What seeds have taught me about patience

 

One very strange thing I haven't been doing lately is visiting gardening centres. Prior to all this covid disruption, you'd probably find me browsing through a garden centre at least once a week. They were right up there with bookshops for me: regular haunts. But that was back then, and I haven't been to a bookshop for quite some time, either.

So, instead of picking up a punnet of seedlings at the local garden centre, for the last few weeks I've either been sorting through my stash of seed packets, searching the small section devoted to seeds at my local supermarket, or — by far the best fun of all — I've been browsing seed catalogues online, placing orders, then waiting for our poor overworked Postie to deliver me the goodies.

Another small padded envelope of seeds arrived in the mail today, and so I thought it's about time to share with you "What seeds have taught me about patience". It's not all good news, but it isn't a disaster story, either. 

On with the slide show.

I love the way coriander seeds hang around on top of the baby leaves until the very last moment. It looks like the baby plants are telling the seeds to "buzz off, now scram!"
It's a tiny bit late in the season for coriander — I normally start sowing seeds in autumn — but this will be my last batch for 2021. They have just a couple of months to grow into lovely leafy herbs before summer comes on. Once things get seriously warm they go berserk, become seedy in no time, and the leafy herb I love is no more.

I only sowed these basil seeds last Monday, and they're up as fast as those other legendary quick sprouters, rocket. I'm looking for a crowded pot of little plants that will look very photogenic for a few weeks and supply lots of leaves for tossing into the mix with tomatoes, especially. What a team!

I'm not fussy about where/who I get my seeds from, and my seed tin stash has all major and minor companies represented.

These English spinach seedlings came up only a day after the basil, and it's a good thing they're making a fast start. They're another crop which does better in the autumn and winter months, but I've got them in a partly shaded spot to avoid the heat, and I plan to fertilise the daylights out of them to make them grow faster. If we get a good crop, there's nothing Pammy likes more than a Japanese style Gomayagochi spinach salad with her grilled Teriyaki salmon. Home-grown spinach flavour here we come.

Once you get addicted to growing plants from seed, as well as actually planting some of the seeds (eg, the spinach, silver beet and spring onions in the top row) you also end up buying packets of seeds in a "seemed like a good idea at the time" kind of way. I fully intend to grow leeks, lettuce and radish some time soon, I hope. No reason why not, really ...

Here's one of those lessons in patience that seeds have taught me. Usually I am dead lazy about growing chives. Every winter my pots of chives turn into dense, unhappy clumps that turn yellow and look crook. Always a glutton for punishment, I have tried de-potting the clump, diving up the plants and replanting them in fresh mix, and the results have never been all that great. So most years I just buy a fresh punnet of little chives, plant them in a pot and they zoom away! This time, I decided to do it with seeds, and what do you know? (See below) ... 

It takes 14-21 days for the seed to sprout, and this pot took all 21 days to sprout (that was all of July). Now, 6 weeks later, we're in business snipping chives to go into Pammy's scrambled eggs on Sunday morning. But the lesson I have to share with slow-sprouting seeds is to know this in advance, plan well ahead, and try to see the year in three-month-long blocks of time. Impatient "days and weeks" thinking is just too hurried. If you grow chives from seed, think "third quarter of the year" as chive time.

Much more fun, quicker and prettier to look at, the wonderful world of lettuce is a great place for beginners to get started with seeds. There's a zillion varieties to choose from, especially when you start shopping online, and usually lettuce will sprout for you quite quickly.

I've been growing spring onions/scallions/shallots (call them what you will) from seed for several years now. My problem is that I hate wastage, and buying just one punnet of seedlings gives me about three times more seedlings than I have space for them, so I raise small batches from seed each time I start a crop. I cook with them all the time, adding them to salads and stir-fries, as well as using them as a mildly oniony substitute when I don't have any onions at hand. And that classic Chinese ginger and shallot dipping sauce for poached chicken is just heaven on a plate. I miss Yum Cha!

