The results from the first Book Club poll (for April) are in!

This post shares the poll results for April's Book Club selection... and the winner is... "The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds: 322 Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, Flowers, Trees, and Shrubs"!

Hey everyone! So here are the results from the first Book Club poll (it was close!)

So the the people have spoken and, The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds: 322 Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, Flowers, Trees, and Shrubs by Robert E. Gough it is!

For a while during the past few days The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic : The Parallel Lives of People as Plants: Keeping the Seeds Alive by Martín Prechtel was tied with The Seed Saving Bible: Seasoned Gardening Wisdom to Effortlessly Harvest, Dry, Store, & Germinate Seeds on a Budget | Learn How to Grow Natural & Healthy Fruit, Vegetables, Plants and Herbs by Benjamin Johnson but then at the last minute a few people voted on the book above and turned the tables!

I`ll purchase a copy and post a note when I receive the book to let you all know I have begun exploring it’s contents.

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In retrospect, I was actually looking forward to the possibility of reviewing The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic and discussing it with all of you so I will likely do that regardless of the results of this poll at some later date.

For a couple days, “The Seed Saving Bible” was in the lead and i`ll be honest, I put that one in there just to test the waters and see how many people were really paying attention and looking at the details. Based on reading the table of contents in the preview online and the page count I speculate that the book is, at best, a shoddy quick overview of some isolated aspects of seed saving and at worst a strait up scam. Either way, based on its page count and the grammar/formatting used in it’s preview pages, I highly doubt that it is the compendium of “Seasoned Gardening Wisdom to Effortlessly Harvest, Dry, Store, & Germinate Seeds on a Budget | Learn How to Grow Natural & Healthy Fruit, Vegetables, Plants and Herbs” that it claims to be.

I have purchased a copy of it to analyze it as a thought experiment (and to see if my suspicions are on point and warn others not to buy it if so, if nothing else).

As I noted in a comment recently, I have observed increasingly diminished attention spans in most people engaging online now a days (with so many who spend many hours a day plugged into the endless scrolling feeds of twitter/instgram/tictok type social media platforms).

I included that “seed bible” book as a sort of litmus test to get a feel for how much this Book Club series was going to be influenced by the proclivity of many of us to “judge a book by it’s cover” (and title). I was somewhat disappointed when I saw it in the lead for votes but I thought, “hey at least reviewing it can provide a cautionary tale about judging a book by it’s cover and the frailties of democratic voting systems in the age of endless scrolling and clicking like on titles and pictures of things syndrome” haha.

Upon further investigation I see that there are a whole range of different books claiming to be “seed saving bibles” available on Amazon (all claiming to be anything ranging from 4 in one books to 15 in one books, and all having suspicious looking author bios and/or pitiful page counts!). This leads me to believe that these books are part of some kind of copy pasting of other people’s material and combining together make a quick buck scam/trend, or perhaps some kind of collection of A.I. Chatbot generated seed saving books created by various scammers that are tryna compete with each other. We shall see once I get the book and take a closer look.

But I digress from the book that is the focus of this post.

The Complete Guide to Saving Seeds: 322 Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, Flowers, Trees, and Shrubs by Robert E. Gough here we come!

Here are a few screenshots of the previews of the digital version of the book so any of you that are going to participate in this April’s Book Club can know what to expect if you buy a copy:

I am excited to dive in once my physical copy gets here!

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