Recommended Reads

Most Green-thumbed people at one point decide it's time to start saving their own seeds. Raising your own seed is extremely gratifying. Even after 20 years, I find it exciting and rewarding. The best part of all is sharing the harvest with friends and family. Healthy plants come from healthy seed. Seeds you collect yourself, you can watch germinate, turn into a seed-ling then maturing into incredible tasting food. It's truly the miracle of life. 

I'd like to share with you my proven strategy of seed saving. This compact guide will give you wonderful results. Save and grow food better adapted to local insects, parasites and diseases than "modern" varieties. Looks, smells, and tastes much better! Practical advice from an experienced Urban Hillbilly. 

Filled with advice for the home gardener and the more seasoned horticulturist alike, The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving provides straightforward instruction on collecting seed that is true-to-type and ready for sowing in next year’s garden. In this comprehensive book, Seed Savers Exchange, one of the foremost American authorities on the subject, and the Organic Seed Alliance bring together decades of knowledge to demystify the time-honored tradition of saving the seed of more than seventy-five coveted vegetable and herb crops—from heirloom tomatoes and long-favored varieties of beans, lettuces, and cabbages to centuries-old varieties of peppers and grains.

With clear instructions, lush photographs, and easy-to-comprehend profiles on individual vegetable crops, this book not only teaches us how to go about conserving these important varieties for future generations and for planting out in next year’s garden, it also provides a deeper understanding of the importance of saving these genetically valuable varieties of vegetables that have evolved over the centuries through careful selection by farmers and home gardeners.

Seed to Seed is a complete seed-saving guide that describes specific techniques for saving the seeds of 160 different vegetables. This book contains detailed information about each vegetable, including its botanical classification, flower structure and means of pollination, required population size, isolation distance, techniques for caging or hand-pollination, and also the proper methods for harvesting, drying, cleaning, and storing the seeds.

Seed to Seed is widely acknowledged as the best guide available for home gardeners to learn effective ways to produce and store seeds on a small scale. The author has grown seed crops of every vegetable featured in the book, and has thoroughly researched and tested all of the techniques she recommends for the home garden.

Survival food will only get you so far. Once it runs out, you're on your own when it comes to sourcing food for yourself and your family. Survival seeds can be used to plant a survival garden that will ensure you have a long-term renewable source of healthy food.
Learning to grow and save heirloom seeds could be the difference between living a long, healthy life and starving to death in an extended emergency. Survival Seeds: The Heirloom Seed Saving Handbook gives you the knowledge needed to grow and collect seeds from 40 different types of fruit and vegetables.

Seed activist Bevin Cohen takes a deep dive into the hows and whys of the modern seed saving movement. A great how-to guide, leading the reader step by step through the process of saving their seeds from 43 different crops; from adzuki beans to wheat and everything in between. Seed savers of all levels will benefit from Bevin's easy to follow explanations on important techniques such as hand pollination, isolation, vernalization and even basic flower structure.

A book like this would not be complete without stories that honor the many gardeners, farmers and seed keepers that have dedicated their lives to stewarding these heritage varieties. Within these pages, the seed keepers themselves share their stories and help the reader to understand the importance of SAVING OUR SEEDS.