This is what arrived in the mail today, from my favourite online seed supplier, Eden Seeds. Like all the good quality specialists they have a wide range to choose from, and their customer service and delivery speed is reliably very good. This time I succumbed to the lure of two very pretty loose leaf lettuce, and a packet of the hard-to-find, tricky-to-grow and finely flavoured herb, chervil. I've been banging on for years about how good chervil is and so far I think I have convinced no-one. But Pammy loves chervil too, and that's all I need to know to enjoy its flavour. Its lightly aniseedy delicacy is superb with mild-tasting vegies such as zucchini and squash. Transforms them from bland to beautiful.

As well as being a sucker for lettuce varieties in seed catalogues, I am also very susceptible to limited edition tins of biscuits or other products on supermarket shelves. My shed has a goodly number of "collectable" supermarket tins filled with glues, nuts & bolts, and seed packets. All the cricket heroes on this Weet-Bix tin have long retired but this tin has aged nicely, with almost all the colours fading to a bluey-grey, as if there has been a printing mistake at the factory. Inside that tin is a cornucopia of seed packets that is constantly being added to ... more Aladdin's tin than Aladdin's cave.

Last but not least in the slide show is confirmation that not everything in that Weet-Bix tin is an edible. I know that cosmos is a bit weedy, so I have planted a row of cosmos seeds at the back of my Big Red geranium patch. So the plan is this summer the cosmos will add cheery yellow and orange flowers towering over the scrambling concourse of red geraniums, and then after the cosmos season has ended, the Battle Royal will ensue as weedy cosmos grapples with ever-spreading geraniums.

So, even though growing everything this year from seed is like gardening in slow motion, time ticks over steadily. It's spooky, like it has something to do with the position of the sun in the sky or something.

If you are impatient, don't even think about growing chives, chervil or parsley from seed. They're seeds of patience, for the long-term planners.

If you are impatient, get out there and start sprinkling around the basil seeds, the spinach, the lettuce, the rocket. There'll be something happening before one week has passed. 

I'm somewhere in between when it comes to patience. I do have some patience, but not a lot. So I do love it when seeds come up fast.

But I have learned that there's a deep satisfaction when real patience, the long-waiting, not-much-happening-yet kind of patience is rewarded. It's as if time has become an old friend with whom I am strolling through the year, hand-in-hand. 

Small starts

Last week, for just a few moments I almost succumbed to a ridiculous thought, but common sense intervened and I changed my mind. 

What was the ridiculous thought? I momentarily felt guilty about starting off some new crops from seedlings, and for just a minute or two headed for the seed stands at the garden centre, instead of wandering outdoors to where all the seedlings were.

Fortunately, a cluster of sensible brain cells rallied and told me to stop being a fool, go buy those nice, healthy seedlings and save yourself four weeks of fussing over seeds in punnets. And that's what I did. I bought a punnet of four Lebanese zucchini seedlings, and a punnet of four Lebanese cucumber seedlings. And now they're planted and they look great.

Growing crops from seed is fun, but you should never feel it is compulsory. I enjoy doing it partly because of the pleasure of growing something from seed, and also partly because the only way to grow rare or unusual varieties is to start them from seed. Your basic average garden centre has an extremely limited range of seedling varieties to choose from, while an Internet full of online seed catalogues has hundreds, sometimes thousands, more seeds to choose from.

Fortunately for me, I like the smaller, light green Lebanese zucchini very much, and there was a perfectly healthy punnet of four of the things just begging to be planted. As many people like to say these days, it was a no-brainer.

Planted 60cm apart into soil enriched with compost and chicken poo. A layer of mulch, some seaweed solution to water them in, and the job was done in no time.


However, the next photo shows a bunch of baby seeds coming up, and that's because this is the best way to grow some plants. This one is yet another crop of chervil, a delicate herb that looks a bit like downsized parsley, with a lightly aniseedy flavour that goes beautifully with vegetables such as zucchini.

Chervil is a relative of parsley, and like parsley it prefers to start life in the garden as a seed sown directly where it will spend its life. Chervil, parsley and several other common vegie and herb crops absolutely hate being transplanted from a starter pot to the ground. It can be done, and is regularly done, but the plants are rarely happy about it.

