Seed Sowing and Saving by Carole B. Turner (1998)

If you don t REALLY want to learn about seeds (and seeds only) and how to grow new plants from those seeds, then pass on this book--Seed Sowing and Saving. Some books will indicate a certain focus and include mostly eye candy. This is a working book and not just an idea or dream book. Carole Turner covers just about everything you d ever need or want to know to be a gatherer, saver and planter of seeds. There are about 100 plants covered including vegetables and flowers.

Today most people think that plants are created in black, labeled pots at Lowe s. If you want vegetables for the garden or flowers, you just go buy a half-grown whatever tomato, pepper, pansy, or clematis. Now, certainly that s the easy way to do it. But, it takes the thrill out of waiting and watching and creating from seed. The buy-it approach also greatly limits what you can grow. Your local store simply won t cultivate every neat vegetable or flower that you might like to try in your yard. Finally, it s much, much cheaper (and usually free) to grow from seed.

Folks who go back to the seed are called seed snatchers as the current catch phrase. One thing I mention (and which is mentioned in this book) is that it s bad policy to harvest ALL the seeds in any one plant space. Take a few. Leave the rest to naturally reseed. Also, (and this is kind of an ethical thing), don t go to the local store and grab the seeds without buying plants. You short the buyer of his or her seeds, and the plant folks have families too. I see online posts where someone brags about going to Home Depot and stealing seeds. Yes. I do consider that stealing. Buy your plants and get your seeds, or ask the person who owns the plants.

Now, some plants have seeds that are pretty obvious. The sunflowers in my yard have big old seeds that can t be missed. I hang them in the shed and plant them year after year. This book covers sunflower seeds, and I m not really going about it the right way (but close enough in this case). I should be putting them in a brown paper bag and then closing them up in a glass jar to keep mice and weevils out of them. I guess I don t have mice and weevils, so that s good.

Actually, sunflowers are about the only flower seeds covered in this book that I have in my yard. Most of my plants are perennials and given to me by my friends and family with roots or cuttings. I m certainly missing out on a lot of plants that share by seeds like poppy, sage, marigold, snapdragon, and zinnia. They all have different looking seeds, and this book has diagrams that show what to look for in the seeds. For example, the morning glory (and I always thought those were weeds) have little seed capsules while nasturtiums have fruit pods with seeds inside that are kind of flat shaped.

The flowers are in the second half of the book. Vegetable seeds come before the flowers. The main reason I haven t wanted to try to save veggie seeds is that a lot of companies have hybrids, so they won t work or they ll come out strange back to the earlier family members of the seed. I d have to make sure that I had plants with seeds suitable for saving. Since I only keep a very small garden, I just buy plants and some seeds. I may try saving squash seeds this year haven t decided on that yet. I m more interested in the flowers currently.

The book opens with all kinds of technical information on seeds in general. The more you know about how seeds work, then the better you can figure out seeds. Though it s not easy or fun reading, this is useful data. I remind myself that I ll be much more successful if I know more about what I m doing. The information is solid and easy to follow though dull to sort through. I can t remember all the technical words, but I can look back, and I do have the basics down after reading this book several times.

The sections on eyeing the plants and then storing and setting seeds out early in the spring are more interesting. I know that the stores start the plants when it s cold outside, and I m not even thinking about planting. So, if I want to do some things from seed, then I ve got to start early. Otherwise, I m back to the black pots. When I got tomato seeds and sprouted them inside, I had loads of plants and for just a few cents. This year, I didn t get around to that, so I had to buy tomato plants ready to plant. Then it rained like the dickens all spring, so I had to buy more. I wished I had grown them from seeds again.

If you like instant gratification, then you really don t want to grow from seed or buy this book. If you want to take on the challenge and the joy of growing from seeds, then this is a wonderful text type book. It s packed with data and diagrams (but no photos), and it has very specific information on each plant covered with 2 total pages per plant (light requirements, soil temp, germination time, spacing, thinning, depth of planting, storage, and viability). I can now find and identify the plants and find the seeds though I m not willing to seed out all the plants at this point. There are a variety of charts like temperatures for germination on each crop or flower and lots of contact companies in the back (some including web sites). They also have seed exchanges, so if you want to get into this pretty big, then you have lots of data to work with and places to find more information.