Once they turn tan/brown color, you can just grasp the back of the seed spray in your hand (index finger and thunmb) and pull lightly. Hold a small bowl under your hand and it will collect most of the seeds. These are Coriander, and they taste nothing like cilantro, even though its from the same plant. I use them in making sausages and pastrami.

Thanks! I will do that. I use coriander seeds in cooking too...can I use the seeds to plant new plants next year?

Yep...I just let mine drop its seed where ever it likes. I've found better germination when it seeds itself than when you take the trouble to plant it!!. If I want to start the cilantro (or parsley or larkspur or columbine or Swiss chard or lettuce or spinach or love-in-a-mist or poppy, etc etc) I just take the dried stem with the seed pods on it and "shake it out" into the new area. The most prep I do is scratch the soil in the new bed a bit.

Thanks!

If your wanting to use it as a flavoring, this method will obviously not work, unless you give it another year to expand its plants. Here, dill and cilantro have always dropped seeds and even though I use a germination deterrent (corn gluten) to reduce weeds, these seeds seem to survive well. Even for that, once the gluten breaks down it give a lot of nitrogen to the plants. This year, I had a huge harvest of dill so far, and none of the plants were actually planted by me, as seeds. Next to them was portulaca (moss rose), that also drops 'salt grain' sized seeds, and some survived to sprout the following year.

Thanks, ksrogers, I am thinking I would like to have some plants, but not the zillions I will get from the seeds that these two plants are producing! So I will probably collect the seeds from all but one and let that one drop them for next year's harvest.

As I mentioned before in another post, sometimes collecting the seeds for the next years crop may give you a lesser hardy plant. If you like cilantro leaves, and want more leaf herb, you would want to plant a slow bolting type, specifically bred for that reason. Just planting the seeds from your plants may not even give you the same quality you have now. When they commercially grow this for seed, they select the largest seeds for planting only.

You have to be careful when collecting coriander. Cilantro will cross-pollinate for up to two miles. This means that your "child" plant won't necessarily have the same desirable characteristics as the parent. For example, if you have a plant that's slow to bolt and produces delicious leaves, it's highly unlikely the child plant will be similar unless you were careful to isolate and hand-pollinate.

Here is a link that might be useful: Saving Cilantro Seeds