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. 

Sowing seeds to ease the covid boredom

First up, a big, warm THANK YOU everyone for all your lovely messages saying things like “welcome back” “wondered where you got to” “was thinking of you only the other day” etc etc. (Not one saying "oh no, he's back"). You’re such nice people! 

On with the show.

Last posting I mentioned that I was going to do something about growing things from seed, because that’s been my main activity ever since the COVID-19 pandemic turned the whole world upside down early this year.

Like all other sensible people, I’ve been avoiding crowded spaces wherever possible. I do my supermarket shopping (mask on!) in the early morning hours, when it's fairly empty, and I haven’t been to a major gardening centre for more than six months — and yet I’ve been very busy growing crops of herbs, vegies and flowers during all this time.

The reason for that is simple: seeds. I’ve bought some of the seeds I need at the supermarket, and others that I can’t find there I have bought online.

So what have I been raising from seed?

Mesclun: this is just a mix of different salad greens, including several varieties of lettuce, plus rocket, lamb’s lettuce, a small Asian green like tatsoi, plus sharper tasting mizuna and red radicchio. Each seed supplier has its own mesclun mix. I'm growing mesclun in long, deep planter troughs that edge our outdoor entertaining area.

Coriander: one big pot is all I need. I sowed a batch in April, then when it started to tire in July, I sowed another batch.

Chives: this is the first time I've sown chives from seed, and it's worked so well I might do it this way every year. My chives pot always loses the will to live in midwinter, when it becomes a solid clump of pot-bound roots in its pot. In previous years I've either divided up the clump and replanted the best ones, or I've taken the lazy route and just bought another punnet of seedlings. From now on, it's seeds, ho!

Parsley: this is a pain to do, as parsley can take 3-4 weeks for the seeds to sprout, but it's a good reliable way to rejuvenate the parsley patch if you get started in late winter.

Poppies: usually I buy seedlings of Iceland poppies to grow for Pammy, but this year I started them off from seed a few months ago, and they're blooming nicely now. Nowhere near as easy and convenient as buying seedlings in late April, but not difficult to grow from seed, either.

Sweet peas: after last year's success with my first sowing of seed, I've expanded the size of the sweet pea patch and moved it to a sunnier spot. So far, so good.

Shallots (green onions): the thing I hate about buying punnets of shallot seedlings from garden centres is that even one punnet has too many seedlings, so I've got into the routine of sowing a small number of seeds every few weeks to keep production going. During the pandemic lockdown my culinary adventures have included lots of stir-fries, and learning all sorts of noodle dishes, and you end up getting through a lot of shallots when you start cooking a lot of Asian food.

Sowing seeds in pots

Sowing seed is easy in pots using my ‘scatter and cover’ method. Here's how I do it (I'm sowing coriander seeds, simply because they are pale and big, so you can actually see them in the photos). The basic principles apply to all sorts of other seeds (ie, chives, shallots, basil, parsley, chillies, tomatoes, lettuce, mesclun).

First up I smooth out a bed of fresh potting mix so it is flat and even, and reaches almost near the top of the trough, but not quite. 

Then I scatter the seed from the packet as evenly as I can, making sure to err on the side of scattering too many seeds, rather than too few (I can thin out the crop a few weeks later on). 

Here's a cool trick ... read the instructions! Seed packets will tell you how "deep" to sow the seeds. In this case, with coriander, it's 5mm deep.

So, I scatter seed-raising mix* fairly thinly over the seeds, about 5mm deep in this case (without getting too anxious about how accurate you are). But do make sure it's enough to cover the seeds so you can’t see them anymore. 

* (By the way, for people outside Australia, seed-raising mix is a very fine-grained potting mix. Maybe a cuttings or propagation mix is the closest thing if you can’t find seed-raising mix.) 

Finally I use a ‘mist’ spray setting on my fancy multi-setting hose nozzle (that I bought in an Asian Bargain Shop for $8, and which has worked well for years) to dampen the soil well but not drench it messily.

I mist the pot every morning until the seeds sprout. And if I can manage it, I like to keep pots out of the hot sun in a shaded area until they sprout, then expose the pots to more sun as the plants grow. Sometimes, with big heavy troughs, that isn't possible, so I just make sure to keep seedlings exposed to full sun well watered at all times.

Here's how the mesclun trough looked like after about two weeks, with lots of babies coming up. With a mesclun mix the fast-sprouting seeds like rocket and mizuna are up within four days. Some of the other seeds can take several days more to appear, sometimes up to two weeks. 

Coriander grows at a more leisurely rate, taking about 10-12 days to appear, but it looks lovely when fully underway, like this pot full of babies that are probably about a month old.

