“FIRST of all, we must understand that the seed has a coat which holds the living, sleeping baby. You see, the baby itself is so tiny and delicate that it would not be safe for it to be out without its seed coat. The wind and the sun would soon dry it up and kill it; then, too, it would die of hunger, for it is too little to find its own food. So its mother wraps the baby up in its strong seed coat, and puts its food in beside it, in the same coat. And there the seed baby lies sound asleep until—until everything is just right for it to wake up. The time it likes best to awaken is in Spring, when the weather is getting warm.
Seed Babies in Their Coats
You will put your seed babies, coats and all, into the warm ground early in the Spring, when they will feel like growing. Then you will dampen them, for without moisture and food, the seed baby will not wake up. The moisture swells the seed coat, and wakens the baby, and gets the food ready for the baby to eat.
The baby begins to eat the food its mother put inside the seed coat; it stretches itself, and pretty soon sends down into the earth a “teeny-weeny” rootlet. This rootlet takes a little food from the earth up to the baby. Oh, yes, plant soup, that is the kind of food it takes. Plant soup is mixed earth and water.
How good it is for the plant child, depends on how sweet the soil is, and how much humus or compost or manure food is in the soup. Humus soup tastes wonderfully good to the baby plant.
Cotyledons
Well, not only does the baby plant send down this tiny rootlet, but its tiny stem grows upward, and bursts through the seed coats and show two tiny leaves.
The two tiny leaves which appear on top of this stem, while down in the soil grew larger, threw open the seed coat, and came up to the surface for the air and sunshine.
These leaves are called the seed-leaves, or cŏt-ŷ-lē´-dŏns. They are not the true leaves of the plant baby, but are nurse-leaves which go ahead of the leaves of the baby plant, and really hold the true leaf of the baby between them.