DECISION TIME

Choosing what to plant is a real growing concern.

IT’S that time of year again, when the number of seed catalogues piled up on the kitchen table is only outdone by the numbers stuffed down the side of the sofa.

This year I’ve tried to limit myself to things that I know will grow well in my garden (primulas, anemones, astilbes and astrantias) and not be seduced by anything tricky or fussy like a pomegranate or a monkey puzzle tree.

Do I have the patience to wait five years for a seed-raised agapanthus to open its first flower? Probably not, but that hasn’t stopped them from appearing on my list.

And am I really going to buy more hellebore seed when the ones that already grow in the garden will start producing their own seeds the moment they stop flowering? I might – you can never have too many hellebores.

Then there are the vegetables.

Why grow red tomatoes when you can have ones with green and brown skins? Or carrots shaped like golf balls? Or beetroot with candy stripes?

Compared to what’s on offer in the supermarket, seeds are a passport to a whole new world of colours and flavours, and it’s the same with cut flowers.

All kinds of pretty things like cosmos and poppies are ridiculously easy to grow but hard to find if you don’t raise them yourself. Shop-bought flowers have been bred to last for as long as possible but somewhere along the way they’ve lost their natural scent and grace.

The same can’t be said for the ones you pick from your own garden and if in three or four days these shed their petals it doesn’t matter, each little packet contains enough seed to raise dozens of flowers, so you can just go out and pick some more.

I like to grow perennials from seed. Not all are easy – some need a period of chilling to nudge them into germination, others need heat – but a surprising number will grow without any special treatment.

Start now and, in a couple of years, your garden could be filled with all sorts of delightful things for just a little effort and not much cost.

Or how about growing your own forest? I have gardening friends who’ve become hooked on raising trees from seed and who swear that these grow into hardier specimens than those bought when they are a few years old.

Trees take even more patience than agapanthuses, which is why I don’t have any in my nursery plot, but I do have lots of euphorbias, anemones, violas and oriental poppies that all started off as not much more than a pinch of dust.

In anticipation of this year’s sowing season I’ve been cleaning out seed trays and stockpiling seed compost, stashing it in a corner of the kitchen to allow it to warm up.

Now all that remains to be done is to whittle my seed order down from 47 different kinds of flowers and veg to a more realistic number – that’s the bit that I find tough.