Is growing from seed out of fashion?

Broad Beans and Peas I grew this year from seed

Ken Thompson; plant biologist and author of several books wrote an article for The Telegraph entitled; ‘Is growing from seed out of fashion’; an interesting exploration of the astronomical prices gardeners appear to be willing to pay for baby plants rather than the more economically sound option of growing from seed, placing it almost in a 'niche' category only attempted by the most enthusiastic or traditional of gardeners rather than mainstream.  

'Fashionable' does not necessarily mean most bought, so surely it is necessary to consider the wider context?  For example, I recently myself purchased a £120 pair of sunglasses, a vast amount of money that hurts me every time I look at said glasses.  I could have bought a pair off the high street for £5 that would have looked good and suitably protected my eyes, but I didn’t because the £120 price tag was not enough to put me off obtaining the image of ‘cool’ pertained by the glasses.  The high price is not paying for exceedingly high workmanship, although the quality is undeniably much higher than that of a £5 pair and this of course is one element of the appeal.  They are fashionable because of the image of 'cool' the glasses give the wearer due to their celebrity endorsements and other social connotations, they are expensive because the company knows that mugs like me are willing to pay whatever price (within reason) to achieve 'cool' in wearing the item.  Clearly £120 is within reason in my book.  The same applies to seed companies, if people are willing to buy baby plants to achieve the connotations of 'grow your own', then those companies are going to make you pay for it.  I do not think it is so much a question of seeds going out of fashion, as the concept of 'grow your own' is fashionable but the time and effort element of using seed does not fit in with our fast 'have it now' culture.

The Organic Gardening Catalogue’s statement that it is new gardeners such as young families who are buying these baby plants is more than likely true.  Why?  Well for starters we are discussing the ‘Organic Gardening Catalogue’ which nicely fits the ethos of people who would find the concept of ‘grow your own’ appealing as a hobby not a requirement and who like the idea of the countryside but still enjoy fast broadband, phone signal and buses after 6.  Countryfile watchers, Range Rover drivers and if a pair of wellies are to be purchased for a walk, Hunter wearers.  The same people who spend £10 on a fancy dibber (I use the end of an old wooden spoon) and a small fortune on slate plant labels (lollipop sticks-£1).  In reality any green welly will do and despite driving for over 30 miles through some of the narrowest country roads Sussex has to offer every day, I have a 2 wheel drive Polo that does me just fine except in the depth of winter when any car would struggle on complete sheet ice.  Im not a farmer, my need to go off road is very limited and all the farmers I see drive the most battered old cars on the road, generally denoted by the encrusted dirt and sheepdog hanging out the back, tongue lolling merrily in the wind.  This disparity between the 'idea' and reality is discussed in The Telegraph's own article 'Countryfile, the TV show that likes to walk on the wide side'.  

The reality is growing from seed is beyond time consuming, requires you to garden in conditions that may involve rain and a coat and actually is not that easy.  I love growing from seed, I revel in the challenge but half the time they don’t even bother to come up which would put most people off after the first attempt.  This summer I wanted to buy two cucumber plants for guaranteed results but was convinced into buying a very expensive packet of cucumber seeds costing a full £5 for five, therefore making the difference in price between plant and seed not very big at all .  At a pound a seed I required results; I got nothing.  Even if they do beat the odds and germinate normally all do and one finds oneself potting on 30 Zinnia plants when 10 would have been more than ample.  Collating 30 small pots with enough crocs took literally hours and my nails were dirt encrusted for days afterwards.

