The Library

Beginning Seed Saving for the Home Gardener by Jim Ulager
How home gardeners with limited time and garden space can reclaim the joy and independence of seed saving Beginning Seed Saving for the Home Gardener explores how seed saving is not only easier than we think, but that it is essential for vibrant, independent, and bountiful gardens. Many home gardeners refuse to eat a grocery store tomato, but routinely obtain seeds commercially, sometimes from thousands of miles away. And while seed saving can appear mysterious and intimidating, even home gardeners with limited time and space can experience the joy and independence it brings, freeing them from industry and the annual commercial seed order.

Organic Seed Production and Saving: The Wisdom of Plant Heritage by Bryan Connolly
This NOFA guide includes information on: the strengths and witnesses of hybrid varieties, selecting varieties, saving seed and improving crops, intellectual property rights, pollination biology, harvesting, cleaning, storage, germination testing, and details on individual crops.

Saving Vegetable Seeds: Harvest, Clean, Store, and Plant Seeds from Your Garden by Fern Marshall Bradley
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!

The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds: 322 Vegetables, Herbs, Flowers, Fruits, Trees, and Shrubs by Robert E. Gough
A full-color resource explains how to gather, clean, and store seeds for three hundred different kinds of vegetables, fruits, herbs, flowers, trees, and shrubs, as well as how to propagate and care for new seedlings.

The Heirloom Life Gardener: The Baker Creek Way of Growing Your Own Food Easily and Naturally by Jere Gettle
In this invaluable resource, Jere and Emilee Gettle, cofounders of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, offer a wealth of knowledge to every kind of gardener-experienced pros and novices alike. In his friendly voice, complemented by gorgeous photographs, Jere gives planting, growing, harvesting, and seed saving tips. In addition, an extensive A to Z Growing Guide includes amazing heirloom varieties that many people have never even seen. From seed collecting to the history of seed varieties and name origins, Jere takes you far beyond the heirloom tomato.

The Manual of Seed Saving: Harvesting, Storing, and Sowing Techniques for Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruits by Andrea Heistinger
This authoritative guide brings together the experience of experts in the field who have found, through careful trialing, how to reliably maximize seed quality and yield for more than 100 crop plants. Clear information on such critical issues as pollination, isolation distances, cultivation, harvest, storage, and pests and diseases is provided. The Manual of Seed Saving is an essential reference for all food producers from vegetable growers to small-scale farmers.

The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving by Micaela Colley
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. Through simple lessons and master classes on crop selection, pollination, roguing, and the processes of harvesting and storing seeds, this book ensures that these time-honored traditions can continue. Many of these vegetable varieties are treasured for traits that are singular to their strain, whether that is a resistance to disease, an ability to grow well in a region for which that crop is not typically well suited, resistance to early bolting, or simply because it is a great-tasting variety. In an age of genetically modified crops and hybrid seed, a growing appreciation for saving seeds of these time-tested, open-pollinated cultivars has found a new audience from home vegetable gardeners and cooks to restaurant chefs and local farmers. Whether interested in simply saving seeds for home use or working to conserve rare varieties of beloved squashes and tomatoes, this book provides a deeper understanding of the art, the science, and the joy of saving seeds.

The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by Janisse Ray
The Seed Underground is a journey to the frontier of seed-saving. It is driven by stories, both the author's own and those from people who are waging a lush and quiet revolution in thousands of gardens across America to preserve our traditional cornucopia of food by simply growing old varieties and eating them. The Seed Underground pays tribute to time-honored and threatened varieties, deconstructs the politics and genetics of seeds, and reveals the astonishing characters who grow, study, and save them.