Cultivated Plants

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SEED-SAVING AND SEED-SOWING. Doubtless many will look here for instructions as to the general management of seeds, for few things are more perplexing to the amateur cultivator. How shall I sow my seeds ? or when is the proper time to sow Wallflowers ? and hundreds of similar questions, are annually...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SEED-SAVING AND SEED-SOWING. Doubtless many will look here for instructions as to the general management of seeds, for few things are more perplexing to the amateur cultivator. How shall I sow my seeds ? or when is the proper time to sow Wallflowers ? and hundreds of similar questions, are annually received by the patient editors of our horticultural journals; and it was partly to meet cases like these that the present section was written. The management of seeds may be considered under two heads? seed-saving and seed-sowing; and we shall commence with the first-named branch of the subject. SEED-SAVING. It was formerly necessarily the practice of all horticulturists to save their own seeds, but it is now quite optional whether they do so or not, as the nurseryman includes it as a very important branch of his business; and it is frequently both better and cheaper to buy seeds than to save them. Most of our principal seedsmen have extensive seed-farms in favourable parts of the country, where great care is taken to keep the sorts or varieties pure by weeding out bad varieties, or rogues, from the seed-bearing plants. This careful selection of seed- bearing plants is an important matter; for if plants were left to themselves, and seed gathered indiscriminately, the strain or variety, no matter whether flowering-plants or vegetables, would soon degenerate or revert towards the type or species from which it had been originated. In the case of Cabbages, Broccoli, Turnips, and other plants which are easily altered by cross-fertilisation, it is necessary to grow the varieties quiteseparate from each other; and it is a common practice to send the seed to different parts of the country, where it is grown in a field or plot by itself that is quite separate from any other brassica...