If you want to grow alot of these you need to start them in open flats. Get some plastic trays from the five and dime. You are looking for something that would double as the bottom of a cat litter box. With about a 1/2 inch wood drill bit put about 12 holes in it. Six of them on the curve of the bottom to side. This is so if sitting flat it won't fill with water. I use a compost soil with a little sand and mix 50% with miracle grow soil or peters which is sold in our area. Fill about an inch from the top and water thoroughly. Add more soil if needed to keep an inch from the top. Lay out seeds flat with about the same space as the seeds are wide. Cover with 1/4 inch of soil mix. Mist top of soil until real wet. Set in semi bright light or on porch but not full sun. After they have had three or four leaves come out strong you can gradually introduce them to more sun. Don't worry about thinning out after they start sprouting. Leave in the tray and fertilize as required. Donts soak and don't let dry out. Leave them in tray for first year, then plant them out or in pots. You will end up with over 50+ a tray and are great for starting a whole bed with one tray. Hoped that helped you some it has worked for us for years. Warning; cats love to lay in these flats of young Amaryllis. Here is a link that might be useful: Town Square

Wow! An easy question at last. Without doubt, the very best book on the subject remains "Seed to Seed," by Suzanne Ashworth. It's the definative work on the subject. Make sure you get the second edition, as some places are still stocked with the earlier one. "Growing Garden Seeds" is a small (32 pages) booklet put out by Johnny's Selected Seeds. It doesn't go into great depth, but does provide the basics. "Back Garden Seed Saving," by Sue Strickland, is decidedly British in outlook. But there are many insights you can discover in it as well. Many books on related subjects include info about seed saving. Typical would be Carol Deppe's "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties," and Nancy Bubel's "The New Seed Starters Handbook." There are a few others. But the fact remains, if you have the Ashworth book, you pretty much have the topic covered.

Hi Drew. There are a lot of GW threads on this with a lot of information. Basically, when pods change color and get rubbery, seeds are fully mature. If possible, let pods dry on the vine. If frost or excessive rain threaten, pick the pods and dry them in a warm place with a fan or good air circulation. When pods are dry, shell them and let the beans further dry in a warm dry place on a paper plate or in an open paper bag. I put them in a plastic bags about the end of the year. At that time they can be frozen for 48 hours to kill bug eggs. Store them in a cool place. They can be stored in a freezer in at least two layers of Zip Lock freezer bags.

I found this interesting: Bill P. Back to Story - Help Arctic vault takes shape for world food crops By John Acher Thu Sep 20, 2:36 AM ET In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world's crop seeds in case of disaster. Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom. It is the brainchild of a soft-spoken academic from Tennessee who is passionate about securing food for the masses, and will back up seed stores around the world that are vulnerable to loss through war or disaster. A 20-metre (66-foot) long concrete entrance, still under scaffolding, juts out of the snow-dusted mountain above the coal-mining town of Longyearbyen. It is reached by a switchback road rising to 120 meters above sea level, offering spectacular views of the fjord below and snow-capped Arctic mountains beyond. Visitors descend through the mouth of a gently sloping 40-metre steel tube into the frosty cavern which smells of new cement and is dotted with portable lamps as work progresses for February's opening. "There aren't going to be any better storage conditions than what we will provide here," founder Cary Fowler told reporters during a recent visit to the site in the Svalbard archipelago off northern Norway. "This is a safety deposit box, like in a bank, where you put your valuables." Although this is one of the world's most northerly settlements, an electric freezer will be used to keep the seeds in the three-chambered concrete-lined vault at minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit). If the power fails, permafrost will still keep them frozen, but not as deeply. The project is at the heart of an effort by Fowler's foundation, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, to safeguard strains of 21 essential crops, such as wheat, barley and rice. Rice alone exists in about 120,000 different varieties. Ultimately, it is part of the world battle against hunger, as crop insecurity mainly hurts poor nations. "Crops important to the poorest of the poor have really been neglected," said Roy Steiner, an official at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has provided financial support. "Millet and crops like cow pea receive so little attention." Fowler calls such varieties "orphan crops" because they have no one to take care of them. DIVERSITY FOR EVOLUTION The aim is to preserve genetic diversity, needed by plant breeders in the future to produce varieties able to adapt to challenges like climate change. Crops consist of numerous species, some as different from each other as a "Dachshund from a Great Dane," Fowler said. If such a store had existed 10 years ago, he said, the seeds would have been needed about once a year as seed collections have been wiped out -- for instance by a typhoon in the Philippines and war in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I'm sorry to say we will be using it a lot," Fowler said. Eventually, the vault will have capacity for around 4.5 million bar-coded seed samples and it hopes in its first year to collect half a million. Not all seeds can be stored by freezing. Banana, the world's fourth or fifth most valuable crop, is one example. "The longest viability under these conditions would be that of sorghum -- about 19,500 years," Fowler said. Other varieties will need to be replaced more frequently. "We're trying to capture the diversity not just between different species but within different species -- that's the basis for evolution," said Fowler, an official of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization but his own boss at the Trust. "Extinction happens when a species loses the ability to evolve." SEED PACKETS Norway is contributing some 50 million crowns ($8.6 million) to build the cavern, a sum which Development Aid Minister Erik Solheim said was a pittance for what is gained. "I consider it a development issue ... Poor African countries have fewer resources to protect their genetic heritage than rich countries," he told Reuters at the site. The Gates Foundation, the philanthropic giant created by the founder of Microsoft, has given a $30 million grant to Fowler's effort, including money for packaging seeds in their countries of origin and shipping them to the vault. Some of Gates' money has gone to develop a new style of seed packet, a small silver-colored pouch made of a special foil and layers of other advanced materials to keep seeds dry and frozen -- the "Rolls Royce of seed packets," Fowler said. The Gates Foundation is also helping develop two software systems, one to help manage seed banks and another to link them globally so that plant breeders can find what is available. "Seeds are almost the software of the natural world that has taken millions of years to develop, and we don't know how we will need them in the future," the foundation's Steiner said.