Beginning of creating a garden - planting the seeds Articles | Gardening

By: Darren Williger

Though any good and reliable nursery is a good choice for buying seeds from, it may brisky business. Plant seeds, may look perfectly right from the outside, but on the inside it could be lacking the vital force and energy to grow into a hardy plant which survives.

One of the ways you can access reliable seeds is if you save seeds from your own plant. Imagine you have saved the seeds of aster. From this, what kind of blossoms are you expecting? It is nice to see a good blossom once a year, but that is not all that you should look forward to. For the purpose of the seed is not to produce one beautiful blossom and then wither and die. It should parent a hardy and tough plant which can produce multiple blossoms. Only then you call a seed a healthy seed.

So when you want to save the seeds of your own plant, there are plenty of aspects that you have to consider: is it hardy and tough? Is the shape alright and is it symmetrical? Does it offer several healthy blooms? All these aspects need to be taken in consideration before you select a seed.

If you ever visit a seed shop you might see several blooms being tied with a string. What does it mean? It means that these particular blooms have been selected by the seed shop owner for its seeds. If you now carefully look at the plant, you can see what the criteria are for such a selection.
Size of the seed is another aspect to consider when buying seeds. It is difficult to tell the health of the plant from where the seed has been selected, and all you have in your hand is the seed and nothing else. So take a good hard look at the seed and choose the biggest and healthiest looking of them all. The reason for this can be explained through a simple example. When you break open a bean, or a peanut, you see the plant inside and you know the importance of size. A large and healthy seed will ensure that the plant is equally healthy and prone to growth.

The plant as it starts to grow fro the seed will draw nutrition from the two pods of the pea, as mentioned above. The food is stored in these two pods not just for us to eat and enjoy but for the future baby plant which will grow from this seed. So the larger seed you choose, the more food it has in store. The sapling draws food from these large seeds till it develops roots to do the future survival jobs. So if you choose a see that is small and thin, chances are that there will hardly be any food for the baby plant to draw from and survive.

The botanical name for this little food storage unit of the seed is called cotyledon. When there are two in a seed they are called cotyledons. Plants which bear cones like pine have multiple cotyledons whereas most plants have one or two cotyledons.

Following the human principle of healthy babies, healthy plantlets also grow from healthy and large seeds.

The other problem often faced by seed buyers is the assurance of purity. Seeds of a plant are often mixed with other seeds and from out side it is impossible to differentiate the pure ones from the fraud. The seeds could also be dirty. All foreign particles from larger seeds can be detected and picked out to make you your seed pot clean. But when small seeds are mixed with impurities, it is nearly impossible to get them cleaned before use.

The third problem of buying seeds is their overall viability. What looks alright from outside, may not bloom at all. Reasons for a seed to become unfeasible could be many: they may have been picked from immature plants; they may have been kept in a freezer; they are too old. It is important to remember that seeds retain their power to grow and mature limited to only a few years. Then they are useless. The viability period differ from one seed to another.

The germination possibilities of seeds can be found out through testing. If the chance percentage is very low, it is better not to plant such seeds unless they are very small. Now why should the size of the seed be important here? The reason is that when small seeds are planted they are usually sown in drills. Most amateur gardeners sprinkle seeds very heavily, resulting in a large number of seeds being used for planting. So some of the seeds grow and germinate from this heavy and random planting method. You could say that quantity makes up for quality.

In the case of larger seed, like the corn for example, where planting is done only with a few seeds at a time, germination percentage is a critical factor for consideration.

While 50% is the average germination percentage for smaller seeds, it is considered too low for larger seeds. For beans, the percentage is 70%, though if sub-standard seeds are planted; it is not too sure whether any significant amount of this 70% will also show up. But if the seeds are of lettuce, you could take a chance and plant them.