Speaking of plants which are related to each other, this Lebanese cucumber seedling does look remarkably similar to the zucchini seedling at the top of this page, and that's because both plants are cucurbits. There are almost a thousand cucurbit species, and the best known other cucurbits to ordinary gardeners are all the pumpkins, melons and gourds. 

Cucumbers like to twine and climb, so I have used five slender bamboo stakes to form a teepee for the cucumbers to climb up. The bamboo stakes were quite long, and they all poke about 15 inches (38 cm) down into the soil. The first really windy day will test how strong the structure is, I guess.

I have planted all four seedlings, which is too many, so I plan to let them race up the teepee, and whichever seems the healthiest plant will be the one that remains.

And so here we have some small starts, two from easy-peasy seedlings, and one crop from seed. It certainly is much less work than getting all three crops started from seed ... a much more sensible way for an old gardener to go about a bit of amateur backyard farming.

The weeds are winning

To misquote Neil Young somewhat, weeds never sleep. We all know that, and at the end of this cool, wet winter in Sydney, the garden weeds have never been happier. They have been having a wonderfully invasive season. Here in Pammy and Jamie Land, it's the usual suspects: the oxalis, chickweed and onion weed in particular, plus a bunch of other little rotters whose names I still don't know.

As if that is not enough punishment for virtuous artists and gardeners, the real kicker is that some of our beloved own plants have decided to go over to the other side — the dark side — and become weeds. Pictured below is Exhibit A: the chervil that decided to plant itself in our Thai lime pot.

The parent patch of chervil which spawned this tropical runaway (pictured below) is about 20 feet (6 metres) distant. It truly beats me how an errant chervil seed made its way down here and UP(!) into the pot but it's obviously happy and healthy, taking advantage of my generous citrus feeding and watering policies, not to mention the cool, green shade provided by the Thai lime tree. 

This little episode starts to make me wonder if this chervil is normal, old-fashioned chervil. Could it be some lab monster? What makes me think this warped, twisted way is the fact that all this thriving chervil didn't come into the world via a packet of seeds. No, this stuff entered our garden via Woolies supermarket, where I bought a simple punnet of "healthy sprouts" that you're meant to snip into your marvellously healthy salad. Here's a link to that story.

Enough paranoia, let's move on to exhibit B: the maidenhair fern that has gone punk.

Compared to the runaway chervil in the lime tree pot, which at least makes gardening sense in that it chose a nice spot to become a weed, this maidenhair fern-ette has gone the full punk rocker and aspires to be a pathway weed growing out of a crack in the concrete. Call me conservative if you like, but this is just not right!

To set the scene, here's our dreary little side path where the garbage bins live, with the maidenhair "weed" in the foreground and some evil asthma weed (Pellitory) in the background, doing its wheezy worst. 

A full 15 feet (about 4.5 metres) away is the none-too-healthy but still alive parent plant, in its garden bed under the cool shade of one of our murrayas. Now I suspect some of you might think this unhealthy adult is the perfectly appropriate, dishevelled parent of a punk weed, but it is the end of winter, the cold winter winds rushing up our side path can be ferocious, and in another month or two this fern should bounce back to better health once the weather warms up.

While I am trying to confect a little outrage here at the thought that some of my garden lovelies want to become weeds, my real feeling is yet another burst of "ain't nature wonderful?"

Should it turn out at the end of my existence that I get the most almighty surprise and end up at a bunch of pearly gates, my name ticked off the guest list and allowed to enter, I will be making a bee-line for the Head Gardener up there in heaven. While there are so many questions I will have to ask (he/she must get sick of old gardeners bothering them) I will definitely be wanting an explanation of how maidenhair ferns turn into punk pathway weeds. Down here on Earth, I haven't got a clue how it happens.

2015 - The Gardening Year in Review

As far as years go, I'd be the first to admit that 2015 has not been a "biggie" in the scheme of things. We didn't set any growth records, we didn't redesign the garden, storms didn't destroy it, bumper crops were not harvested ... in fact it proved to be a perfectly normal year all round. Phew!

