Editors of Organic Gardening - Seed Starts & Smarts: An Organic Gardener’s Guide to the Fundamentals of Growing Plants from Seed

To make a seed, plants do the deed. To sow a seed, dirts all you need.

Sowing seeds is first and foremost an act of faith. Whether broadcast across the top of a prepared seedbed or tucked lovingly into a container of growing medium, seeds can seem small, inert, and inconsequential. But each one holds the promise of something much biggerjuicy tomatoes, lush foliage, brilliant blossoms. When we put a seed in contact with warm, moist soil, we see past the tiny, dry morsel to the promise it holds for a green and growing future.

Sowing seeds of plants that yield food for humans and livestock dates back to the beginnings of human history. Civilization as we know it rests on the foundation created by the earliest agricultural endeavors, when people first intentionally planted seeds and then stuck around to tend the crop and gather the resulting harvest.

Growing plants from seed can be one of the most satisfying and intriguing aspects of gardening. Almost all gardeners have grown vegetables from seed. But most kinds of plantsannuals, perennials, herbs, and even treesmay be grown from seed. Starting from seed is natures way because it worksin the wild or in the garden, seed starting is efficient, effective, and easy.

Ethne Clarke

Editor in Chief

Like a battery, a seed represents potential energythe promise of movement, change, and activity seemingly inert but waiting for the right conditions to activate it. Seeds come in an amazing variety of forms and sizes, from the dustlike seeds of begonias to the hefty coconut. Seeds are living links between generations of plants, carrying the vital genetic information that directs the growth and development of the next plant generation. Seeds are alive. They even breathe as we do, absorbing oxygen and giving off carbon dioxide.

From a botanical standpoint, a seed is a plant embryo with its supply of nutrients, often encased in a protective seed coat. Some of the things that gardeners think of as seeds actually are fruits, dry or fleshy, that may contain multiple seeds, but the result is the same when the right combination of warmth and moisture awakens the dormant embryos within. A few of the things that gardeners treat as seeds are not seeds at all but vegetative structures such as tubers and bulbs (see below). While vegetative structures such as onion sets may seem seedlike, they are grown in the garden more like transplants than like actual seeds.

Its not necessary to understand the botanical intricacies of how seeds are formed or to know what lies within a seeds outer coat to have a beautiful, bountiful garden. Most gardeners get along fine by just sticking seeds into soil at the right time of year, without giving much thought to pollination, dormancy, or cotyledons. But knowing what stimulates germination can inform decisions about where and when to plant each kind of seed, as well as whether to start seeds indoors or sow them directly into garden soil. Understanding how a plant is pollinated and how and when its seeds form and ripen is the foundation for preserving seeds from heirloom crops and for selecting cultivars uniquely suited to growing conditions in the garden.

Most garden seeds contain two cotyledons, or seed leaves; these plants are referred to as dicots (short for dicotyledonous). Perhaps the best-known example of a dicot is a bean seed with its two fleshy seed leaves. Plants in the grass family, which includes all of the grains, are termed monocots (short for monocotyledonous), meaning they produce just one seed leaf upon germination. Particularly among dicots, the seed leaves often bear little resemblance to the true leaves that follow.