People are not growing 5 organic leeks to feed their family and cut down on food bills, they will be plucked from the ground and presented on a plate when dinner guests are over so the phrase ‘We grew them ourselves!’ can be slipped into conversation as much as possible.  In these days of increasingly urban living gardening is becoming cool among the young, but only if its clean and quick, too things gardening most definitely isn’t.  Seed companies are merely taking advantage of our desire to have things now without waiting, and we are prepared to pay through the nose to get it.  Plants are bought large and in flower when at their most expensive because we see it, like it and want it as it is rather than putting the time and effort in to nurture a smaller plant.  At some point growing from seed would have fitted into the 'make do and mend' and 'upcycling' trends, but even then I think most people would rather buy a new cabinet created in that style to making over an old one themselves, me included.  There isn't time in my day for sandpapering old furniture.  If it was possible to get the same imagery and ethos associated with home baking from a shop bought one most people would throw away the cookbook and nip off to the shops.  Unfortunately that isn't possible with baking, but it is with gardening; you just buy the plant ready started.   

But Mr Thompson is right; growing from seed is economically a far better bet, and if we consider the old adage 'time is money', supermarket ones will be cheaper than both these expensive baby plants and growing from seed.

Read the original article here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/plants/11058870/Is-growing-from-seed-out-of-fashion

A slug who ate all my runner beans before they germinated- one of the many things making growing from seed less appealing

Drilling holes for Gladioli

Anyone who has read my post on what I bought at Hampton court will know that come spring next year I am to receive a slightly terrifying delivery of forty Gladiolus bulbs.  What you won't know is that I actually had a little foray into growing them this year.  Back in the early spring I was in the garden centre when a packet of Gladioli bulbs was thrown into the trolley, shortly followed by another as I threw caution to the wind, but being my second favourite flower its not surprising I couldn't resist.

The varieties I bought were: Passos and Wine and roses.  Not exactly a match made in heaven but I love a good clashing colour combination so I didn't let that hold me back.  In the front garden is a rather large fuchsia hogging a lot of space without exactly adding much to the overall ambience of the garden.  That was hacked back and the resulting area has become my gladiolus patch for the year.  I don't plan on leaving the bulbs there indefinitely, and now I have bought a thousand more I might need to just completely jettison these altogether.

You can tell our compost is home made a fruit label has snuck in my hole with the corns

Here I am planting the bulbs on the moon.  No I jest, this is the front garden.  Look at that soil!  Isn't it beautiful?  Soft and crumbly and beyond easy to dig holes.... but only when using a pick axe.  That isn't a joke by the way; we have had to use a pickaxe in the past to break up the soil.  Every time I buy a plant the mother reminds me I will have to dig a hole and Im like ‘yeah yeah thats fine!’  Five minutes of hole digging as the sweat runs down my brow and Im blowing I regret those purchases. As I write this I have literally just finished planting 3 plants out there which took about two hours, mainly because I had to dig one hole 3 times as I got almost deep enough only to find a cracking great root.  That plant nearly stayed in the pot and even now is not really deep enough but it’s lucky to be there at all!  I chose to ignore the advice on the packets and look to the gardener Sarah Raven for guidance.  On her website she suggests a depth of 8 inches and uses a bulb planter.  Oh Sarah, 8 inches?  Clearly she has soil where 8 inches is achievable in under 40 minutes of digging, I don't think I managed more than 6 and it was hard graft, reduced to four by the time I put a layer of manure in the bottom for when the corns get hungry.  I also decided to dig trenches rather than individual holes which also proved to be a mistake.  Sarah advices planting the bulbs in succession to provide staggered flowering which I did do, less for the flowering and more because I would have keeled over and died if I had to plant them all at once.

The slugs have provided aeration in my leaves

So this was a few months ago and I have waited and watched the leaves sprout and grow and be devoured into threads by slugs because evidently they eat absolutely everything, and then waited some more.  We already have gladioli growing in the garden in the form of Alba, a small white variety that is very pretty.  Alba grew, flowered and died and still my leaves remained merely that; leaves.  Clearly Gladiolus are perfectly capable of flowering in my soil, but mine are slow burners. And so the wait continues...

