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Sowing seeds: mollycoddling versus tough love

Laura

As with most hobbies you can choose the level of challenge you wish to set yourself when it comes to gardening. Take seed sowing for example: you can choose just to sprinkle annual seeds onto the bare ground in March or April and rake them in, or germinate some tomato plants on your kitchen windowsill – even Caroline managed this last year. 

 

Seeds easily push up through gravel

But as your interest grows, you will need to learn and understand more about plant biology and ecology. Seeds have inbuilt mechanisms, often embedded in their tough seed coats, to make sure they only germinate when the resulting seedlings are likely to encounter the warmth, sunlight and moisture levels they need to get established, and here in Northern Europe this is generally spring.

However, if the plant seed you are sowing is a perennial they often need to be really sure that spring has properly arrived, and the only way they can do this is for it to have experienced the frosts and downpours of winter first.
So I sow a lot of my seeds after Christmas and leave them outside to soak, freeze and thaw for a couple of months. I use deep pots and a gravel topping. I ran through all this with Elaine and Caroline earlier this year when we met up – and caught it on film – but this was quite a challenge in it’s own right; I’m not sure they really got it and looked pretty vacant throughout apart from some quite unnecessary squealing when I inadvertently splashed them with a tiny bit of water.

 

Elaine

Oooh, get her, with her tamper and her vernalisation and her ‘seedlings coming up all over the gravel drive’ (see the video!) That’s all very well for the rarefied world of unusual clematis varieties, but most of just want some half-hardy annuals to plant out in June, a few herbs and some easy veg – and now’s the time to get started with them all.

Elaine’s sweet peas enjoying their root trainer pots

Seed-trays or modules (or even yoghurt-pots with holes punched in the bottom), full of peat-free compost and watered before you sow anything. Lovely.  Sow your seeds at the depth specified on the packet – not thickly; a little grit or vermiculite sprinkled over the top can prevent a crust forming on the surface or the seeds damping-off (collapsing), but don’t worry if you haven’t got any.  Pop a plastic lid or a plastic bag over the top to stop them drying out, put them in a warm place, take the lid off when they’ve germinated.  That’s it. Job’s a good ‘un.  It works for 100s of things – cosmos, and tomatoes, and peas and hollyhocks……….even if you have to be a bit patient sometimes.

I persuaded family and friends to grow dozens of sweetpeas for our daughter’s wedding five years ago – you remember, girls, you LOVED it! – so I know a bit about them.  No need to ‘nick’ the seed  (life’s too short) and you can just sow the seeds in a pot, but what they really like is a long root-run, and natty little jobs called root-trainers are tailor-made for the job. I have found out the hard way that nice cheap loo-roll innards often disintegrate before you’re ready to plant out your seedlings, and they don’t have the little grooves that the root-trainers have, to channel the side-roots downwards. But bog-rolls are good if that’s all you’ve got.
Honestly, just enjoy yourself! Whether you have got a window-sill, or a porch-pot or a hundred-acre park, you can get some seeds for a lot less than the price of a Double Shot Latte Macchiato (whatever that is), and they could give you pleasure for a lot longer.

 

Caroline

You won’t be surprised to hear my seeds are born in the Private Maternity Clinic of a heated seed propagator. I can’t be relied upon to raise anything – including my own children – with dependable efficiency.
So when seed catalogues started to appear in the house this year and I showed signs of wanting to try the experimental ‘Deno’ method of germinating seeds  in the airing cupboard using wet paper towels, husband Michael hit the panic button – or the Amazon button to be precise – and ordered a propagator.

Yes! Germinating sweet pea seeds in a closed tupperware box lined with soggy tissue paper really does work – witness these guys popping out happily.

Now I admire Laura’s ‘tough’ love approach of big pots and gravel (although en masse in her coldframes they look a bit like ‘when Dobbies goes bad’),  and Elaine’s Blue Peter-like devotion to recycling toilet rolls is endearing – but they can’t compete with my neat little custom-designed incubator unit which is popping up seeds faster than our Government up here in Scotland can call for referendums.

They don’t cost a lot (propagators, not referendums obviously) – around £20 and I do agree with my sisters here –  it’s so exciting.  Michael was shocked at how quickly his Alicantes popped up (tomatoes if you’re wondering) but I will concede that no matter how efficient your germination, you’re still left with a problem of where to bring your seedlings on.
I can’t yet banish them outside to the biting North Sea wind but my warm house is sending them into overdrive – or  ‘etiolation’ according to Elaine. I know from experience that in a couple of weeks I’ll be up until 2am every night transplanting them into small pots and balancing them on cool windowsills. Hmm is that twice in one blog I’ve had to bow to my sisters’ better judgement?

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By the3growbags

We're three sisters who love gardening, plants and even the science of horticulture but we're not all experts. We'd love everyone even remotely interested in their gardens to be part of our blogsite.

2 replies on “Sowing seeds: mollycoddling versus tough love”

Just loved the film on seeds (& dear dog and large watering can!) and now feel inspired to try seeding again, so do thank you for that. Really enjoy all the articles, fun, helpful and inspiring, I always want to rush out and buy every one of Louise’s gems! Happy April all!

It’s so nice of you to leave a comment Celia. There is never a shortage of dogs at Laura’s house – every seat seems to come with one already comfortably parked! Yes it’s a privilege to have Louise’s contribution on our website, and we appreciate every visitor who takes the time to read our blog because we really enjoy doing it. Thank you for your encouraging remarks – Happy April indeed! x

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