Yes, there were successes and failures, lots of fun with plants and plenty of fascination with nature, plus a little sadness, and so there remains but one more thing to do before we pop the champagne and declare "Happy New Year" to friends and neighbours: and that's to hand out some awards to the deserving. Now, if Pammy could hand me the envelopes, let's begin the 2015 Garden Amateur Awards!

Plant of the Year/Blog of the Year

And the winner is a happily resettled refugee! Pam's former potted office plant, this delightfully spotty Begonia maculata, was forced to move from its original home simply because it had outgrown the space. It has now settled in superbly into its new outdoor home under the murraya bush (still within view of Pam's office), where it shares the moist shade with other former residents of Pammy's verdant office, some maidenhair ferns. The big suspense surrounded the begonia's chances of surviving its first winter outdoors ... and it not only romped it in — it kept on growing. 

Now, this begonia is a bit like those Hollywood blockbusters that take out all the prizes on Oscars night, because as well as winning POTY (Plant of the Year) it also took out the prestigious BOTY (Blog of the Year) award for the most-read blog posting here at Garden Amateur. It seems lots of people wanted to know about what does well in a shady spot.  

Wildlife of the Year

The winner of WOTY (Wildlife of the Year) is Mr and Mrs Native Paper Wasp, pictured here building their new creche just outside our kitchen window. Much maligned by the ill-informed anti-insect crowd (the Taliban of nature lovers), paper wasps are beneficial insects which are nowhere near as cranky as the Taliban says they are. 

Idea of the Year

Turning little punnets of supermarket sprouts into crops has proved to be a runaway success, and deserving winner of the IOTY (Idea of the Year) award. Pictured here is the chervil sprouts loving life as thriving crops, and elsewhere in the garden the same idea has produced great crops of both flat-leaf parsley and coriander. 

Crop of the Year 

Though they are small in size, the little Lebanese zucchini takes out the 2015 Crop of the Year (COTY) award through its production of healthy flavour in good, steady numbers. These tasty little fruits just keep on coming, despite the fact that their foliage growing overhead looks like a hospital ward of powdery mildew disasters. Doesn't bother the little workers down at ground level, they just keep on producing.

Surprise of the Year 

After more than 20 years of being quietly green and very fragrantly leafy, our false cardamom plant decided it was time to be flowery, which makes it the standout choice for SOTY (Surprise of the Year). However, big questions remain to be answered in 2016 (which might put it in line for Suspense of the Year): Will it flower just once every 20 years? Will it flower every year from now on? What in the hell prompted it to start flowering? Does it know something about climate change that we don't know? Stay tuned...

Fish of the Year 

This special one-off award has been inaugurated purely to honour the passing of our little goldfishy mate, Paul, who passed away late this year, just a few days short of his sixth birthday. Most little goldfish never achieve much in the way of internet fame, but at least Paul has been read about by hundreds of readers of this blog, and he also has been immortalised artistically in this lovely painting by his honorary mum, my slightly biased pick for Artist of the Year (AOTY), Pamela Horsnell. RIP Paul, you did great.



And so that's it for our 2015 Awards Show here at Garden Amateur. Pammy and I and all the regulars here at the Garden Amateur blog would like to say a big "thanks" to everyone who has visited our blog, left a comment or just accidentally found us while looking for something else. We'll be back in 2016 but in the meantime, have a happy and safe New Year and we look forward to continuing to share our love of gardening, nature and anything else that we fancy all through the coming year.

Salad season

Tonight's mixed home-grown garden salad, but before we
get to that bit ...

I can't begin to tell you how much I enjoy Saturday mornings, especially ones as lovely as today's, where Sydney is working its way into a perfect, sunny spring day.

The shopping is great, for one thing. It's a 15-minute walk along bustling Illawarra Road to Banana Joes, the fruit, vegie and grocery hub to thousands of locals. Today I lashed out and paid 10 bucks for a kilo of fresh broad beans.

