SECTION ONE Starting Seeds Indoors

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and swatch the renewal of life this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do. Charles Dudley Warner

1 Why Start Your Own?

Security and adventure might be considered opposites in some situations, but the gardener who raises plants from seed can experience both. Security - that confidence in the future that springs from ones own ability, forethought, and preparation - and adventure - the soaring sense of anything is possible and there are so many interesting things to try - as well known to those who grow new varieties, experiment with new methods, and dabble in plant breeding and seed saving. Skill in raising vegetable plant from seed is the very cornerstone of gardening independence. Choice of seeds and careful handling can bring you not only earlier harvests, but better vegetables. You can select varieties of food known to keep or process well so that the winter season, for which we gardeners are always planning, will be a time of abundance. Likewise, good eating will be yours all summer long from the selection of fresh vegetables youre planted for their superior quality.

The reasons
I suspect that Id continue to raise my own seedlings even without a good excuse, because I enjoy the process, but when I stop to think about it I realize that there are all kinds of good reasons for nurturing ones own plants from seed. Earlier Harvests. You can get a much earlier start in the garden, and therefore put fresh food on the table sooner, when youre grown flats of cabbage, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers indoors for setting out when weather mellows. The sooner you can begin picking from your garden, the greater your yield for the year. Greater variety . Varieties of plants offered by commercial seedling vendors represent but a tiny fraction of the possibilities open to you as gardener. Buying started plants severely limits your options for raising vegetables of special flavor, insect or disease resistance, or extra nutritional value. If, for example, you want to grow Juwarot or A + Carrot (extra high in Vitamin A) youre have to start with seeds. Looking for special gourmet foods like globe artichokes, watercress, or Japanese melons? Its back to the seed catalogs. Peppers that are hot, but not too hot? Start your own Hungarian wax plants. Delicious, mild, sweet Golden Acre or Jersey Queen cabbage? You need to start those with seeds. Stronger seedlings. Seedlings youre grown yourself can be super seedlings. If you do all the right things at the right times, youre have the best that can be grown, and youll know that your plants have well-developed roots growing in good soil that hasnt been hyped with chemicals. You can even plant organically raised seeds to give your plans an extra start on excellence. Healthier seedlings. By raising your own plants, you minimize the chance of introducing soil-borne diseases to your garden. Club-root and yellows that affect cabbage, along with anthracnose, tobacco mosaic, and wilt, are some examples of plant diseases you may avoid importing if you grow your own. Of course, you must use uncontaminated soil, and especially in

the case of mosaic in pepper, eggplant, and tomato seedlings, avoid handling tobacco around the plants. Cost saving. Youre save money. Well, maybe. Certainly for the price of a dozen greenhouse tomato plants you can buy a small handful of seed packets, each of which will give you plants to share or to sell, or extra seeds to save for the following year. So many interesting plants can be grown from seed, though, that once you start raising seedlings you might find that you tend to put some of that saved money back into seeds of other kinds. But since youre likely to eat even better as a result, you may well consider that youre still far ahead. Satisfaction. Creative satisfaction ought to count for something, too. From settling a wellchosen seedling in a pot of its own carefully prepared soil and watching it grow greener, sturdier, and leafier, to picking and eating the peppers, eggplant, or other nutritious food the manure plant finally bears, youve been involved all the way, and you can see that your skillful care has made a difference. Enjoyment. At the very least, planting seeds indoors is a good cure for the winter doldrums - those bleak, cold days when February seems like a permanent condition and you feel you simply must do something to nudge the season into turning. Choose your earliest plantings judiciously, though. You dont want them to be past their prime when you set them out in the garden. Onion, chives, peppers, certain wildflowers and perennial plants, and houseplants like coleus and geraniums are good candidates for beginning the season.

2 First the seeds

You have in your hands an array of seed packets and perhaps a few jars of seeds youve saved yourself. Youre anxious to plant, to get a start on the growing season that still seems far away. Take a minute now, if you will, to be aware of what the seed really is before committing it to the soil. Dry, flaky, hard, smooth, warted, ridged, powdery, or wispy, these distinctively shapes particles may look as lifeless as the February garden patch. Dont be deceived, though. Seeds dont spring to life when you plant them. Seeds are alive. Often symbols of beginning, seeds are living guarantees of continuity between generations of plants. Inside even the most minute, dustlike grain of seed is a living plant. True, its in embryonic form, possessing only the most rudimentary parts, but it lives, and it is not completely passive. At levels that we cant see, but laboratory scientists can measure, seeds carry on respiration. They absorb oxygen and give off carbon dioxide. They also absorb water from the air. Seeds need a certain minimum amount of moisture within their cells in order to make possible the metabolic processes by which they convert some of their stored carbohydrates into available food. Thus they maintain their spark of life - dim though it may be - until conditions are right for them to complete their destiny as germinated plants.

