How to Save Better Seeds

Originally published 2023-04-20. By Stewart Kahn Lundy.

When you are born, you are a bundle of raw potential; as you mature, your life becomes more lived, and eventually, more of your life has been actualized than remains unperformed. Similarly, art itself feels like being born: a spiritual idea makes contact with the material world but there it must be crafted into being. Birth imparts potential, but life desires to be realized. 

Within each seed are enormous possibilities. In the emergence of the plant from the seed, the seed’s potential progressively manifests as the actual plant. How a plant arises from a seed presents quite a mystery, but no anomaly. “Mystery is not one of the possibilities of reality. Mystery is what is absolutely necessary in order for reality to exist.”1

If an artist receives inspiration, she will uniquely craft her inspiration, refracted through the prism of her soul. No artist will manifest the same inspiration in the same manner, nor should any try. Likewise, every seed carries a particular inspiration but molds it uniquely. You could almost say that each separate plant species embodies the handiwork of a specialized “school” of artists. One group crafts dandelions, and another crafts barberries, but all are inspired by one spiritual plant.  

A seed carries pure potential, waiting to be realized. The more a plant develops, the more real it becomes and the less possibility remains. Like a work of art developing on a blank canvas, when a tomato grows, its pattern gradually becomes more predictable. The gardening guru Alan Chadwick joins this line of thought when he says, “Art is seed, is idée.2 Craft is plant, metamorphosis.”3  Chadwick was fond of paraphrasing Goethe, “the seed is utmost idée and least metamorphosis.”4 Chadwick’s words regularly conceal the germ of truth using unusual terms as a safeguard against any sort of superficial understanding. His meaning entails something more primordial. He does not at all mean “idea” the way you might think of it as some interesting thought that might occur to you. Instead, Chadwick chose peculiar terminology precisely because it forced you to engage in a new kind of thinking. By using idiosyncratic words, Chadwick forced his audience to think whether or not they particularly felt like it!

In Chadwick’s mind, idée appears as a kind of a living spiritual process -- you might even say that it is an Idea with a capital-I. In the fullest sense, none of us have ever had such an Idea. That would be impossible. They are simply too big to circumscribe. American plant pathologist Frank E. Egler, who assisted Rachel Carson in writing Silent Spring, reminds us that “Ecosystems are not only more complex than we think, ecosystems are more complex than we can think.” This idée is such an enormous concept that it doesn’t even fit into a concept at all. The idée points to the pure potential of all possible plants: every leaf, every root, and every flower. But every single seed embodies this one idée in its discrete way in the same way that every performance of Hamlet through history is always also unquestionably Shakespeare’s Hamlet.5 The real experience of the play does not exist apart from its performance on stage. In the words of Chadwick’s mentor, Rudolf Steiner, a kind of “chaos” arises in a well-formed seed. What is “chaos” if not unformed potential? As a plant grows up, it becomes more and more orderly, but as a tiny seed, so many possibilities remain.

In short, you are seeking inspired seeds. When saving tomato seeds, you may place the freshly gathered seeds in water to let them ferment. The seeds that end up floating are uninspired and whether or not you discard them, they will never germinate. Though it may sound counterintuitive, tomato seeds that float on water rise to the surface because they are uninspired. How much does spirit weigh? It can’t be very much at all and yet that is precisely why it must be anchored to physical substance. Hollow seeds are simply lacking the heavy substances necessary to draw down lighter forces into the material world. As Milan Kundera wrote, “The heavier the burden, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”6 You are after the heaviest seeds precisely because plant life is made of weightless light and therefore needs the weight of a material substance to remain anchored to our physical earth. 

Inspired seeds have the utmost potential and will tend to sink in water. Some gardeners save their seeds according to planting calendars, and some just when the timing seems right. But if you want to sort your seeds, you must make the water denser. Freshwater springs produce wonderfully drinkable, pure waters. As they join streams and tributaries, this freshwater gradually accumulates sediment and minerals and becomes saltier. By the time it reaches the coastline, rivers are carrying all sorts of dissolved elements out to the ocean. Where else does the sea receive its saltiness? And there you have it: springs are fresh and oceans are salty. Freshwater runs downhill and there resides the denser saltwater. To make the water denser, you must add sea salt.

Consider effervescent flowers on the one hand and gravitational roots on the other. Essential oils evaporate from blossoms while mineral salts accumulate in the roots. A curious event occurs when the flower produces a seed: something passes from the salty root up to the top of the plant and there the seed is formed, which naturally wants to fall to the earth. Nature itself is wiser than we are clever, and she partially separates seeds by density herself every season. When they fall to the ground, the densest seeds tend to settle into the soil while the hollow uninspired seeds float away with rain. Nature does this haphazardly for all her seeds, but you want to develop specific plants for your uses. If you abandoned seed selection to Nature’s whims, such wild plants would still be quite healthy though they may not taste the way we’d prefer. Only where people have forgotten how Nature selects seeds do they unwittingly save poor seeds. What Nature does spontaneously for her purposes, you must perform intentionally for your own. And so to water you add sea salt. 