I love cooking something special for Saturday nights, for me it's the perfect way to finish off a day pottering in the garden. Pam sometimes laughs and says I'm a glutton for punishment, with the trouble I go to for some meals just for two, but it's my favourite dish – dinner for two, with Pammy.

And those broad beans will take some preparation, too. One friendly young Vietnamese girl manning the checkouts in Banana Joes sometimes asks me how do I cook certain vegies which aren't part of her mum's repertoire at home. In the past we've had some lovely chats about quinces and celeriac, for example, and this morning she wanted to know about broad beans.

So I explained how I open the big, long pods to extract the beans (gave her a demo on one pod!). Then how I blanch the beans in boiling water and peel them again, to expose the gleaming, shiny inner broad beans (didn't do a demo on that ...). It seemed to her like so much work that she couldn't help laughing a bit, but the old Greek mumma behind me in the queue, who was patiently enjoying the conversation, backed me up and said that's the way she prepares them, too.

That's one of the things I like about Banana Joes and Saturday mornings ... the conversations with the people you meet.

My bought broad beans (didn't grow any this year) will be going into the pot at the last moment, where lamb pieces will have been cooking for a few hours in a Moroccan spice mix, along with some zucchinis, tomatoes, eggplant and potatoes.

On the side I thought I'd offer up a light little salad of home-grown fresh mixed salad greens. With the tomatoey, spicy sauce surrounding the main dish, the salad doesn't need much dressing at all. 

And so that's my home-grown content in tonight's dinner: the salad. What follows is just a few photos of how I am going about making my salads a bit more interesting. 

The pot of 'mesclun' mixed salad leaves is coming along nicely. I just bought a packet of Yates Mesclun French Salad Mix seeds, sowed some, covered them lightly with seed-raising mix and watered the pot with a fine spray (for non-Australian readers, seed-raising mix is a light, fine potting mix that's very like a propagating mix). 

The trick is to keep it steadily moist for the first few weeks. The seeds take about 7-10 days to sprout, then a few more weeks to get to this size. If you're slack about watering pots, your potted salad will probably cark it, but if you can remember to water it most days, it's easy to grow. A liquid feed or two helps a lot. There's all sorts of different leaves in the mesclun seed mix (Yates says it has endive, corn salad, rocket, chicory and lettuce) so if you only have one salad pot growing, make it mesclun and you're in business. 

But we're watching a glutton for punishment in action here folks. Here's a pot of cultivated rocket. This stuff is fabulous as a salad on its own, provided you harvest it very young, like it is now. Later on the leaves will be too peppery when they get bigger. 

Our wild rocket, which is a perennial plant, has awoken from its midwinter slumber. I ended up cutting it almost to the ground in mid July, but with feeding and watering once the weather warmed, it's becoming prolific again. Just a few leaves of this peppery zinger in a salad adds real flavour and character to your bowl of rabbit food.

Adding colour to a salad always helps, and so this red-stemmed baby spinach does the trick. This is a type of spinach called 'perpetual spinach' and it truly lasts for months. In its early days the baby leaves are fine in salads, but once they get bigger treat them like normal spinach and cook with them. 

The old standby of mixed lettuce leaves helps when you're making bigger salads for bigger groups, and I've been a loyal buyer of the 'Combo' lettuce punnets from garden centres for many years. Every now and then I grow more interesting lettuce from seed, but when feeling a bit slack and lazy I just grab another Combo punnet and whack them in the ground. Never fails. 

A few herby leaves never go astray in a mixed salad, adding a lot of flavour – but of course the trick with herbs is not to be heavy-handed. Just a little. My potted chives usually look disgustingly sad in midwinter, so in late July I routinely take them out of their pots, divide the crowded clump into individual chive plants, then I repot them into new, fresh potting mix. Six weeks later, with plenty of water and some liquid organic food applied, they're back in business. We roadtested our chives in last Sunday morning's scrambled eggs for breakfast, and Pammy gave them the tick of approval. 

A little bit of chervil adds an aniseedy tang. Our little chervil border, grown from chervil sprouts bought from the supermarket, is looking truly luscious at the moment.

