A Garden Guide to Saving Seeds

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PHOTO: DAVID CAVAGNARO

Bring new pleasures and superior plants to your garden by saving seeds.

A Garden Guide to Saving Seeds

Gathering garden seed gives me a feeling of kinship with our ancestors who for centuries depended utterly on home-saved seed. For thousands of years, harvesting seed was a vital, often sacred, ritual. It was not until the early nineteenth century that seeds were packaged for sale in small envelopes and, soon after, sold through mail-order catalogues.

Today, filling out the seed order is a happy duty for the wintered-in gardener. Even so, I never fail to keep and use seeds from certain crops of my own.

Why? First, for quality. There are seeds money can’t buy. Good ones. One of my favorite tomatoes, for example, is an extra-meaty Italian variety obtained from a friend, for which I could never buy seed if I let the strain run out.

  • Published on Sep 1, 1987
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