With my first trough of mesclun I learned that I needed to keep a close eye on which plants are bullying the others and grabbing all the space, and that meant I had to occasionally pull out an over-eager bully plant so the tiddlers lower down could get going.

After a few weeks of sorting out the squabbles between competing plant egos, they all settled down to make the most picturesque and delicious mixed leaf salads. A mature pot of mesclun is so photogenic, and if you just use a pair of scissors to give the pot a light ‘haircut’ you’ll have a nice mixed greens salad ready to go, with replacement leaves growing back rapidly in the next few days. Regular (fortnightly) liquid feeds keep the production humming along.

The alternative to mesclun, and also worth growing, is simply to grow several different lettuce varieties in the one pot. Though nice to look at and easier to manage, what a mixed lettuce salad lacks is a bit of that tasty pepper and spice in the leafy mix that you get with mesclun.

Managing the competition

The one trick to remember with my ‘scatter and cover’ method is that it's likely that you will have sown too many seeds, so you will at some stage (say, in the third or fourth week after sowing) have to play at being Charles Darwin and pull out several weaker plants so there is enough room for the healthy ones to grow on. Don't be squeamish, just imagine you are the David Attenborough of salad greens, observing that only the strong survive while you watch on, fascinated.

Breaking news ...

I am also growing basil from seed, just because I don’t want to visit garden centres to buy seedlings, not because basil doesn’t grow well from seedlings. 

All the seeds came up beautifully, they looked as cute as fat babies, but a few nights back the slugs ate everything. It was my fault — I had sat the basil seedling pot up on top of the soil under a potted lime tree, so it got nice dappled shade on a warm day, and I forgot to move it back to a safer space that evening. I found a bunch of slugs living under the rim of the lime tree pot, sneaky slimy seedling munchers ...

There was nothing left, just pathetic little white stumps where leaflets used to be. Such is life, and gardening, so start again …

October surprises

Some mornings, I know exactly how daisies feel. It's not enough for the sun's early appearance to turn night into day. What daisies need is to feel the sun's warm, direct rays beating down on their flowers, and then (and only then) will they open up and do their thing. 

Looking like a cluster of mini suns, the "surprise" part of this purple-leafed, yellow-flowered daisy bush is that it's a lettuce plant enjoying its floral fling before signing off on a life well lived, however briefly.

This handsome purple tower was once a low-growing, purple patch of "pick-and-come-again" loose-leaf lettuce, looking much like its green lettuce siblings growing at its feet. Then, two weeks ago, it made its break for adulthood and rose daily, inches at a time. I watered it and gave it a feed to encourage it, and in the last few days it has repaid the favour with its own flower show. Bravo!

In a recent posting on bees I showed you a photo of this shallot flower, but it's so delightful I want to show it again. And it's not alone in this world, either. While I have another mini patch of shallots growing well in another bed, I've very happily watched these shallots doing their flowery thing for the last few weeks. There used to be more of them in fact, but in the last few days both Pammy and I have harvested some from this patch for dinner, and they're still perfectly fine to cook with, but probably getting a bit too strong-flavoured for salads anymore. 

My final little October surprise is this perfectly predictable scene of our common sage bush in bloom. The "surprise" factor is simply that it is flowering so well this year. It was looking utterly rough, scrawny and bedraggled in the middle of winter, so I adopted the simple policy of "cut off all the ugly bits" (and there were a lot of them, too). It seems to have worked. All the healthy wood that was left has burst out in new growth and, in the last few days, created this explosion of mauve good health.

Sage has wonderfully complex flowers, too. With their mouths agape as if singing a long, high note to finish a song, sage flowers remind me of some orchids. 

I have no problems imagining that on other planets, alien life could easily be comprised of flowering plants that talk.

  

Making a beeline

If there is one thing I don't want in my garden, it's an automated watering system. Without the daily pleasure of getting out there and hand-watering the garden each morning, I don't think I would enjoy gardening one-tenth as much as I do right now. And I am sure I would miss out on seeing a lot, as well.

This morning was a classic example of what I mean. Forecast is a sunny day, max of 27°C. Doesn't get much better. But I have baby seedlings of lettuce, shallots and coriander to mollycoddle, and the newly planted New Guinea impatiens will love a good dose of tropical-style "hot and humid" — it will make them feel like they're back up in Port Moresby for a day.

And so I did a very enjoyable "lap" of the garden, watering the thirsty and stopping off to clean and refill our two birdbaths while I had the hose in my hand.

I wasn't the only person out there, of course. I had company. Dozens of bees humming their tunes were busily collecting pollen, sometimes buzzing close to my head as they scooted around their mysterious highways in the sky.

