On Tue, 27 May 2003 12:45:18 -0400, Pat Meadows
wrote:

On Tue, 27 May 2003 11:06:05 -0400, DigitalVinyl
wrote:

My in the groud garden has various sprouts now. However I've become
suspicious that soe of the sprouts that I thought were from my seed
may not be.

Other than long term experience--how the hell do you tell these little
guys apart? It would be great if a book showed you the seedling stage
as well as the full grown.

There are books that show this. I have one. It's called
'Park's Success with Seeds', author: Ann Reilly.

This book is available online, used, for about $8.00. It's
well worth the money, IMHO, as she also gives you preferred
seed-starting methods for each of hundreds of plants - most
vegetables and many hundreds of flowers - and actual
photographs of the seed leaves of each plant.

This is one of my 'bibles', too! I was very disappointed to find it
out of print, but e-mailed Park's (last year?) and they said a new
edition was in preparation. *Most* useful. Made me decide to let
camellia seeds fall where they might and dig up 'volunteers' rather
than try to cultivate them.

I, too, was going to suggest to Digital that he/she look up the
immature appearance of 'good' plants, so as to be able to reconize
them. As he mentioned, experience is the best teacher, but a tomato,
carrot, or pepper is recognizable fairly quickly. Within a few leaves,
that is. I'm not so sure about 2 tiny plantlets that *might* turn out
to be re-seeded basil, but I'm confident about pulling out the grass
and some common weed starts that I recognize from years past.