I still love them. I love the pods, I love the promise, the shapes, the textures and the WONDER that a living plant is sleeping in there -- even in those incredibly tiny ones, smaller than a grain of salt.
It is only in the past few years that I have begun to seriously gather my own seeds and to appreciate those plants that continue to 'come true from seed' and the ones that have been around for zillions of years because someone cared enough to save the seeds and keep them going. It has never been more important than now that we continue to do that.
As we cruise through the winter seed catalogs, we see a number of categories for seed plants. If you want to grow plants from which you can save your own seeds, look for the words "Open Pollinated" or "Heirloom". Avoid "Hybrids". If you save seeds from a hybrid plant, you MAY get a new seedling that is like the original plant, but more likely you'll get a plant that is like one of the parent plants from which the hybrid cross was made. If you let hybrid plants re-seed themselves (that is, if their seeds can survive your climate outdoors) you often find the glorious pale pink ruffled flowers you planted reverting back to what we in High Horticulture refer to as "murky purple". It is not your original plant changing color, it is scrappy seedlings from an original parent plant being stronger than your fancy hybrid.
There is another term used in seed catalogs: "Selected". This means that a grower grows out a whole slew of seedlings and lo and behold, one of them pops up all different! How exciting! Mother Nature at her most creative. So they save those seeds with the hopes that the babies will come 'true from seed', and that this 'oddling' has some value.
Now I know only too well that you can diligently save seeds from your own 'selected' variety (In my case a bronze-red utterly DELICIOUS tomato that came from a group of 'Evergreen' tomatoes that I re-named 'Red Evergreen'). From the seeds of ONE tomato I got ALL THESE COLORS! So if you're serious about saving seeds, you need to keep your varieties far enough away from each other to give you a good shot at 'purity'. This can be accomplished by throwing a row of sunflowers between each tomato variety.
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