Grand Central Station for our garden's bees right now is our Tahitian lime tree, which is covered 50/50 in white flowers and green fruit buds that used to be flowers. The closer I got to the lime tree, the louder the hum became.

I love the thoroughness of bees. They don't miss a thing, they don't miss a single grain of pollen if they can help it. They dive deep into flowers and come out covered in their fluffy yellow harvests.

Of course bees' diligence is also beautifully fair. If you're a flower in this garden, expect a visit from the Bee Patrol. No exceptions made. They don't miss a thing. (Although, speaking of missing things, you'll have to believe me that there was a bee there just a moment before I clicked the digital camera button. They're a terribly difficult subject for an amateur photographer like me to capture every time.)

Just for fun, I like to let a few of our vegetables live out a complete life cycle (I think it's latent vegetable-harvesting guilt at work, a product of me thinking far too much). Here's a shallot (spring onion) flower dusted with water droplets. And yes, it's a waypoint for the loyal, hard-working members of the Pollen Gatherers Union.

In our world of endangered species, it's sometimes hard to wrap your brain around this concept when your own little sheltered existence is filled with these endangered creatures, the humble bee. I read the scientific stories and many newspaper reports and am filled with the same helpless sadness that I am sure so many of you share with me about the dwindling numbers of bees in so many countries. 

But that word "helpless" is misleading. There actually is a little bit I can do to help, and I do it in my garden. 

For starters, I use very few pesticides at all, and only organic ones occasionally, and none of them in the mornings or evenings, when the bees are about.

Next, I grow a good variety of flowers wherever I can. It doesn't matter which ones, as far as the bees are concerned. Even vegies well past their "harvest-by" dates can help. And if you can also manage it, try to populate your garden with plants so that you have something in flower every month. In Sydney's garden-friendly climate that's a lot easier to do than elsewhere.

That's the basics of being friendly to bees. It's only a small, very local gesture, but the more people thinking and acting locally, the better off are our bees.

Homegrown content

I was cooking a basic little meal for the two of us last night and, as usual, I took a moment to think about the homegrown content in that meal. I do this almost every time I cook, as there's always something from the garden in most evening meals. Here's what was homegrown last night.

It's no fantasmagoria of self-sufficiency, it was just a typical night. The potato salad (shop-bought spuds) included homegrown radish and green onions (shallots), and the tomato salad was homegrown cherry tomatoes plus homegrown basil. The fish that I grilled came from the fish shop.

I can't remember how many times people have asked me if I grow all the crops I eat at home. The answer is always "no, I'd need an acre to grow all our own food, and it would be a full-time job to keep up the supply." 

Instead, all I like to do is grow enough edibles in my garden to have some homegrown content in most meals I prepare. Herbs often fit that bill, but it is nice when vegies get to be the star turn. 

And that's what most backyard food gardens are all about. A bit of homegrown content, the occasional star turn, rather than the self-sufficient organic farmer fantasy.

Moving Heaven & some earth

It was nice to pretend that I was operating the weather levers while Huey had the weekend off. In control over the weather dial, I seemed to be. Some rain on Sunday, not too much, about 9mm did the job nicely, weakening the weeds' grip on the soil while readying everything else for planting the next day.

And then I set the weather dial to very fine and very mild on digging and planting day, Monday (Aussies got a long weekend too, in honour of all those who served in wars for us – Anzac Day). Warm but not hot 22°C, no clouds, blue skies, perfect gardening weather. Hmmmm, autumn in Sydney...

The colour of our sky was the first thing I noticed when I returned from living in Europe for a year, quite a few years ago. Since then, I don't take our wonderful blue sky for granted anymore.

When I started digging I came across lots and lots of my best farm workers, like this person, who was not at all thrilled to meet me. While I mulch most of my garden pretty well most of the time, there were a few patches which I had deliberately decided not to mulch over the last few months, and in those spots worm numbers were well down, compared to the mulched areas. If you want worms, mulch!

After all the weeding, which doesn't warrant a photo, and turning of the clods of soil with a fork, which I forgot to take a photo of, the next step was much more fun – turning the clods and clumps of soil into a fine tilth ready for planting. For this task I always rely on my trusty Japanese Niwashi, which I have blogged about before here. It's my favourite job too, because I get to sit down on the ground and contentedly plug away at the soil until it's right. Deep down, I love my drudgery. It's good quality thinking time.

Rake level, ready for planting. Doesn't that sound easy? Perhaps I should add that all the weeding, digging, tilling and raking took up the first three or so hours of that glorious, sunny but mild Monday.