Slower to get going but now making steady, promising progress, our flat-leaf parsley border (also grown from supermarket sprouts) will also eventually make a contribution to some of our salads.

And it being early spring, there's no better time to grow some salad greens. Summer is a tougher task as it gets too hot, but right now we're truly enjoying our salad days.

Doing well in winter

Just an update on this recent post about growing coriander and chervil from supermarket sprouts. It's working!

Forgive me while I bang on yet again about this topic, but winter is the ideal time to grow both coriander and chervil. Plant them in autumn, they thrive all through winter, and will only start to fade once it warms up in spring.

Lovely chervil, with a mild aniseed flavour, called a "delicate"
herb by some, but I think the people who call it delicate add it
too early to dishes. It's a great herb to add right at the end of
cooking, or just before serving. 

Coriander in amongst some baby spring onion shoots (and
yes, some dreaded onion weed) with lettuce and New Guinea
impatiens to complete the scene. One of the tricks with
coriander in winter is to actually use it. We cut off leaves
with scissors, just like trimming hedges, and it grows back
thick and lush quite readily.

So there you go, fresh delicious herbs all through winter, one of the many nice things about gardening here in mild, temperate Sydney.

Successes and failures

This blog posting has taken a few weeks to happen, but at last I can report on a magnificent failure, plus two very satisfactory little successes.

Projectionist! The failure slide first, please...

A failure? Yep, nothing like what I was hoping for. This, folks is a pot of failed radishes, grown from a little punnet of "Micro Radish" sprouts which I spotted at my local giant market-dominating supermarket. The gardener in me said "go on, have a go at growing them into radishes". And when I also spotted some "Micro Chervil" sprouts and "Micro Coriander" sprouts, the grand experiment began...

Here's the punnet of micro radishes, cute and fresh little
zingers which are nice tossed into a garden salad.

Plucked from their punnet they sit in their own
little pot of growing medium, which is kind of
like compacted cotton wool, sort of.

And here's the failure in action: no little round
radishes at all. It's a nice pot of leafy greenery
with red stems, and the leaves taste peppery, like
mustard greens, so I can still use them in stir-fries,
but the experiment was to grow radishes, and
in that attempt I didn't do all that well.

However, I didn't collapse into a funk of despondence, because at the same time I was tasting bitter (or, more accurately, peppery) defeat with the radishes, I was also savouring some, well ... savoury success. The coriander and chervil experiments have turned out quite nicely.

At $1.49, my chervil sprouts are cheaper than nursery
seedlings. More usually they're $2.98 a pop, which is still OK.

The potted chervil is belting along, loving the deluge of rain
which has soaked all of Sydney to its sandstone bones.

Ditto, the coriander sprouts, they're doing well too.

The chervil sprouts look great in the punnet. You can see some
long, thin black chervil seeds still attached here and there.

The trick with planting them up is to divide the punnet into
clumps. Don't bother with trying to separate out individual
sprouts, that's too much like hard work, and it's also too
much handling of the tender sprouts. Instead, just break this
kind of clump into four or five mini clumps, and plant these.

Here's how that single clump looked after being divided up
and planted out. The next trick is simply to keep the sprouts
watered. Some Seasol or Eco-Seaweed once a week is also
a good idea, as these solutions encourage roots to grow.

It's the same story with the coriander. 

It's the same story with the coriander. Just
divide the punnet into several clumps, not
individual seedlings, then plant them out.
Water often, seaweed solution weekly.

Both the coriander and the chervil should last for months, if planted now. As I've said many times before in this blog, coriander loves winters in Sydney and lasts for months in the cooler weather. In summer it grows too fast and turns to whispy-leafed seedy stuff in a matter of weeks. So now is the best time to plant some coriander.

And chervil loves winters here, too. It's also one of the better herbs for growing in part shade or at least gardens that don't get a full day of sunshine (which is the case in many inner-city gardens).

At the prices the supermarket is asking for these mini sprouts, this way of growing them is easier than seed and cheaper than nursery-bought seedlings. Good luck!