Call it 'cheap thrills' but I love growing plants from seed. Now I know that a couple of postings ago I was complaining about my capacity for impatience, but I'm not completely bereft of patient waiting genes, and seed-raising is one of the better uses of patience in this plant filled world where I like to spend so much time. Besides, watching seeds come up provides lots of cheap thrills, especially when they come up overnight and you wander outside and there's a new facing smiling up at you from their pot or patch of ground.
OK, on a 'level of difficulty' scale of 1 to 10, where
1 is a weed and 10 wins a Nobel Prize, raising these
'Tiny Tim' cherry tomato seeds are about a 3, but
they're my little toms and as the plants grow only
50cm tall they're exactly what I want for one spot
in the vegie patch. All I need is four plants.
Not so much seeds sprouted as seeds almost ready to
be harvested. These are the 'Microgreens' which came
as free seeds attached to the cover of 'Burke's Backyard'
magazine. I always like to roadtest the free seeds for
myself, just to make sure readers are getting value.
The idea is that you harvest these mini greens for
salads and sandwiches, and hopefully they will also
regrow for you. So far so good, they look delish.
Beetroot coming up amid a sea of mulch. These things
grow best from seed, hating being transplanted as
seedlings. One good tip I've learned is to soak the
corky-looking beetroot seeds in water for a few hours
prior to planting. I did an experiment, and the soaked
seeds came up days earlier than the unsoaked ones.
Still in the teensy-weensy baby stage, this is a sprouted
oregano seedling. The mustardy coloured 'boulders'
also in the pic are slow-release fertiliser grains. To
think this little baby will one day be a far-spreading
beast of a herb is hard to imagine, but then again
lots of footballers looked harmless and cute as babies.
Looking remarkably like oregano babies at this very
first stage of life, this is corn salad.
Chervil seeds come up thin and spindly, only to turn
into lacy, delicate little things a bit like parsley. The
lesson here is don't let plant babies fool you!
Just for fun, I'm going to collect some
seed from some plants I value and have
a go at raising new plants from them.
This is a wonderful plant called perpetual
spinach, which has provided a constant
supply of leaves from early autumn all
the way through winter until now, when
it has finally decided to go to seed. I'm
keeping a lookout for flowers, then I'll
pop a mesh bag over the flower heads
and hopefully will end up with seeds to
sow later on. Expect a blog on this one!
And speaking of future blogs, here's another seed-
collecting effort about to begin. This is the seed head
of the rapidly fading scadoxus which I have featured
here a few times recently. There are four flower heads
forming stacks of seeds now, and I have bagged up
three of them in the hope of collecting the seeds and
germinating them. This unbagged one is my 'Plan B'
option: no bag, just collect the seeds and sow them
in a tray. If it works, brilliant, and if it doesn't, I am
sure I'll still learn something useful (not sure what
that'll be, and I'd rather succeed, thanks!)
Some bloggers have a wonderful, inspiring mastery of seed-sowing and growing, and to point you in an interesting direction, if you haven't visited Michelle's blog called From Seed to Table, that would be an inspirational (and very informative) place to start.