My excellent gardening adviser Geoffrey told me to not plant my brodiaeas too early – wait until Anzac Day – and so they have been chilling out in the crisper section of my fridge for the last two months. Monday was planting day for these blue-flowered spring bulbs.

For the last two years I've grown poppies for Pammy, who just loves these blooms. The first year I grew them from seed, and the results were pretty good. In the second year I used seedlings, and the results were much better, with more stout stems. So it was seedlings for sure this year.

Instead of doing my usual 'grow from seed' method with shallots, I bought a punnet of seedlings, to save time, which is what punnets are very good for. However, I sowed seeds galore in several other spots, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes up.

This is a photo I pinched from Google Images of one of the seeds I sowed. Nigella, or love-in-a-mist. I grew this flower many years ago and really liked its old-fashioned charm, and so I thought I'd sow a packet of seeds this year. As well as the Nigella I sowed some seeds of mesclun mixed lettuce, coriander, spinach, calendulas, baby beetroot, curly parsley, Chinese buck choy and another Asian green called celery leaf plant, which is a celery relative with all that celery flavour, except that it's very leafy, and the stems are thin. Should be useful in cooking, and yes, it was an impulse buy at a seed stand.

A while back I had made a careful garden plan, and then on planting day I didn't follow it. I did what I usually do: I laid out all the punnets and seed packets where I planned to plant them, and then had a think. My other great garden adviser, Don, calls this method 'put and look'. As a garden design tool, it works. Once consultations with Pammy were done and we both agreed that this is what we wanted (after adjustments), away I went with the fun bit, planting.

Poppy seedlings in, 20cm apart. The black strip on the right is my special 50:50 mix of potting mix and home-made compost, into which I sow seeds. That strip is a parsley border in the making. I love parsley borders. The rear strip running at right angles is mesclun lettuce. The seemingly bare, unmulched bed behind is where the brodiaeas went in. The rest of the planting was not all that photogenic, just seed sowing direct to the ground, but it was good fun nevertheless and the next few weeks promise to be enthralling (if you're weird like me and love watching seeds come up).

And that was about it for the weekend. There are a few parts of the garden that remain happily productive. Another batch of lettuce is at picking size, the sage behind is having such a good autumn that it still thinks it's summer, and an early pot of coriander raised from seed saved from last year's crop is nicely leafy, ready to add its flavour to both cooked dishes and salads.

The real highlight of the day for me was the sheer luxury of spending a whole day in the garden again. I've been so busy with work lately that I haven't had much time for gardening (apart from watering) or blogging. And so thank you Huey up there in heaven for laying on such a wonderful day to be outside just moving some earth and planting seeds and seedlings.

Now, if I could have that weather dial back for a moment, could I set it to steady 22s for the next few weeks, with goodly, soaking showers on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays? There's a good chap, Huey. Thanks so much.

Morning light

Of all the times of day I love being in my garden, mornings are the best. It's the morning light, low and clear and, compared to the shadows, as bright as the sun itself. As the garden awakes from sleep, dull colours shimmer brightly, dark greens become pale and young again, and honeyeaters come to enjoy their breakfast of nectar as I enjoy my coffee. (As always, click on the photos to make them bigger).

Here's the scene this morning. My garden faces north-east, so the morning light comes in from the right. There are a few bare garden beds here now, as I've just pulled out my tomatoes and zucchinis. And the birds are happy. Covered with mulch, these 'bare' beds have suddenly become a wormy, insecty feeding ground for blue wrens, magpies and wagtails.

Perched atop a grevillea, this perky little New Holland honeyeater checks to see what's going on before enjoying another lick of nectar.

A young wattlebird ponders its favourite grevillea before darting there for breakfast.

As well as the red one providing food to the New Holland honeyeater pictured earlier, this 'Peaches & Cream' grevillea, a young plant just two years old, has come into its own this summer and, flowering well, is now the delicacy of choice for several different native bird species. Maybe it's multi-flavoured, as well as multi-coloured?

As the sun rises all the lower-growing colours get a glow on. In the foreground are my zinnias, and that's blue salvia behind. The spiky grass on the left is my new pot of lemongrass enjoying its sunny spot. Far right, the basil and baby curry leaf trees catch the sun.

Against the dark background of our murraya hedge, the frangipani's leaves are X-rayed by the sun.

So too the hollow shallot leaves. Sometimes I think they'll just spontaneously burst into flames, so aglow they are with light.

I had originally chosen about 20 'morning light' photos for this blog, as everything here looks wonderful at this time of day. But mornings aren't a time for excess. It's a gentle, beautiful time of day and I never miss the chance to be there if I can possibly manage it.