The Complete Idiot's Guide to Self-Sufficient Living by Jerome D. Belanger

Author:Jerome D. Belanger
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: House & Home, General
ISBN: 9781592579457
Publisher: ALPHA
Published: 2009-12-01T07:00:00+00:00

The Miracle of the Seed

Planting a seed and watching it germinate and grow is one of the most profound and awesome experiences imaginable. How does that little dried-up speck of a thing know whether to be a tree or a tomato? Or a beefsteak, cherry, Roma, plum, red, yellow, or other kind of tomato?

A seed is a living embryo. It develops into an indeterminate potato-leafed, rich-flavored pinkish Brandywine tomato because all that genetic information has been passed down to it through more than a hundred generations. The root, stem, and leaves are already present and very much alive in the seed. You can see this in a large seed, like a bean. Soak it for a few hours to soften the hard skin, and cut it open.

Looking at it this way, a tomato seed is no more the beginning of a tomato than an egg is the beginning of a chicken, as in the old “which came first? conundrum. They are links between generations. Seed savers preserve those links.

Also like the egg, a seed contains food for the sleeping life it protects. A seed has a supply of carbohydrates, fat, protein, and minerals. (That’s why we eat some of them.) When conditions are right—moisture, temperature, light, etc.—the embryo awakens and uses that food supply to send out the roots and leaves that will nourish further growth.

Those proper conditions for awakening are important to the seed and the seed saver. A seed must start growing when conditions are suitable for the survival of the plant. A tomato or pepper seed that sprouts in a northern garden in September won’t survive the winter, and therefore won’t continue the species. The seed saver must provide an environment that will keep the seed dormant until the proper time. When that time arrives, the environment is changed to one that will awaken the embryo and start growth.

Seeds form inside fruits; fruits develop from flowers; and pollination is required for the whole process to work. This brief recap should remind you of what you learned in a biology class you probably thought was useless or at least bring back an image of birds and bees busily pollinating flowers. The importance of this to the seed saver is that pollination affects the genetic makeup of the seed. If the seed came from a hybrid plant, it was cross-pollinated, which means we have no way of knowing what the next generation will be like. That’s why we only save seeds from open-pollinated plants, not hybrids.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.