Promises, Promises

There was a book that I read to my son when he was small, long before that fateful day when I opened his door to wake him up one morning, gasped, and came running back out to tell Dave, "There's a hairy man in our son's bed!"

The book was called "A Seed is a Promise," and it was one of those fairly unmemorable kids' books that talked in very general terms, with cartoonishly unsophisticated graphics, about what fun it is to dig in the dirt and plant seeds and…well, you get the picture. We had lots of these books, mixed in helter-skelter with really good ones like The Wreck of the Zephyr, In the Night Kitchen, Mitkey Astromouse and some quirky titles put out by a publisher called Harlin Quist, featuring work by authors like Eugene Ionesco, Guy Billout and Etienne Delessert.

But the title of that pedestrian little paperback always stuck with me somehow, and it came back today when I took the tomato seeds I'd been drying (top) and scraped them into plastic sandwich bags that I faithfully labeled (left).

Should I still be able to find them next spring when it's time to start thinking about sprouting a new garden, these little promises might just end up fulfilled in some salads and sauces next year.

Read about how to save seeds from tomatoes.