I really am partial to white flowers with green highlights like this one.  Here on the left we have freshly opened and perfect and on the right with delightful crimped edges having been nibbled.  It appears that Gladioli are a particularly tasty plant and no part of it is safe!

An ode to grass

It turns out grass can be rather intense pink

Every year in my quant English village a large agricultural show full of cows and extremely fluffy bunnies and the like is held.  In preparation for this the council comes round a few weeks beforehand and cuts the grass on all the verges that don't 'belong' to a house to make the place all neat and tidy ready for the hoards of people who pass through for the show.  Only this year something seemed to go seriously awry and the mowers never came.  The grass got longer and longer and began looking really untidy.  But as when growing anything such as your hair or a beard for example, there is a really ugly stage you have to get through and then suddenly it comes into its own. 

Look at all that variety: the shades of purple! The textures and structure! And the overwhelming birds nest mess effect.  How I appreciate a bit of chaos

One day I got out of my car and was amazed at the amount of colour and variety of flower there was in what had before resembled just scrubby green grass.  Obviously the overwhelming colour of the verge was still green but it had a real purple and red hue running right through it.  For the first time ever I finally appreciated the joy of wild meadow-type planting.  The flowers were not big and showy but the mix of structures and the sheer number of them all intermingled just had a beauty all of their own.

Also a significant amount of red in patches, the varying colours stuck to particular drifts.  Why it has photographed orange tinged and almost pink in two different pictures I don't know

I couldn’t resist whipping out my camera and taking a few pictures, although I did wait until a time when as many of my neighbours were out as possible because if people see you randomly squatting in a verge of grass taking pictures they will naturally assume that you have gone nuts.  To get a nice angle I had to get real down and dirty getting right in that grass with it, which is fine, I have very little dignity to lose these days.  The real problem was I have hayfever, I have hayfever bad and my pollen of choice is from grass.  By the time I had finished taking my few snaps I was sneezing approximately every 20 seconds continuously, and the nose was seriously a-running. 

The verge remained long and luscious and beautiful for a week or two, and then one day I got home from work, and it was gone.  The mowers had come and we were just left with hay.  I wish they had left it, but maybe its' real beauty lay in the fact that it wasn't meant to be there and it was never going to last.  It has made me wonder, why do grass verges have to be kept short and green and boring?  Why not leave them to turn into little wild stretches that break the formality of our neighbourhoods and bring a little excitement to a tired eye on the return home.  Yes, I doubt dog walkers would be pleased but if anything that is a bonus in my book.  One lasting effect it has had on me is a wish to incorporate grass into my actual garden hence the purchasing of bunny tails at Hampton.  They remind me of open fields and are terribly tactile, long and yielding to a hand and that is good enough; not everything must produce flowers to be worthy of a place.

And then it was gone and we had a mini hay field blowing debris down the street
I think they should have left it...

My cucumbers are conspiring

As you may know by now, I have a love/hate relationship with growing cucumbers, and I think they know it.  I spent about £7 on two packets of seed and sowed two batches resulting in a grand total of two seedlings, woopee; get the celebratory parade organised now.  I resorted to buying two plants from the garden centre to boost my stock.  I had where they were going to be planted sorted months in advance.  As I don’t have a greenhouse I planned to stick them in the sunniest spot on the patio so needed a decent tub which I purchased in the form of a giant plastic trough from high street store Wilkinsons, where the prices are very appealing.  Terracotta would probably have been better but money doesn’t grow on trees and I had to lug the thing back to the car. 

The trough to end all troughs.  This was taken quite a while after planting, I didn't let my cucumbers get quite that advanced before planting them out.

Filling this trough with soil took considerably more soil, time and effort than I anticipated and I definitely worked up a sweat in the process, it was effectively a full body workout with dead lifts and squats and all sorts; who needs the gym!  Actually correct that; if it wasn't for regular gym sessions I don't think it would have got filled.  A full plastic bucket and a half of soil heaved and lugged and tipped later and It is now almost impossible to lift.  While a lot of effort, planting in tubs is far more pleasing as the soil can be cleaved with a trowel like butter rather than attempting to chisel a hole in my solid clay garden soil.  So I popped in my two larger shop bought specimens at either end and my home grown numbers in the middle and sat back and awaited cucumbers.

