So, what do you do on a cold, wet, blustery Sunday at the beginning of March? You wash up your seed trays, get out the potting compost and all the different packets of seeds and start planting. And I have, in the warmth of the kitchen.
Foxgloves, delphiniums, snapdragons, lupines, dill, parsley, coriander, basil, sweetcorn, aubergines, tomatoes, squashes. We’ll see what comes up. Some of the packets were a bit close to, or a couple of months after, their sell-by date, but what the hell. If nothing shows in a couple of weeks or so, I’ll just buy some fresh seeds, I imagine. That’s the advantage of starting early. Plenty of time.
The tricky bit begins when you are drowning in new plants and they all need potting on and you don’t have a greenhouse. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. In the meantime, there is plenty of fun and excitement in store and all I had to buy was a bag of seed compost. Cheap thrills.
I still can’t quite get over seeds. They are at best very small, at worst totally insignificant. While you can pretty much understand that something as substantial as a pumpkin seed could grow into something useful, foxglove seeds are just russet-coloured dust, looking like the sort of thing you might find your car covered in were you to park it in the Australian outback. Sowing the foxglove seeds is something of a challenge. You just sprinkle as little as possible in your growing cell, poke the growing medium about a bit in the hope that some of them are covered and trust in luck. It must work, as I have a few foxgloves in the garden that started this way.
Coriander seeds and lupine seeds are tiny cannonballs, quite easy to manipulate. Tomato seeds are like miniscule bivalve shellfish. Delphinium seeds, on the other hand, are wee little granules that don’t look like seeds at all. How could they possibly turn into beautiful blue flowers? Maybe they won’t.
Seeds for most of us are utterly banal. They are probably sitting on the top of your hamburger as sesame seeds, or on your bap as poppy seeds. It seems a waste, somehow. All that potential never realised. And how many countless millions of the things are in a combined harvester destined to become your breakfast? It’s only when you start to deal with them in ones and twos and spend time carefully poking them into the soil that their true awesomeness hits home.
