Plant sex, seeds and spring

Part 1 of my four-part spring seed sowing series!

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Notes:

• Today’s full newsletter is only available to paid subscribers. It’s part 1 of my 4 part spring series on growing from seed!

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It’s spring. Mudlarks are flying around on nest-building missions with bits of twigs and tufty dog hair in their beaks, the sweet peas are blooming and yesterday I saw two cabbage white butterflies copulating on a nasturtium leaf. Filthy nature. Sordid beasts.

It’s time to talk about sex.

Don’t worry, I haven’t entirely lost my mind (though I’ll acknowledge that is also always a possibility). This is still very much a gardening newsletter and I promise things will remain scientific, fact-based and very grown-up.

Thing is, if you are at all interested in growing plants from seed this spring (and you definitely SHOULD be, because it is ohsomuchfun), you and your garden stand to gain a lot from a more in-depth understanding of plant procreation.

• If you’ve struggled to grow sweetcorn successfully, the answer is: sex.

• If you wonder why your zucchinis are flowering but not fruiting, the answer is: sex.

• If you’ve ever wondered what the difference is between hybrid seeds and heirloom seeds is, the answer is: sex!

• Basically, if you want to sow seeds, save seeds and have more seed-raising success in your garden this spring, this newsletter is for you.

The more you know about the ways in which plants reproduce, the more power you will have to get things growing - and flowering, and fruiting - successfully in your garden. So, in honour of spring, and seed-sowing and sex-ed with John Cleese, today I would like to welcome you to the first in a four part spring series that is all about seeds. Here’s part one.

Why grow from seed?

Plant nurseries are a very modern invention. Prior to the mid-18th century, people acquired plants the good old fashioned way; they begged, borrowed or stole them. Rare plants were sneakily procured from far off lands, grandmothers passed tomato seeds down to their grandchildren, home gardeners (which was basically everyone) sold their own plants or traded with their neighbours. The ‘gardening market’ didn’t really exist. It certainly wasn’t the 127+ billion-dollar industry it is today.

It’s easy to forget - with the ubiquity of modern plant nurseries - that for most of human history, walking into a shop and leaving with some neatly germinated seedlings was simply not a ‘thing’. It’s actually very weird what we do now. Our ancestors would be tittering behind their grubby gardening fingers.

We allow someone to take a handful of seeds (produced en masse and basically for free), chuck them in some soil, add water and leave them in the sunshine for a few weeks. Then we pay $5 for a punnet of six. It’s a genius business idea. I don’t know why I’m not doing it. But, in the absence of my own full-fledged seedling-selling business, I want to convince you that you can - and should - be saving your own seeds and growing beautiful flowers and delicious edibles yourself, for next-to-nothing.

You don’t need to buy all your plants as seedlings from a garden centre. Sowing seeds and growing healthy plants from seed is easier than you might think, thriftier than you can imagine and it makes gardening feel like some kind of awesome witchcraft (even though it’s not; it’s just nature being super cool, as always).

Here’s how to do it.

Hybrid seeds and cross-fertilisation

Before we get to saving seeds and sowing seeds, it would help to have an idea about what’s actually going on when our plants produce seeds. The majority of seed-producing plants create seeds via sexual reproduction. For this to happen, pollen from the stamen (the ‘male’ part of a plant) needs to find its way to a pistil (the ‘female’ part of a plant that contains the stigma, style and ovary). When this happens successfully you get fruit and - inside the fruit - seeds! But it gets more complicated…

• Some plants have male and female parts within the same flower.

• Other plants produce some male flowers and some female flowers.

• Still other plants produce either only male or only female flowers.

• And some plants - like avocados - have male and female parts within the same flower, but the flower opens and closes daily, changing its ‘sexuality’ each time it opens (this is known as protogynous dichogamy)!

Nature is awesome and weird!!! So bear in mind that everything I am about to say will certainly be an oversimplification. These are the broad strokes of plant reproduction and for every generalisation I make there will be whacky and cool exceptions that are totally worth learning about. For the sake of simplicity (and to prevent me accidentally writing a 10 000 word essay) I’m going to stick to the basics.

Self-fertilising plants