When you add salt to the water, the liquid becomes considerably more earthy. With the addition of a mere tablespoon of sea salt to the water, you will see many seeds rise to the surface leaving others at the bottom. The more inspired seeds sink and the less inspired seeds float. If you skim off the seeds above and add even more salt, yet another set of seeds rises to the surface. Repeating this, you will witness an entire spectrum of seed quality. You don’t need to be worried whether the seeds will be harmed by the salt water. Dry the seeds on a paper towel and they will be suitable to store as you would normally keep seeds. Sorting seeds offers a beautiful activity for the slower winter months.

In the seed, you see the finest concentration of earthly substance in the plant distilled from the root, whereas the greatest expansive expression of cosmic substance culminates in the fruit collected from the atmosphere.  Goethe refers to the seed as the “greatest contraction” and here you can glimpse its intimate relationship with the root itself. The root longs for the earth and follows gravity. The seed desires the soil and returns to her by the grace of gravity. 

“From the seed up to the highest development of the stem-leaf, we observed first an expansion, after which we saw the calyx arise from a contraction, the petals from an expansion, the reproductive organs by another contraction, and shall now soon make out the greatest expansion in the fruit and the greatest contraction in the seed. In these six steps Nature completes, without pausing, the eternal work of the propagation of vegetables.”7

When only twenty percent of your seeds remain at the bottom of your saltwater solution, you have identified your most inspired seeds. You want seeds that can grow to be great actors with marvelous performances. A curious “rule of twenty” seems to apply to so many things -- in economics, twenty percent of your labor produces about eighty percent of the real value. Or even in livestock: twenty percent of the animals carry eighty percent of the parasites. In short, much of what we do is wasting our time when we consider ourselves to be doing productive work.

For the little time it costs us, finding your most inspired seeds is one of the most precious things you can ever do. If you read this and think, “I simply don’t have the time for such things,” then you should remember that you could have sorted countless seeds in the time you’ve just spent reading all these words! 

This doesn’t merely apply to the seeds you’ve grown yourself, but especially to the seeds you purchase. Seeds brought in from elsewhere will rarely perform quite as well as seeds arising from your garden. You need to start with some seeds from somewhere, but friends remain the best source for new seeds. As the visionary St. John wrote: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”8 You would do well to test every seed that engages your attention before permitting it to join the ongoing performance of your garden. No reasonable business owner will hire a stranger without an interview. Why should you be any less selective about your seeds for the garden? 

Only at the moment of reunion between the seed and the soil can you say that the plant is conceived. The plant pre-existed the sprout, but only as pure idée in the seed. You are wrong to imagine that the daughter plant is being built out of the mother plant. No, the child plant remains connected directly to its mother plant only through the umbilical nourishment provided in the seed. If the seed has the right moisture, it has already reunited with the heavier elements that sink with gravity. In the moment of germination, you discover the birth of the plant. At this moment, the seed chaos receives a new imprint of ordering from the cosmos. As the astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote, “The soul of the newly born baby is marked for life by the pattern of the stars at the moment it comes into the world, unconsciously remembers it, and remains sensitive to the return of configurations of a similar kind.”9 The moment of germination is of great importance, though many people imagine that every seed germinates at the same rate. The actual moment of birth in the seed marks the seedling with the stamp of the world around it. Some seeds like corn take many days whereas barley leaps up instantly -- it is the difference between an easy birth and a gentle birth, but in the end, the birth chart of the child belongs to its very first breath.

Immediately after germination, an embryonic plant can survive on the nourishment gifted from the mother plant. But pretty soon, it begins to develop a strong desire for the earthy element and not just the watery element. At this point, the plant longs for salts, and its roots reach out hungrily. At this stage, the seedling begins to feed off the remains of many mother plants. In a way, humus is like nectar from the roots of mother plants -- mother’s milk for little seedlings. 

An agriculturalist once urged me to purchase a seed density sorter, but with only a little research it was easy to discover that such machines are prohibitively expensive. It took a year of gentle meditation to arrive at a practical way for gardeners to employ the same principle. Conventional farmers sort seeds by density which is part of how they can still guarantee good germination rates despite some unhappy farming practices. 

Beware of a “foolish consistency”10 that might distract us from the phenomena right in front of us and seduces us into our heads where the gravest of errors are manufactured. Some seeds are designed to float, and others like chamomile are so tiny that they must be sown together with sand.  And then there are oil seeds, which must float to be good oil seeds. Sorting for inspired seeds should not be considered a thoughtless dogma but should be carried out sensitively. Some seeds may need no sorting at all, but you will recognize those quite clearly. 

The idée is too big to be contained by the confines of the mere intellect because it is alive. When you visualize the plant, you cannot reduce it to mere verbosity, for “If a picture could be explained in words, words would suffice and the picture would be superfluous.”11 Within the idée of a plant resides all possibilities of every plant, even the ones that seem contradictory. If you attempt to eliminate all unresolved points of tension in your mind, you invariably remove yourself from reality by ignoring what doesn’t “fit” into your worldview, gradually moving into the pleasing world of delusion. You must embrace apparent contradiction to find the unitary idée expressing itself in every single plant, for the idée contains multitudes.