Like most people, I don’t bother looking at those wonderful seeds when I order or plant them. I look at the goal: the produce they will become.
Perhaps we should take a closer look at these amazing things. And it is amazing that something only a sixteenth of an inch in diameter can become a four pound cabbage.
Wonderful Seeds
When I wrote “The Pumpkin Project”, I did several investigations about seeds. Different varieties of pumpkins can have very different sizes of seeds.
Different vegetables and flowers have very different seeds too. Some, like portulaca (moss rose) have seeds almost too tiny to see. Cabbages and their kin have tiny round seeds. Lettuces are flat.
Each of these seeds has the potential to become a plant many times the size of the seed. Squashed inside that seed is an embryo plant and endosperm or food for that plant.
Seeds for Food
We eat lots of seeds. Perhaps you think of nuts. However, flour is ground up wheat seeds. Corn meal is ground up corn seeds. Beans and peas are seeds.
Wildlife eat seeds too. Turkeys and deer eat acorns. Squirrels eat those and other nuts. Birds feast on grass and other seeds.
Each of those consumed seeds could have become a plant. In a way we are lucky they don’t all have a chance to grow.
Prolific Plants
What if a single dandelion invaded a lawn one spring. By the end of that spring, if all of the seeds it produced grew in that lawn, there would be no lawn. That expanse would be a field of dandelions.
Don’t believe me? Get a dandelion seed head and count all the seeds in it. How many of these does a single plant produce in one spring?
In the Garden
I might have a fairly large garden. It produces, I hope, enough produce for us to eat for the entire year, fresh or stored. If everything goes well, there will be extra to sell to cover my seed costs.
Even so, I rarely use all the seeds in a packet. Each of those wonderful seeds wants to grow and I feel bad about not giving them a chance. Some of them will get lucky when they get shared with other gardeners.
