Saving Vegetable Seeds by Fern Marshall Bradley

Blurb:

This illustrated, step-by-step guide shows you how to save seeds from 20 of the most popular vegetable garden plants, including beans, carrots, peas, peppers, and tomatoes. You'll learn how each plant is pollinated (key to determining how the seed should be saved), how to select the seeds to collect, and how to process and store collected seeds. Grow the varieties you love, year after year!

Saving Vegetable Seeds: Harvest, Clean, Store, and Plant Seeds from Your Garden was a short read, but filled with all the basic information you'll really need to start saving seeds from your garden. Author Fern Marshall Bradley broke the entire process down by separating the steps into these three chapters: Getting Started with Saving Seeds; Seed-Saving Techniques; and Saving Seeds, Crop by Crop.

The beginning of the book, the basics of seeds are identified and defined, such as the cross section of a seed, the parts of a flower and how seeds form from them, and self-pollinating vs. cross-pollinating crops. In the seed saving chapter, she walks the reader through her five steps of seed saving: taking care of your plants; harvesting the seeds; cleaning and drying the seeds; packing and storing; and testing viability. Included is how to control pollination (important in open-pollinated types of vegetables), and how to hand pollinate.

Probably the most helpful for me as a gardener was how to test seed viability. I've saved lots of seeds from my garden over the years, but doing a test on the seeds viability was something I've never done. The vegetables Bradley details are beans, carrots, corn, cucumbers, lettuce, melons and watermelons, onions and leeks, peas, peppers, radishes, squash, and tomatoes.

Handy book if you are planning on doing some seed saving, with the varieties she details.

Book Info:

• Saving Vegetable Seeds: Harvest, Clean, Store, and Plant Seeds from Your Garden by Fern Marshal Bradley 
• Storey Publishing; 2014
• ISBN13: 9781612123639
• Paperback, 96 pages.

Disclosure: This book was provided by the publisher, and any opinions are my own.