The Botanical Facts

By strict botanical definition, a seed is a ripened fertilized ovule containing an embryonic plant and a supply of stored food, all surrounded by a seed coat. In practice, though, gardeners use many seeds that are actually fruits (the mature ovary of a flower containing one or more seeds). A kernel of corn is really a seedlike fruit. Carrot, dill, and fennel seeds are, technically, dry, one-seeded fruits. Seeds, then, are completely self-contained. Within the boundaries of the hard, dry coat that protects them, they possess enough food energy to carry them through their dormancy and into their first few days as seedlings. They have all the enzymes theyll need to convert this stored food into a form their tissues can use, and they carry within their cells the genetic information that directs what they will be and when and how. Lets look at the bush bean as an example - not a typical seed, perhaps, but one in which it is easy to see the parts and their arrangement that are common to all seeds. The good old garden bush bean is the favorite of botanists for this purpose because its size and structure make it possible for us to see clearly how it is formed. If you soak a been seed in water for a few hours, the hard outer coat will slip off easily. The bulk of the bean that you now see is composed of the cotyledons, the two identical fleshy halves that comprise the meat of the seed. Cotyledons are rudimentary leaves. Unusually large and thick in the bean, they contain stored fat, carbohydrates, and protein. Both cotyledons are attached to a rudimentary stem, and they curve protectively over a tiny leafy bud. The root tip, at the other end of the seed, will elongate into the first root of the plant when the seed germinates. Any seed, no matter how tiny, wispy, or irregular, will possess these features: cotyledons (sometimes one, more often two), a leafy bud, and a root tip.

Most seed-bearing garden vegetable plants are dicots; that is, they possess two cotyledons. Bean, tomatoes, celery, cabbage, and other vegetable seedlings are dicots. When they germinate they send up two wings. Monocots, with just a single cotyledon, are represented by the grass family (Gramineae), with includes corn, wheat, rye, and other cereal crops. These seeds send up the familiar, single grasslike spear of green. In many seeds, some of which are important food crops in their own right, the stored food is not contained in the cotyledons, as in the bean, but in a layer called the endosperm, which surrounds the embryo. This part of the seed varies in different species. It may consist of starch, oil, protein, or waxy or horny matter, but whatever its form, its function remains the same - to nourish the seed from the time of its maturity on the parent plant until the beginning of the next growing season, when conditions will be favorable for its success as a plant in its own right. Often, of course, they tasty endosperm is what we are after when we raise the crop, as with buckwheat, corn, wheat, and rye. Just to keep the record straight: cotyledons of some plant may synthesize nourishment needed by the seed; others may both make and store food for the embryo. If you find that fact surprising, reflect that there is more - much more - that we dont yet know about seeds.

Dormancy
Were beginning to appreciate, too, how much is still unknown a bout dormancy in seeds. If youve ever tried unsuccessfully to start a row of lettuce in midsummer heat, you have an idea of how a dormant seed behaves. It refuses to germinate, even if otherwise viable, when it lacks the right temperature, moisture, and oxygen supply that would ordinarily favor germination. Even though conditions might seem favorable for germination, such as those that occur in midsummer, they might not be right to induce germination in certain seeds. It can be annoying to miss a seedling date for a certain crop and be unable to plant it later in the summer; however, the ability of seeds to remain dormant, in varying degrees, has contributed to the survival of seed-bearing plants as we know doomed to failure if it sprouts as soon as it matures at the end of the summer, shortly after the first frost. Lettuce, likewise, has less chance of success under random conditions when sown in hot, dry soil than it does in the moist, cool surroundings that promote its quick growth. Dormancy, then is a protective device, designed to assure the continuity of the species. A seed may be dormant because its embryo is still immature, its seed coat is impermeable to water or to gases, its coat is too unyielding to permit embryo growth (although this is rare), or because of a metabolic block within the embryo. Often, more than one of these factors operates at that same time.

Breaking Dormancy
As a gardener, it is often in your interest to try to beak development in certain kinds of seed. Since you intend to give the plant special care and optimum conditions, you can often dormancy this and get away with it. For example, if you are anxious to raise a fine bed of lettuce to eat with your midsummer tomatoes - a real mark of gardening expertise - how do you give your lettuce seeds the message that its all right for them to sprout?