Bonsai update – we have lift-off

One of life's little mistakes that most of us make repeatedly is to assume stuff. Assume X will be OK. Assume Y will happen. Assume Z will get in touch about W ...

And in the case of my little bonsai curry tree project, I just assumed on Day One that the seeds would sprout easy-peasy. After all, they have a "weedy" reputation, so I assumed the least of my worries would be getting the seeds to sprout.

Now, as a bit of a sworn enemy of assuming stuff, I like to look things up, to do my research. And so the next morning after planting my curry tree seeds, I actually went onto Google and looked up "Curry tree seed". Panic!

Well, more accurately, "unjustified panic!". A few of my Google hits told me that sprouting curry tree seeds was "unreliable", "sporadic", "inconsistent" ... you get the picture. Iffy at best, and so what you see below is my calm reaction to panic. I planted eight more seeds in a plastic seedling punnet.

I needn't have bothered to panic. Most of them are coming up, but not all of them. To refresh memories, I first posted about my curry tree bonsai project on February 24, then I went into panic mode on February 25, and here we are three and a half weeks later, happy as can be with six baby curry trees poking their little green heads above the soil.

I am not sure why the seeds in the plastic punnet are doing better than the one in the bonsai pot itself. All are in the same sheltered spot in the garden and all are receiving identical amounts of rain, warmth and sunshine. So I am adopting a "survival of the fittest" policy for the contender. 

A month from now there should be one or two seedlings that are doing best ... and that does encourage me to think that maybe having two identical bonsai-from-seed projects might not be such a bad idea, either. I haven't really got a clue what I am doing, apart from very very basic knowledge, plus Googling, so two pots doubles my odds of success, sort of.

The seedling in the pot itself currently is the weakest of all the candidates, but it's early days yet. Leaving a seed to grow undisturbed in the pot in which I hope it will spend many happy years is an appealing notion, so I will take a kindly, tolerant view of the progress of this first seed planted and be very reluctant to decide that it has to go.

Gardening is a bit awful like that. You get to cull the weak, decide the fate of other plants. There's just a tinge of being a conscientious medieval monarch to it all, don't you think?