Or so I thought.  One day, on a regular progress inspection of the cucumber tub, I was shocked and mystified to find this:

Two cucumber seedlings who should be there, and two that really shouldn't

A close up of the little obstinate toad

That if you are wondering is a picture of two rogue cucumber seedlings that have just popped out of the soil like daisies.  I was completely mystified.  How on earth had two seedlings appeared when I hadn't sown any seed?!  Then the penny dropped.  On clearing out the numerous little pots that I had sown cucumbers in but hadn't germinated, I just threw the effectively unused compost, seed and all, into the tub of compost going in to my cucumber trough.  Well fine I thought, thats a little annoying that they choose to grow now but I get two extra opportunities for cucumbers so whatever.  But then a few days later I wandered over to a pot of sweet peas and lo and behold look whats growing!

That is a cucumber seedling nestled in the side of a pot of sweet peas.  Excuse the stick 

So now I really am annoyed.  These cucumbers are clearly doing this to be deliberately irritating.  I lovingly plant them in their own pot of exactly the same compost, give them water and delightful growing conditions and nothing.  Nada, none of them grow.  Lob them haphazardly in a huge pot and completely ignore them and they are up and growing before you can turn round.  You may think, well maybe it was just the right time of year, or perhaps the growing conditions were just a bit better, and so would I have.  Until, oh until! Until I found another seedling merrily growing away amongst my Zinnias in the front garden when I planted them out months later.  So it didn't grow in the pot of compost alongside the zinnia, no no.  It chose to wait until it was placed in the more homely surroundings of the soil in my front garden, which to be honest resembles concrete and is possibly the worst conditions for seeds ever.  So now I know that these cucumber plants are just growing out of spite, just to be able to rub my nose in my lack of success.  And this is why I will continue to hate cucumber plants for the second year running.

I know its hard to tell but thats a cucumber seedling right in the middle.
Other plants include Zinnias, stocks and the odd inevitable weed

How my vegetable patch got way out of control

Before: So ordered, who knew what it was going to become

When I first planted my vegetable patch many months ago now it was neat, it was ordered, there was visible brown earth between plants.  Fast forward and somehow it has turned into this:

Oh dear, not good.  Notice the fuchsia sticks really performing in their given task.  

Mowing the lawn should be fun around this lot

That is what I think we would describe as being a vegetable patch that only a mother could love, or a mess in plain terms.  Strangely one moment it seemed fine, and then chaos erupted almost over night.  I went down to check on progress and found not only sugar snap peas forming but also growing old and tough hidden thick in a tangle of leaves without me even realising.  I didn’t put in all that effort at the beginning to have it get away from me now.  My broad beans were in a sorry state flopped all over the lawn, early beans rotting gently into the grass.  Mmmm nice.  I didn’t want it to be this way, I envisaged a vegetable patch beautifully ordered and spaced out as it was at Hampton, but inevitably being an incredibly untidy person, my vegetable patch has mirrored this.

I have identified two main reasons for this current predicament:

1.     I have wedged a ‘patch’ into a fairly small area as space is a commodity in my garden in seriously short supply, so I tend to at least shave 3 inches off the recommended distance between each plant because when small this seems an absurdly generous amount.  I have been known to dig seedlings up having finished settling them in to reposition them closer.  I forget that they will grow and expand and more than fill that space and effectively create a pea hedge, with the beans hidden deep in the thicket making them impossible to find.  On that note, why do peas have to be green? There’s not a war on so why the need for such camouflage?  Im not aware of any pest being a particular pea connoisseur, and I can’t bloody see them!  Half the problem is failing to spot the peas in time and only finding them after a full body search of the plant when its old and wrinkled like your grandma.

