Ideals and Reality
It is absolutely a goal of mine to grow most of my annuals from seed. Every year, I have big plans for this, but I know my limitations. I don't have a proper set-up to grow enough from seed at a time, for one thing. And then there is the matter of timing.
Timing is important in the garden, and growing seedlings is particularly precise. When to start the seeds, and when one must plant them out or pop them into a bigger container, is down to a matter of weeks or even days. If your timing is off your seedlings may get sickly, go to seed, or even die.
I absolutely love watching my plants grow from seed, but I often don't have time to do a thing just when it needs doing. And so I am strategic. I have learned to focus on the less time-sensative plants - my beneficial flowers, and most annual herbs. If they fail, I have time to just start over.
I love summer veggies, and I tend to grow lots of the type that need to be planted at just the right time - late enough for the ground to warm up, and early enough to take full advantage of the Summer growing season. I will always try to grow a few of these from seed, but if I miss the window or my first attempt fails, I'm prepared to go right to the garden centre and pick out my seedlings. I just can't stand to miss out on these Summer veggies; they make me so happy. Peas, beans, squash, tomatoes, capsicums, cucumber, zucchini, I could go on...
This is how I find myself at the local garden centre, picking out a cart full of Summer seedlings. And this is how my main veggie bed has gone from just a few sunflowers to a fairly filled-out garden in just a few weeks.
I had a plan skectched out:
This attemps to fit in most of my favourite Summer veggies, and relies on a 2 meter trellis as a crucial feature. This will support beans, peas, a cucumber on one end, and one of my long-shot watermelons on the other.
I am growing on a small scale; I tend to inter-crop and think in square meters when planning. The wooden mini-paths help define the three squares. In this plan, the bottom square contains four tomato plants, the middle is dominated by a zucchini, and the top square is a butternut squash. It is going to be a challenge to keep the butternut from taking over if it does well, but I couldn't help myself. It's on a corner, where it can be allowed to drape down into the paths, or trail into the wilderness of the not yet cultivated area behind it.
The awkwardness of cucurbits that are currently tiny but are destined to take up an entire square meter or several by the end of Summer. One way to make the most use of the space around these seedlings is to plant something that will lead to a quick crop. Lettices or other salad greens are a common choice for this. But I felt this garden bed needed all the help it could get in terms of nutrients, and so I had beans on the mind. Beans and peas are nitrogen fixers - they actually add nitrogen to the soil - and so I plan to plant them all over this bed. So I planned to pop in some bush beans on one edge of the squash's territory and hope I got plenty of beans out of them before the squash smothered them.
That was the plan. This is what it looks like so far:
The view in this picture is the reverse of the sketch, with the butternut squash and bush beans at the bottom. Those beans are the one veggie I successfully grew from seed for this bed. They are in fact the seedlings I photographed as they first emerged in a previous post. They are all doing well, apart from one that got savagely munched by the local snail population. It is particularly satisfying to see things I grew from seed thriving. The magic of watching something grow from seed to a dynamic, beautiful growing plant is always a source of wonder for me.
Yes, I have this idea that I would like to grow everything from seed. But in the mean time I have to work from where I am right now. The main thing for me is the pleasure I get from the cycle of growing, tending, harvesting, and eating by own veggies. There's no way I'm going to let my vision of my ideal gardener-self get in the way of my enjoyment of it.
Timing is important in the garden, and growing seedlings is particularly precise. When to start the seeds, and when one must plant them out or pop them into a bigger container, is down to a matter of weeks or even days. If your timing is off your seedlings may get sickly, go to seed, or even die.
I absolutely love watching my plants grow from seed, but I often don't have time to do a thing just when it needs doing. And so I am strategic. I have learned to focus on the less time-sensative plants - my beneficial flowers, and most annual herbs. If they fail, I have time to just start over.
I love summer veggies, and I tend to grow lots of the type that need to be planted at just the right time - late enough for the ground to warm up, and early enough to take full advantage of the Summer growing season. I will always try to grow a few of these from seed, but if I miss the window or my first attempt fails, I'm prepared to go right to the garden centre and pick out my seedlings. I just can't stand to miss out on these Summer veggies; they make me so happy. Peas, beans, squash, tomatoes, capsicums, cucumber, zucchini, I could go on...
This is how I find myself at the local garden centre, picking out a cart full of Summer seedlings. And this is how my main veggie bed has gone from just a few sunflowers to a fairly filled-out garden in just a few weeks.
I had a plan skectched out:
This attemps to fit in most of my favourite Summer veggies, and relies on a 2 meter trellis as a crucial feature. This will support beans, peas, a cucumber on one end, and one of my long-shot watermelons on the other.
I am growing on a small scale; I tend to inter-crop and think in square meters when planning. The wooden mini-paths help define the three squares. In this plan, the bottom square contains four tomato plants, the middle is dominated by a zucchini, and the top square is a butternut squash. It is going to be a challenge to keep the butternut from taking over if it does well, but I couldn't help myself. It's on a corner, where it can be allowed to drape down into the paths, or trail into the wilderness of the not yet cultivated area behind it.
The awkwardness of cucurbits that are currently tiny but are destined to take up an entire square meter or several by the end of Summer. One way to make the most use of the space around these seedlings is to plant something that will lead to a quick crop. Lettices or other salad greens are a common choice for this. But I felt this garden bed needed all the help it could get in terms of nutrients, and so I had beans on the mind. Beans and peas are nitrogen fixers - they actually add nitrogen to the soil - and so I plan to plant them all over this bed. So I planned to pop in some bush beans on one edge of the squash's territory and hope I got plenty of beans out of them before the squash smothered them.
That was the plan. This is what it looks like so far:
The view in this picture is the reverse of the sketch, with the butternut squash and bush beans at the bottom. Those beans are the one veggie I successfully grew from seed for this bed. They are in fact the seedlings I photographed as they first emerged in a previous post. They are all doing well, apart from one that got savagely munched by the local snail population. It is particularly satisfying to see things I grew from seed thriving. The magic of watching something grow from seed to a dynamic, beautiful growing plant is always a source of wonder for me.
Yes, I have this idea that I would like to grow everything from seed. But in the mean time I have to work from where I am right now. The main thing for me is the pleasure I get from the cycle of growing, tending, harvesting, and eating by own veggies. There's no way I'm going to let my vision of my ideal gardener-self get in the way of my enjoyment of it.
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