Seed Scrounging

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HARVEST

A guide to houseplants on the cheap

By Leslie Gadallah

At our farmer's market,my friend had found among the offerings of a Lebanese fish seller a confection made from the fruit of the tamarind. Looking somewhat like large raisins rolled in crystallized sugar, they had a pleasant, tart taste, and each had a big, shiny, odd-shaped seed in the center. To my dismay, my friend was spitting the seeds onto the sidewalk. My own seeds were going carefully into my pocket.

"What are you going to do with them?" my friend asked.

"Plant them."

He laughed. He is used to the somewhat odd habits of a seed scrounger. He knows me for one who is forever digging treasures out of the kitchen trash.

I don't know that this is such a strange idea. Why throw away those lovely seeds when all that's needed to turn them into beautiful greenery is a little potting soil? An orange pit, for example, or one from a grapefruit or lemon, will make a small, pretty tree when grown in a pot, and a crushed orange leaf has one of the sweetest smells this side of a sprig of lilac. If you can get the tree to bloom, the flowers will perfume an entire house.

A few seeds dug out of a fig or a kiwi fruit produce interesting, fast-growing plants. A planted carrot-top on a windowsill instantly becomes a fernlike growth, surprisingly attractive for so humble a thing.

Curiosity and a desire for something a little different in houseplants enter into this, too. What does a pomegranate tree look like, or a tamarind?

Combine all this with an element of parsimony. After all, having eaten the fruit, the seed is free. With commercially grown plants commanding handsome prices, green thumbs can be put to good use developing alternatives to the expensive, pedestrian offerings available in most plant shops.

A dedicated seed scrounger must be prepared to fail occasionally. I've never been able to get a banana seed or those of cactus fruits to grow, nor have I been able to sprout a coconut. Of course, the coconut isn't really the proper project for a seed scrounger anyway, since you have to sacrifice the whole nut—which means you get nothing to eat.

For a while it seemed the tamarind seeds were going to be a failure. In spite of my determined efforts to sprout them, they lay as inert as so many shiny black pebbles. Some I cooled, some I washed in hot water. Some I kept in the dark, some in light. Some were planted in seed-starter mix, some in Perlite and some were kept on a moist paper towel in a petri dish. Nothing happened. Luckily, I had plenty of seeds with which to experiment.

Digging around in the horticultural section of the public library to see what I could find about tamarinds (nothing, I came across an article about sprouting seeds which suggested hard seed coats be nicked with a small file. I applied this technique to some of my tamarind seeds, not so easily done, since they are marvelously smooth and slippery. In about a week, the nicked seeds showed signs of root development.

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