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. 

Five garden jobs you can do this spring

How's that gardening motivation level going? Out of 10? Locked down by covid and nothing to do, lovely garden out there and you're still a motivational "1" out of 10?

If you can get yourself all the way up to a "3" or better, doing that first gardening job might just propel you to the dizzy heights of 5s or 6s. So here's a short "to-do" list just in case the spring weather starts getting to the gardener in you.

Plant some spuds

Spring is the ideal time to get some spuds planted. The good thing is that specialist spud suppliers have been taking orders online for many years, so that's how to get started.

You can of course grow spuds in the ground, but a big pot works fine, so does a large "grow bag" that has holes included to help water drain away.

To get started on your 2021 Spud Mania, try these links to well known suppliers:

Garden Express:  https://www.gardenexpress.com.au/shop/edible-produce/certified-seed-potatoes/

The Diggers Club:  https://www.diggers.com.au/shop/vegetables/potatoes-and-other-tubers/

Green Harvest:  https://greenharvest.com.au/Plants/Potatoes.html

Goodmans:  https://www.goodmanseeds.com.au/shop/certified-seed-potatoes

Sow some seeds

Spring is the ideal time to sow seeds of so many delicious crops, such as all salad greens, tomatoes, shallots, basil, silver beet, carrots, eggplant, cucumbers, zucchini — there are countless others — and the good news if you are locked down is that major supermarkets often stock the seeds you are looking for. I bought my Yates seeds for these babies pictured below at my local Woolies supermarket. 

On the left are some shallot seedlings enjoying the morning sun, while on the right are seedlings of "mesclun" salad greens, which is a mixture of different greens. After sowing the seeds the fastest ones – the rocket (or arugula) – came up in just four days. The slowies took two weeks. The shallot seedlings came up in 7 days, so on each and every morning I was out there misting the seedling trays with water, there was something new coming up.

After about three weeks the seedlings are ready for more sunshine, so in my garden a lovely half-way house is under the dappled shade of my potted Thai lime tree. The seedlings get a bit of direct sun on them during the day but big brother lime tree shades them most of the time. In two weeks from now, they'll all be much bigger and potted up in their troughs in full sun, ready to roar away as spring warms up.

Sowing seeds is a bit hit and miss sometimes, but I find I get 10 hits to every miss, so give it a go, the odds of succeeding are really good.

Salad greens like mesclun, rocket, lettuce etc are very reliable and worth a try.

Basil is a good bet once the weather becomes truly warm.

If you're nervous about tomatoes give cherry tomatoes a try.

And if you want to fire up your lifestyle, chillies are so much fun to grow from seed. So many types and, given you probably only need one or two plants of each variety to knock your socks off, you're bound to have lots of success.

Go potty

Spring is a good time to do a bit of repotting. Here's one simple job I did this week, part of my succulent and cactus patch renovation.

God knows how many years ago, these three were tiny, cute midgets in baby pots that could sit on a windowsill. So I put all three in the one pot, put it out in the garden and forgot about them – and my, haven't they grown. Time for an upgrade in accommodation. 

Half an hour later each plant has its own home, and if I manage to neglect them for the next decade they'll probably need an upgrade in size by then. Without repotting, each plant would have crowded the other and all three would have suffered and probably died in the end.
This way, all three will just keep on growing.

So if you have a single plant that has grown too big for its pot, or you have too many plants in the one container, do everyone a favour and remove all the plants from the pots, upgrade their accommodation, and they'll be with you for many years to come.

Renovate your compost bin

Smelly compost? Open the lid and a cloud of little flies swarms out? Chances are your compost is too wet. What it needs is more dry matter to balance things out. And for me, the easiest source of dry matter is my big bag of sugar cane mulch. 

So I've been adding a few generous handfuls of mulch to my tumbler compost bin, giving the lot a twirl so it all mixes up nicely, then adding some more mulch a few days later. 

If, like me, your kitchen fruit and vegie scraps bin is the main source of new materials for your compost bin, your compost bin is in danger of being too wet. When that happens composting slows down and things can get smelly. Add some dry matter (raked up autumn leaves if you have any), but if you have a bag of mulch, it's the easiest and quickest way to get your compost bin back in business. 

