cover image Starting Seeds: How to Grow Healthy, Productive Vegetables, Herbs, and Flowers from Seed

Starting Seeds: How to Grow Healthy, Productive Vegetables, Herbs, and Flowers from Seed

Barbara Ellis. Storey, $8.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-1-61212-105-5

Consider the seed. A single seed, no matter the size, carries all the needed building blocks to become, say, a towering beech tree. The trick is helping it along. Ellis (The Veggie Gardener’s Answer Book) takes the project in hand and with meticulous, sometimes excruciating, detail, leads the reader step-by-step through ways to place the seed in the dirt and then coax it into reaching its potential as full-fledged food and/or astonishing garden beauty. From tending to those fussy “special-needs seeds” by means of a helpful lesson on the necessity for stratification, to calculating the optimal watering strategy (soaker hoses are the vegetable gardener’s best friend), Ellis enables even the hopeful beginner to plan the garden, implement it from seed, and then behold the glory: seeing the magic unfold when, with proper care and the work of one’s own hands, the little speck of DNA-packed life rises from the ground in beauty, vitality, and wonder. (Jan.)