Germinate: The Essential Guide to Seed Starting and Saving

A friendly and thorough guide to everything gardeners need to know to successfully germinate seeds and raise healthy seedlings.

This book offers what no other seed-starting guide on the market does: condensed germination and seed saving information for 500 kinds of edible and ornamental plants, from arugula to yucca and achillea to zinnia. This encyclopedia section will be a dream come true even for experienced seed starters. 

Author Joseph Tychonievich will leave no gardener behind, and thus he starts with two chapters on fundamental concepts of seed biology, function, and dormancy. After providing this solid basis for understanding the factors that influence seed germination, which will be especially important for those readers new to seed-starting, Joseph dives into chapters on specific techniques, offering clear, step-by-step instructions throughout for germinating and harvesting seeds of annuals, biennials, perennials, shrubs, and trees, including: 

• Sowing outdoors—direct sowing
• Sowing indoors—greenhouses versus lights, container choices, soil mixes, light, temperature
• Sterile culture
• Seed saving
• Seed genetics

Whether you want to save seeds from heirloom vegetables in order to live a self-sufficient life, sow a bed full of cut flowers to fill vases in your house, collect seeds from local plants to grow a pollinator garden, grow a shade tree for the front yard, or germinate succulents for the windowsill, this book will show you how to do it.