Growing from seed made easy

EVERY seed is packed with potential and a wonderfully cheap way to fill your garden with flowers, herbs and veg.

Sowing seeds is not as easy as you think but thanks to clever seedsmen – and women – and some gardening tricks, there are solutions.

Small seeds are difficult to handle and sow thinly, so many are pelleted with a special clay coating, which makes it easier to space them in a pot or tray by hand. Spacing seeds does away with the fiddly job of thinning seedlings later on.

Pelleting gives the best conditions for germination and protects against infection from micro organisms in the compost. It also makes growing more affordable as there is no wastage.

Some seeds, particularly lettuce, are even primed before pelleting, which means germination happens up to 50 per cent faster.

Pelleted seeds are great for onions, parsnips and carrots. Experiments have shown treated seeds produce straighter and more uniform roots.

Seed tapes work too. Make your own by mixing the seed with flour and water paste and putting a blob at intervals along a strip of toilet roll.

Improve

The roll is simply cut to the length of a row in your veg plot and covered to the correct depth with finely sieved soil and watered in.

If your failings have been due to sowing too thickly and seedlings damping off, now is the time to improve your method.

Tricky seeds are small ones like lobelias and it is common practice to prick the seedling out in clumps of four or five when they reach 2mm tall.

To get an even spread of seeds across the surface of the compost in seed trays, add a teaspoonful of dry silver sand to the packet and shake. Then shake on to the compost.

Foxgloves, begonias, snapdragons and rainbow coleus are also small enough to slip past the cracks in your hand, so use the silver sand trick again.

Alternatively, brush the seed on to the surface of a tray of compost and use the moist tip of a toothpick to lift the individual seed to space them evenly across the tray.

There are also things to help, such as the Magic Seeder – a syringe-type gadget that allows you to distribute seeds evenly. Pick up this handy tool for £6.99 from suttons.co.uk.