I did­n’t go crazy on them or spend $100.00 for a cache of seeds either…  I bought them off of Ebay, which may have been a mis­take, but I did­n’t spend more than $20.00 plus ship­ping on a small cache of seeds.  I first want to exper­i­ment with them, see if I can grow them, then go back and pur­chase more seeds.  The goal is to become more self reliant.  The imme­di­ate goal is to teach myself how to become more self reliant.  If the SHTF and I have to hoof it to my BOL, I cer­tain­ly want to be able to be self reliant on as lit­tle mon­ey as pos­si­ble, assum­ing mon­ey is still around.

Now, to the point of this post.  I know NOTHING about seeds.  Hell, if I plant a gar­den, I usu­al­ly pick up the plants at Home Depot or Lowe’s and come home and trans­plant them in the dirt or the pot and nur­ture them to fruition.  Sprout­ing / ger­mi­nat­ing is going to be a whole new ani­mal for me.  So, I did a lit­tle research.  Since I did not plant in the spring, I thought I might plant for sec­ond har­vest in the fall to see what I can do.  Before I do that, how­ev­er, I need to do more research.  Here are a few sites I found to help me get start­ed… I also have sev­er­al PDF books I down­loaded.  I will try to post them fol­low­ing this post.

Here are the sites:

Ger­mi­nat­ing:

• Gar­den­ing Know How:  How to Ger­mi­nate Seeds at Home
• eHow: How to Ger­mi­nate Seeds
• Pri­mal Seeds:  Sprout­ing

I am think­ing that Sprout­ing the seeds will be the hard­est part for me.  I have grown a small gar­den in the past on the deck of my apart­ment with suc­cess, but the sprout­ing requires a high­er lev­el of atten­tion, it seems.

Once the plants are sprout­ed and grow­ing, I also want to know when and how to har­vest the seeds from them, so that I do not have to buy more seeds next year.  This too is an area I am a com­plete neo­phyte.  Well, with the help of Google, I came across this site that will explain to you when to har­vest the seeds from each veg­etable plant in the gar­den.  Pret­ty cool if you ask me.  Just saved me months of tri­al and most­ly error.

Har­vest­ing Seeds:

• Veg­etable Seed Sav­ing Hand­book — I may try to down­load the whole site and turn it into a PDF for myself…

Well, let this be part one of the “Heir­loom Exper­i­ment.”  I will post more when I start this lit­tle project…