1 plant for a £10 or 1000 for £2.99?
Cheap gardening from seed
I was astonished by the current price of perennial plants at a garden centre the other day. What would have been £6.50 before lockdown is now £10 or more, for something very ordinary. Fair enough – the nursery spends a lot of time and skill raising plants and rather wants to make a profit from doing so, but if you are planting a new garden just from containerised stock, the cost is considerable. You can gap up borders very well with sowing flowering plants from seed. However, some of my clients seem strangely reluctant to do so, so I asked them why.
It’s too much bother…’ Consider growing only the seeds that you sow directly, as the soil warms up in mid-April. Half-hardy annual growing involves planning, propagators, large windowsills and greenhouses, and that is indeed a bother too far for many. Sowing a packet of hardy annuals like Nigella Gertrude Jekyll takes less time than planting a perennial. Why buy one plant for £9.99 when you can buy the potential of 1000 plants for £2.99? Surely in these uncertain times you deserve a border of joy for less than the price of a pint? Just poke them into the soil in a small group and mark it with a stick.
‘I never know which ones are the seedlings and which are the weeds…’ You will if you sow in crosses with your stick marker in the middle of each group. Some seedlings are very distinctive, and you will learn to recognize the feathery leaves of nigella, grey-green poppies and lime green marigolds – purple orache comes up burgundy. If weeds grow in crosses, they aren’t the weeds.
‘I am too busy in spring and the soil is too wet…’ Indeed, it was cold and wet this spring and not much fun to be in the garden. Many hardy annuals and most of the hard biennials will grow very well if you sow them in mid-September. The kids have gone back to school, the soil is warm and hopefully moist and germination will be quick. Autumn sown annuals will flower in May and June, and April sown annuals will flower in July and August – so packets of seed sown twice could give four months of flowers.
‘They take over…’ I would be happy to be taken over by a border of plants from seed. Most of them will die if you hoe them on a sunny day in April when they are still small. Left to their own devices, they will drop seed in late summer and grow again in September or spring. Avoid plants that have a running root stock as well as self-seed. Ask your gardening friends which plants they regret introducing to the garden and they will usually be in this category, or ask this garden designer.
‘I couldn’t be doing with having to sow them every year…’ See above. Poppies, marigolds and foxgloves will be just the thing for you.
‘They don’t last very long…’ three weeks for those poppies, over three months for marigolds, how long do you need?
‘It’s fun for the kids I guess…’ Oh, those happy memories of growing sunflowers with your little moppets for the Giant Sunflower competition at primary school, the delight on their faces as they saw their nasturtiums flowering for the first time! You introduced them to the delights of the natural world, grew plants from seed in the hope they would thrill to the joy of eating their first home grown carrot, and maybe they did. Now they are skulking teenagers who want to stay in their bedrooms, and your dream of them working with you in the garden has crumbled to dust. Seed growing has been relegated as an obsolete hobby, along with making pasta pictures and paper mâché Christmas decorations. Grow some nasturtiums for yourself! Sow Nasturtium Cherry Rose, a shade gentler than the screaming bright red ones, and a good addition to salads.
‘They are too gaudy’… The garden centres stock only a limited selection from the seed suppliers catalogue, and often mixtures in the brightest reds and yellows. You, being a creature of infinite refinement, consider them far too vulgar for your kind of garden, although you may never voice that opinion. Go on line and check out the Sarah Raven catalogue and order some Orlaya grandiflora – it’s like posh cow parsley and is not a bit gaudy. Marigold Arctic Princess opens lemon yellow and fades to cream and mixes with anything.
‘They are awfully common…’ Peruse the Chiltern Seeds catalogue Unusual section and grow something your neighbours don’t know and haven’t got. Revel in smugness as they ponder over your choice of something easy, spectacular yet unfamiliar. Try hot pink Ipomoea ‘Scarlet O’Hara’ or Ipomoea alba to scramble up a climbing rose. ‘Heavenly Blue’ will always be my favourite!
Enjoy!