Feed everything!

Spring is fertilising time, so get out there and do it. Doesn't matter what you use, usually, but there are so many specialist types of fertiliser to choose from it's easy to become overwhelmed with choice. 

The only plants you need to be extra-careful with are natives, and they definitely need specialist native-friendly food that won't harm them but will feed them. The good news is there are many native friendly plant foods around now.

The best rule to follow, apart from reading the instructions on the packs, is that it is much much better to under-fertilise than overdo it. More is not better with fertiliser. So treat the maker's recommended dosages as the "maximum" dose at all times, and there's nothing wrong with lighter, half-dosage feeds, either.

To keep things simple I mostly just use a liquid food (mixed up in a watering can) for all my edibles. Leading brands such as Dynamic Lifter, PowerFeed, Charlie Carp all do the same kind of job, and there are several others in the same category. In the growing season (ie, now) I liquid feed crops once a fortnight.

For most of my potted plants I use slow-release fertilisers, brands such as Osmocote and PowerFeed leading the field. These are almost "set-and-forget" in that you apply the little pellets, then you don't need to re-apply for months after that. Read the instructions and you'll see that some last 3 months, others 6 months. That's about it.

And for general garden use and feeding citrus trees I use organic-based pellets such as Dynamic Lifter. The good thing about chicken poo style fertilisers and other organic-based products is that they also feed everything that lives in the soil, not just the plants.

Compost is a fabulous fertiliser for feeding the whole of the soil, so is blood and bone. Seaweed is a superb soil health tonic too. 

All the pure organic, or organic-based fertilisers are the best long-term option for improving the overall health of your garden soil. The benefits don't happen overnight, but over the years they are the outstanding option.

So get out in the spring sunshine, plant some crops, visit your growing babies each day to care for them, then start harvesting the organic home-grown goodness that you've raised yourself. It's a satisfying feeling in a trying time. Give it a try.

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 …

Four weeks in one day

We Sydneysiders can be quite oddly proud of our rain at times. We get quite a lot of rain, especially for such a sunny city, so how do you combine lots of sunshine with lots of rain? Easy ... just make sure the rain buckets down when it does so.

This morning is a classic example: a whole average month's worth of rain (83mm for November) in a couple of hours in several parts of Sydney. My how it rained (and still is)! As a rain radar fan, I just have to share this random shot of our fair town this morning.

The red and orange bits show the heaviest rain, and this morning they are doing their thing complete with thunder and lightning flashes; at its peak the grumbly bits seemed to be about 10 seconds apart. It was a good one, if you were safe inside your house that is.

All the truck and delivery drivers, commuters, public transport staff, homeless people and emergency services workers had a different, more scary experience, of course, so all I can do is hope they got through it OK.

But here in selfish little gardener-who-works-from-home land, it was mostly perverse fun.

(I should at this stage put in a special mention for art teachers, too, such as Pammy. She is conducting a watercolour workshop this morning on, ironically enough ... skies and clouds, and so her mobile phone has been running hot with text messages from students asking whether the workshop is still on. It is, and god bless their cotton socks, all of them are still attending, and with help from her loyal driver and husband, Pammy will have to make the dash to the studio a couple of streets away where she conducts her classes.)

Click on this photo and should come up as a big, wide, soggy panorama. No need to water the garden this morning!

This downpour is perfect timing for our garden. I spent all of Sunday pulling out weeds, spreading mulch, and adding some fragrant Dynamic Lifter (chicken poo) organic pellets here and there. Thanks Huey for the perfect timing. Garden health is rated good right now.

This soggy sight is the other side of the garden, and in the middle foreground, that little bare patch of ground with green seedlings coming up is an experiment with seeds. Last year I grew little Zinnia linearis there, and they flowered all summer long. At the end of summer I harvested the seed heads, popped them into paper bags to dry off in the shed over winter, and so a month or so ago I scattered the seedy contents of the paper bags over the bare ground, watered it well that day and every day for the next two weeks, and lo and behold I have stacks of zinnia babies coming up.

The other great thing about very rainy days is the opportunities it provides to amateur photographers like me. Leaves and water are a magical combo, such as this mini lake perched precariously on the tough, strong leaf of our potted fig tree.

