Carol Klein gets excited to start her seed sowing at Glebe Co age
Get going now for the best results from your summer sparklers
When you start sowing seeds in earnest, the excitement of a new gardening year begins to exert its grip. Summer may seem a long way away but for best results, now’s the time to get cracking.
Seed sown now of all those irresistible summer sparklers will mean the season can start earlier and we will all be thankful for that. Providing you can offer seedlings the security of a frost-free place and reasonably bright light, seed can be sown from late January onwards.
Many of our brightest daisy flowers hail from the Americas, most from Central and South America (incidentally so, too, do many of our favourite vegetables – tomatoes and ‘French’ beans among them).
Zinnias, tithonia, coreopsis, dahlias and rudbeckia, all with a vivid array of brilliantly coloured blooms, are all easy from seed. Once they’re out in the garden (best wait until May) they’ll give you flowers through to the frost. Frequent deadheading is vital and the same procedure works with all these daisies; with a sharp pair of secateurs or florist’s scissors, take off the dead flower and its supporting stem down to the next bud or lateral.
Also from South America, though decidedly not a daisy, is Cleome spinosa, one of the most exciting of half-hardy annuals. Its outlandish flowers are like nothing else – strange, hair-like stamens give this the name of spider flower. Plants are statuesque and go on flowering for months. If you want something more ephemeral, you could try one of the daintier tobacco plants, such as Nicotiana mutabilis, whose flowers, as its name suggests, change colour. A very pretty plant.
Snapdragons (antirrhinums) are wonderfully old-fashioned plants that have been given a new lease of life with exciting new colours. Last year we grew a splendid, strong white form, ‘Royal Bride’. Some of the plants have overwintered but we’re still going to sow more seeds. Antirrhinums make splendid cut flowers so the more we have, the better.
If you love the blues of delphiniums but are, like us, not too successful with them, larkspur (now called consolida) is an excellent and easy substitute.
Perhaps it’s unfair to call it a substitute since it’s outstanding in its own right and, if seedlings are pricked out promptly and potted on individually, they make tall, bushy plants. Of course, they can never compare to delphiniums in stature, but their colour can be just as intense and you can have more of them very cheaply or even for free if you save your own seed. We saved the seed from two magnificent plants that appeared in our giant veg troughs last year.
Sometimes, when you broadcast seed of hardy annuals, literally just chucking it about, there are clumps of seedlings that germinate together and it’s tempting to leave them all. Thinning them out may seem cruel but it gives the remaining plants the chance to expand and grow to their full potential. Although it’s much more time-consuming, I prefer to grow both hardy and half-hardy annuals individually in pots and plant them out exactly where they have space to become themselves.
We start all seed in the same way, filling half seed trays (use anything – recycled punnets or pots – as long as they’ve drainage holes) with proprietary seed compost or our own mix. Sprinkle seed sparingly, grit over the top, press down firmly, stand in shallow water and when the grit changes colour take out trays and drain. Stand in a warm, bright place.
When seedlings develop their first true leaves, prick them out by gently lifting them by their seed leaves and putting them in individual compartments. Make your own modules using strips of cardboard to divide up a tray. Who knows, by the time our plants are coming into flower, we may be able to share them with friends and family.
‘The excitement of a new gardening year begins to exert its grip’