If this is your first year of Grow Your Own, then little and often is a good maxim to follow. There’s many a time in my early days of growing that I’d sow a whole packet of seeds and then have 100 beetroot or lettuce all ready at the same time. You can expect some seeds not to germinate or to get nipped off by your resident slug or cutworm, so it pays to sow a little extra – but don’t go overboard.
Because one of the least wonderful things about GYO (after the slugs) is the glut of produce you get if you don’t phase your growing over the whole season. You’ll need more friends than my children have on Facebook to be able to get rid of your glut, especially as everyone seems to have a glut of the same thing at the same time.
If you are clever, there are all sorts of ways you can cut costs. The first way is to sow direct into the soil – preparing a patch of land for growing to what is called a fine tilth (no stones, no weeds, texture like fine breadcrumbs) and sowing your seeds direct onto that. We tend not to use this method because our growing season in really short and our slugs are really active so starting off all except the hardiest plants under cover means we can grow more and longer.
If you can’t sow direct either, don’t despair! Empty 1 litre juice cartons (the ones you can’t recycle with normal cardboard because of the plastic lining) with one side cut away and between ten to twenty 2mm holes poked in the opposite side make perfect and totally free seed trays. And you can tuck your seed packet into the V of the spout so you know what you planted. It is also possible to use newspaper to origami your way towards free biodegradable pots – children especially like doing this (well, at least for the first thirty or so). No need to ship in biodegradable coir pots from the tropics via your garden centre when you have all the pots you’ll ever need sitting in your recycling bin. And then there are those stalwarts of the DIY plant pot world – the sturdy loo roll cardboard tubes we discussed last week.
Compost is another thing altogether. I would always recommend organic because I believe it’s best for the soil, for wildlife and for the rest of the natural world including the human bits of it. It is possible to make your own compost - before the rise of the garden centre, gardeners had no option but to make their own - but it’s never something I’ve tried. Partly because I love the idea of growing my food in a living soil with lots of beneficial microbes. For DIY compost I’d need to sterilise the soil to kill off the weed seeds, but then the bugs would go too. But also because it’s possible to use too strong a compost for the delicate thing that is seed germination and the perfect recipe for seed compost has so far eluded me - if you have one you’d recommend, let me know!
So I tend not to cut costs on compost. And I prefer organic seeds too (you wouldn’t believe all the chemical treatments non-organic seeds get before they go into the seed packet) but where possible, I save my own seeds from previous years or share seeds with other organic growers.
Sowing couldn’t be easier. Just about every packet of seeds has full sowing instructions, so follow those and you can’t go far wrong. A simple rule of thumb is to cover the seeds, once sown into your soil or seed tray, with about the same depth of soil as the size of the seed – so fine seeds like carrot will only need a very fine layer of compost to cover them, tough old brutes like beetroot will have a bit more. Big ‘fruit’ seeds (cucumber, pumpkin and courgettes) can rot if you lay them flat on the soil, so always plant them on their side.
A long time ago someone (probably one of those old gardeners that made all their own compost) taught me to water the compost before sowing the seeds on it – he claimed it stops the top layer of compost forming a crust which could make it harder for the seeds to break through.
Given how vital and tough some seeds are, I’m not sure I always believe him, but I liked his style so I do it anyway. He taught me to treat young seedlings like babies and toddlers. Treat them well and with kindness and you get the most amazing ‘adults’, neglect or mistreat them and they never fully recover. It’s not a bad analogy and I admire his idea of gardening with kindness.
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