2.     I took the mothers advice.  Always a massive mistake and yet I never learn.  She suggested using old fuchsia stems as pea sticks to save money on proper canes.  This works when your peas are four inches tall and are still keeping themselves to themselves.  Its when they get bigger and start wandering all over the joint, wrapping their little curly tendrils round anything they can get a hold on that problems arise.  The small side sticks that fuchsias inevitably have just add bulk to an already bulky situation, padding out the hedge and providing a real supportive frame for the peas to interweave through horizontally.  Plus after a certain point the pea plant weighs as much as the fuchsia stick does and the two just sag gently into the lawn.  Or topple heavily across other plants as in the case of the broad beans, who were doing a super job of supporting themselves at the beginning but after heavy rain they all felt in need of a little lay down. 

The necessary equipment gathered and ready for battle.  I know these photos are the height of visual excitement but how do you jazz up a veg patch?

After: Not that it exactly looks that ordered even now but at least everything is growing in the right direction now

After discovering numerous sugar snaps that had already had their day I decided this couldn’t go on and bought at least 50 proper bamboo canes from the garden centre and armed with scissors and a huge ball of twine went down there and started unraveling the mess.  It took a solid few hours to gently (ie. with scissors) persuade separate plants apart and back into an upright position.  Some had to be staked at an angle so there is now a flowerpot over the end of a cane protruding over the lawn to prevent the piercing of eyeballs.  I would definitely suggest that this is not the way to do it and proper staking at planting stage is the way forward.  Next year having already got the tools to hand I hope not to get into this kind of mess again.

A flurry of foxgloves

There is something faintly 'Jurassic Park' about this particular stretch of road to my mind, except the rather modern pole and wire of course 

There are few things I enjoy about my daily epic voyage, or ‘commute’ as it is widely known.  Twice in the last couple of weeks I have been held up by cows, actual cows with swinging udders and the slowest pace set by a mammal across a road.  They actually mooch, but then what is the hurry?!  The field isn’t going anywhere, and neither am I.  Very occasionally something turns up on my journey that makes it just faintly bearable.  Strangely during my 32 miles home there are two sections of road that cut through rock producing effectively roofless tunnels and making already narrow roads frighteningly narrow.  On one of these there used to be a whole canopy of trees creating a rather dank dark hollow which I rather liked, so was rather sad when all the trees were cut back last year to reveal the bare rocky sides, I don’t know if this was safety and the trees had become too big for the amount of soil there.  

And so this rocky section has remained exposed and dull, until May when at the same time as the garden in my previous post was in full bloom, suddenly the rocks were smothered in literally hundreds of wild foxgloves.  I know one does get wild flowers en mass like Bluebells for example, but the concentrated nature of this little display really made it quite a sight.  Driving along a perfectly pretty but predominantly flowerless country road for a mile or two and nothing, and then suddenly boom: 500 foxgloves in the space of 30 metres.  I really struggled to do the numbers justice in photos due to the previously mentioned beyond narrow nature of the road and a curve that prevents being able to see it all from the one spot.  The tiniest grass verge on one side allowed me to capture some of it, but I did fear for my life the whole time due to the fact that short of resorting to a spot of impromptu rock climbing I couldn’t get out of the road if something huge came along.  Amusingly whilst virtually clinging to the rock face, camera in hand, somebody stopped to ask me directions but I didn’t know the way.

Did you know that Digitalis Purpurea, the Latin name for Foxgloves, came about because of the ease at which one can stick a finger (a digitus if your wondering) in a foxglove bell.  That has to be the most odd way of naming a plant ever.  I prefer the colours of the cultivated foxglove to the wild ones, but given the setting and scale, it really was stunning to drive for 7 seconds or so through two tall walls of purple.

Almost makes you want to be a bee looking at this doesn't it?