Get your garden started | part 6: seeds
The triumphs and tribulations of growing from seed
This garden guide is the sixth in an 8-part series I will be releasing over the next month. It covers the essentials of starting a successful garden. The 8 guides will be available to all paying subscribers and members of the Wild Garden club, and there will be some previews and sneak peeks for free subscribers. Want to access all my garden guides, tours and recipes? Click the button below to upgrade your membership.
Hello and welcome back to the How to get your garden started series that I will be sharing with you over the next four weeks. This is a simple, pared-back series that covers the topics that I think are essential when starting a garden. Think of it as a bit of a primer - a guide to the fundamental starting points to get you motivated and started in your garden this autumn.
If you’re just joining us, you can catch up on parts one, two, three, four and five here:
If you want to access the full 8 parts in this series, you can upgrade your subscription to paid by clicking the button below. It’s also worth noting that if you subscribe now, the price of your subscription will always stay the same - it’ll never increase - even if the subscription fees do go up in the future :)
Now, onto part six - the triumphs and tribulations of growing from seed
Get your garden started | part six
Growing from seed is one of the most satisfying parts of being a gardener. It is something I will never get sick of - seeing how a tiny seed, barely the size of a grain of sand, can become a 6-foot-tall flowering shrub in a single season.
It’s also something that, to the uninitiated, can feel complicated, intimidating and overwhelming. Growing plants from seed can offer a tonne of benefits and can make you feel like some kind of nature wizard, spawning life all over your garden with the wave of a hand. But it can also be a totally frustrating let down. It can leave you staring at pot after pot of nothing but soil, wondering where you went wrong and where the hell your seedlings are.
Growing from seed can - technically - make every part of gardening harder and more confusing. Tiny, newly germinated seedlings are more vulnerable to bug attack, need more frequent watering and consistently mild conditions and let’s not forget that at the start it can be impossible to even identify what you’re growing (is it a successfully germinated chilli seedling or just another random weed??).
That said, growing from seed can also be thrilling, rewarding and it can paradoxically allow you to relax a lot in your garden, because it helps you lower the stakes. As with all things in the garden, you just need the right approach.
In the guide that follows, I want to highlight the benefits you stand to gain by growing from seed, help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls and give you a selection of the easiest seeds to start off with. But before I do that, I want to say this:
Growing from seed can either be fun, low-stakes, wild and free, or it can be fiddly, high stakes and high pressure. I have tried it both ways in my life, and I can say with certainty that the former is much better than the latter.
Here’s what I did that made seed sowing very NOT fun:
I bought seeds for high-maintenance, unusual plants I had never grown before
I really cared whether or not they germinated
I sowed them, painstakingly in little punnets, in SUMMER
I labelled them (or I didn't) and put them on a table out of the way
Some of them never germinated and eventually I threw the entire punnet of soil away
Some of them did germinate, I then a) forgot to water them (they died), b) left them in the sun to fry (they died), c) stressed over where to plant them until they outgrew their pots and got root bound (these also died).
Basically it was one giant multi-month saga of rearing fussy plants in a messy corner of the garden, stressing over planting them and keeping them alive and ultimately killing at least half of them.
Fortunately, sometimes seed sowing has also been the best thing ever…
Here’s what I did that made seed sowing FUN:
I bought (or saved) seeds for plants that I knew were suited to my garden and climate
I bought seeds that I could (mostly) sow direct, especially things like sweet peas, broad beans, snake beans, radishes, beetroot and sweetcorn, with big seeds that were easy to plant
When I bought smaller seeds, I still went for seeds I could scatter direct into the garden - things like basil, mustard greens, coriander, lettuces and fennel
I bought (or saved) a LOT of seeds, and I sowed them en masse, in a few different spots around the garden, to increase my chances of success
I abandoned using punnets for everything except the (few) fancy, novel or unusual seeds that I was unfamiliar with
I accepted that I will probable never label anything in my garden or remember where I sowed anything
I detached entirely from any expectations for a successful outcome
And, when I did all of that, you know what happened? Basil, lettuces and mustard greens popped up in random places through my garden. Patches of coriander and wild rocket germinated and thrived, then flowered and gave me even more seeds than I started with. Sweet peas sprung out of the ground and wound their way up our front fence.
And I lost ALL of the poppy seeds I sowed to some uninvited weed that totally crowded them out.
And my sunflowers never came up at all.
You win some and you lose some, is the point I’m trying to make. But the true beauty of seed sowing is it opens up new opportunities for relaxed, experimental gardening. Especially once you start saving your own seeds, because a single flowerhead will give you hundreds of opportunities to try and try again. The key, I think, is in setting realistic expectations, experimenting a lot, and celebrating the things that do work, the things that do grow, that do thrill us with their beauty.
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