The other photogenic thing about rain is the sight of usually glamorous garden beauties drooping and drenched with rain. This NSW Christmas Bush, also in a pot, is looking truly gorgeous in the late November sunshine, but even in the aftermath of today's storm it's still lovely to behold.

So don't just stand there at your window looking out at your soggy mess. Get out there in amongst it; you'll get some great photos and see a side of your garden that only happens now.

If that sounds weird, don't worry. I'm from Sydney, we like our rain. We're strange that way.

Oh Me of little faith

After all these years pottering around our garden, you'd think I could trust myself to grow some coriander without it turning into a drawn-out saga. But the magic ingredient in this story is faith, or a complete lack of faith in myself, I'm sad to admit.

It all began with my being late to get any coriander going at all this year. In April or May, I usually sow some of the seeds I've saved from the previous year's crop, and pictured above, here's a nice close-up of them. The problem was that April and May in Sydney were unseasonably hot, and heat is not a good thing to have too much of when growing coriander in Sydney. It's a much better autumn/winter/spring crop. And so it wasn't until mid-June that I finally scolded myself with "Coriander, Jamie, what are you doing with coriander this year?".

This is where my complete lack of faith in myself kicked into overdrive. Sure, I sowed some seeds, in fact lots of seeds, but I knew that a very chilly June isn't anything like the right time to sow seeds. They should have come up in 10 to 12 days, but it was only after 18 days, this morning, that I spotted the first little coriander sprout rising up to greet the day (pictured above). Better late than never ...

However, by last week I had convinced myself that my saved seed was perhaps never going to come up. It was not so much panic as anxiety spiced with urgency that made me do it, so I went to the garden centre and bought a packet of Yates coriander seed and sowed them, too. They're in the pot in the foreground, and so far nothing has happened, but it's a bit early for them to show. 

I'm trying to mollycoddle them as much as possible, sitting them up in a sheltered spot under our covered pergola, on our outdoor table, in their own mini greenhouse. Nasty cold winter winds aren't going to hurt my babies.

The back of the Yates seed packet says the ideal time to sow coriander in Sydney is definitely not now. Spring (September) through to autumn (May) is recommended. But since when have I allowed a mere seed packet to run my life? I'm in charge here!

My coriander seed-saving and sowing routine has been humming along nicely for several years, and it's only because they were slow to come up in the colder weather that I foolishly didn't trust my own saved seeds this time round. When you consider how much coriander seed in a packet costs (you get hardly any seeds) this brown paper bag full of my saved seeds is probably a hundred bucks' worth. Untold riches ...

Worst of all, and I am saving the worst till last, I spotted a punnet of coriander in the garden centre where I bought the seeds, and though as a general rule transplanted seedlings of coriander don't last as long as plants left undisturbed in the pot where they first sprouted, I decided to get these as well. If you're a generous soul you might consider this to be sensible insurance, but I'm not feeling generous today I know it is pure faithlessness and nothing else.

The main reason I grow coriander is to have little handfuls of it on hand when cooking. When I am cooking a curry that requires a cup or two of chopped coriander leaves to go into the blender with all the onion, garlic and chillies etc, then I can buy a bunch of coriander from one of our many local Asian shops.

But when I don't really need a whole big bunch of coriander, and all I need is to snip off a handful to toss into a stir-fry or to use as a garnish, it's nice to be able to wander out into the garden to get some, rather than trudge up to the shops once more.

Should my lack of faith in myself prove to be a shameful episode, and all my sown seeds sprout and I have coriander pots galore  (well, three of them to be precise) then it all should last through winter and spring. Then, in the early summer when the weather warms up, they will all turn into spindly-leaved flowery plants that eventually produce masses of seeds that I harvest and dry.  

And so the cycle of the seasons and life goes on, but next year I plan to trust myself a little more ...

Coriander the easy, seedy way

I really ought to have a bit more faith in myself. There I was a few weeks back, filled with doubt that my coriander seed-saving skills were up to scratch, and so I sowed my seeds really thickly, hoping that maybe a quarter of them might sprout.

