root and leaves) could be dehydrated then roots ground up into powder or left that way for further use.
That would depend on what you want to use them for.

Tho I feed all mine to the chickens.

Haha...I started collecting them a few months ago (summer here) and have quite a lot now that I am going to plant out next spring. I have been collecting the leaves and adding them to our salad greens. There is also a red veined dandelion (Taraxacum spectibilia) and a Red-Veined Chicory (Chicorium intybus) commonly called Italian Dandelion. I have got seeds for the Red-Veined Chicory that I am going to plant next spring, it looks very much like dandelion.
I usually try to turn over my seeds every two years, they will still be good after 5 years just the germination rate goes down. I have still had 80% germination from seeds older than 5 years though, just need to keep them in a cool, dark place.

I saved seeds from last year & I am about to start some to see if they are viable, I will let you know...I make dandelion fritters and salads mostly but I have a dandelion recipe book I got for free on amazon kindle and they are all over you tube

I bet I got the same free Dandelion cookbook 🙂 It has a few interesting things, I would have liked more with the roots, they were really focused on the greens, and I didn't think they used the flowers as much as they could have either.. I do love the flavour of a perfect deep yellow flower..

I'm not certain that one would have to save the seed in SHTF. I can't see any event that would eradicate them, and the ones I can think of wouldn't matter if you saved some or not...they'd likely not grow (or anything else but cockroaches for that matter) anyhow.

Try the seed saving though, by all means. If it's anything its a great education in how to save seed and an interesting experiment in non-traditional crop propagation. I'm watching to see how this plays out 🙂

Ok Runs with Scissors,

Here is my challenge back to you.. this year, go out into your "wild" area that your dandelions are allowed to produce in and really look at them, I want you to try different plants and compare the bitters on them.. I want you to look at a dozen or a two dozen plants and see that some produce less leaves, and others produce lots of them, some produce bigger and smaller hearts on the plants..

then I want you to figure out which of those things matter to you? if you were in fact using these as crops and then think about how you would gain any control over passing some of those required or looked for traits on in the next generations of plants.

For me at least, I dig out the plants that produce like I want, and I move them over to a certain area, if a plant in that area does not produce what I like, I dig it out, and throw it to the sheep or pigs or rabbits, given yourself a few years and slowly but surely, the percent of the babies that are naturally self-seeded will have more and more of the traits that you like in that patch..

I have done the same thing with my plantain patch, its made great strides over the past five years..

I am looking forward to hearing back on how this plays out 🙂

Thank you Farmgal for encouraging us to think more proactively about our foraging supplies. As gardeners, we often look towards our domestic plants as a place to invest time on developing our own varieties, saving seeds and creating a seed strain that is ideally suited to our location. As an active forager I maintain patches out in the woods that supply specific medicines, foods and teas that I harvest on a yearly basis. Some species have found their way home to live in my yard. But your suggestion of creating patches of tough, resilient weeds, ahem, desirable plants is very far-sighted indeed.

You may not be the first to suggest this idea, but you are the first person that I have heard express these ideas so clearly and thoughtfully. So here is to the future of intentional selection of wild plants.

I've run into a snag on the dandelion propagation project.

So, I selected some specimens that looked good. I was going for leafy, with bigger flower heads. So earlier I collected some seed and I planted the seeds into a 72 cell planter. They grew out.

The snag was, I didn't tell the wife what I was up to...and she thought that the planter I had out in the back corner of the lot was invaded by 'weeds'. She dumped the lot. Back to square one.

haha, that is funny! need to keep the wife in the loop.. but to be fair its taken time to train the hubby, he never gets rid of something without checking, my own collection grew by leaps and bounds this year, I added in five new plants in the family, I have pink flowered ones, red low curly ones and so forth, I had no idea that there was so many different ones to choose from 🙂

http://prephaven.weebly.com/blog/dandelions-in-cooking

I posted about cooking with dandelions recently on my blog. The links on there include a number of ways to use them....if you're interested.