Doubter! Now I feel foolish, because it looks like three-quarters of the little blighters want to enjoy the autumn sunshine, and now I have a two-inch high glut of too-much baby coriander to manage.

All the babies are as cute as these guys. After the first long baby leaves soak up the sunshine, the next to come are the ones that look like proper coriander.

It's not a huge glut, it's still a small glut, but it's as crowded as a Hong Kong vegie market down there.

Late last year my coriander did what all coriander does when the weather warms up. It goes from leafy to flowery to seedy in the space of two weeks. So I let the plants go through their life cycle, waiting for them to then start dying down and the seeds to go from bright green to showing tinges of brown ... and then I pulled up the plants, snipped off the seed heads and put them in some brown paper bags and hung these up on a nail in my shed.

Totally forgot about them I did, but as autumn arrived I knew it was coriander seed planting time once the warm part of autumn was over.

Instead of painstakingly plucking individual seeds off the stems, I just closed up the bag and gave it a very good shake. Sure enough, a hundred or so seeds fell off and these were the ones I planted.

I use an easy method for planting them. I just clear a small patch of soil of weeds, dig it lightly with a fork to fluff up the soil, then I scatter the seed randomly, fairly thickly from my hand, medieval seed-sowing style. You know, just casting them out.

Then I get out a bag of seed-raising mix (it's a fine, sandy potting mix) and scatter this (also medieval-style) over the seed until you can't see them anymore. It does not need to be a thick layer of seed-raising mix. A quarter inch or about 5mm at best is all that's needed.

The huge, enormously difficult trick that you need to master is to remember to water the patch every morning, if rain isn't forecast. I use a light, fine spray setting on my hose attachment, so that the soil is well moistened but isn't washed away.

The seeds come up in about two weeks, and you'll have to wait another week or so before the seedlings send up those second pairs of leaves that actually look like coriander.

If you sow coriander seeds now, in autumn in temperate Australia, the plants should last you through the winter. 

In my case, due to the excess of success, I will have to "thin out" my coriander patch, pulling out some plants to give the remaining plants room to grow. If you leave them overcrowded, your crop won't thrive, so you'll just have to do what farmers do, and manage your crops. Just pull out the smaller, weaker plants — Charles Darwin would want you to — to let the stronger, fitter plants thrive.

And PS: if you save seeds this way, you almost certainly will have saved more seeds than you could ever grow at your own place, so give the leftovers to your gardening friends.

Use-by dates

Every now and then I put in a burst of growing radishes for salads. Haven't done it for a while, so a short while ago I planted out my fast-growing radish seeds ... and then nothing happened. Nothing at all. Zero, zilch.

Now that is not how radishes usually perform. They're the Speedy Gonzales of the vegie beds, sprouting quickly and ready for harvest a few weeks later. And so I went back to the shed, picked up the seed packet, flipped it over and discovered that my French Breakfast radish seeds were exactly one whole year past their use-by date!

As Homer Simpson would say: Doh!

So then I did a stocktake of my tin full of seed packets, searching for old-timers whose use-by date was up. I am a bit embarrassed to report this folks, but if you include all the seeds whose use-by date is right now, August 2015, about one-third of all my seed packets were tossed into the rubbish bucket in my shed.

If you didn't know there was such a thing as use-by dates for seeds, you do now. Some seeds last for ages (I think the record is a couple of thousand years for certain varieties of sacred lotus) but in the vegie kingdom it's normal for seeds to last anywhere from two to five years, depending on the plant type. I'm not sure how accurate this chart is, but it gives you some idea.

Most reputable seed companies stamp the use-by date on the back of their packets. The oldest one here is for 2012/13, and the others you can see here are all stamped August 2014, one whole year out of date.

Seeds beyond their use-by date might still sprout, but don't be surprised if they don't. That's what the use-by date is all about: the reliability of seeds sprouting. If you are a committed economiser (with the emphasis on 'miser'), and you still want to have a go at sowing your past-their-use-by-date seeds, my advice would be to sow all of the rest of the packet. Some will probably come up, I hope. And good luck!

However, I really do want to grow some radishes, so once I finish this blog posting I'm off to the garden centre to buy some nice, fresh radish seeds.