🌱 “A gardener’s work is never at an end; it begins with the year and continues to the next.” —John Evelyn
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Curious whether seed-starting is worth the effort, or if it’s better to buy seedlings? Let’s dig into it.
Why You Shouldn’t Start From Seed
First, a quick aside here: I absolutely love starting all of my plants from seed myself and I rarely if ever buy any seedlings / starts from nurseries that I can grow on my own.
That said, I’m going to do my best here to outline (as objectively as possible) all of the downsides of starting your own seedlings first, before we look at the benefits:
Difficulty
Starting plants from seed is difficult. It’s a skillset which will take time to dial in. There will be trial-and-error, frustration, and many failures along the way. It will challenge your skill as a grower.
The Repercussions of Failure
If you rely on growing everything from seed, any failure will bubble up and become a bare […]
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Succession planting is the key to continual garden harvests all throughout the season. If you’re looking to spread your harvests out across the season so you have a steady supply of food coming in from the garden, succession planting is the way!
Let’s jump into some of the specifics, as well as some common mistakes and issues you might encounter while getting into garden successions.
What Is Succession Planting?
Succession planting means starting each crop multiple times within the season, rather than all at once.
For instance, radishes are an incredibly quick crop which can go from seed to harvest in as little as 3-4 weeks (depending on variety).
Because a radish plant can’t be harvested in stages, once you pull up a radish it’s done for the season.
This makes radishes the perfect crop for succession planting, as you can sow a new planting of […]
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Look at these pictures— what do you notice?
Three beautiful people? Yeah, duh, but look a little closer at the backgrounds! Barren soils covered in undecaying dead leaves; sand! High-drainage sand!
This is a product of the commonly used turfgrass. Pretty, right? Green, uniform, well-kept… but that’s only if they’re well kept.
Turfgrass is one of if not the most common groundcover used in lawns, parks, and general city landscaping. It is INCREDIBLY water intensive, cannot withstand heavy foot traffic, and creates areas of low biodiversity and a monoculture that frankly Florida just doesn’t need! Turfgrass, on average, requires about an inch of water to keep looking nice and green, and even when it’s nice and green, the roots are low, they require frequent gasoline for mowing and a lot of water, and provide minimal habitat for wildlife.
And in areas like the Deerfield Beach’s Renaissance Fair, where foot traffic can be high, it ends up looking like this:
Barren patches of erosion and sand that houses a very poor microbiome. So… what’s the big deal?
Fact: Good, healthy soil can pull roughly 1.5 to 5.5 BILLION tons of carbon dioxide out of the air! That’s around 27% of what’s needed stored to keep our earth below 2°C! This is because of not only the photosynthesis process of plants, but microbial activity!
But in areas of turfgrass, especially neglected, microbial activity is not only low, but turfgrass pulls in significantly less carbon than native groundcovers.
So what can be done about this? Well… here’s what I’m doing at Quiet Waters Park.
Sunshine Mimosa is a native Florida groundcover that is not only extremely resilient, but is resistant to drought, attracts pollinators, and has deep root systems capable of storing several metric tons of carbon in the soil, as well as correcting the nitrogen potential of the soil! I, personally, have done a bit of sprinkling. The picture above is one I took before I started sprinkling Sunshine Mimosa seeds around after soaking and scarifying— so hopefully, by the end of the festival, I have another picture of the sprouts starting to come to life!
That all being said, everyone can do something for the environment. Sometimes the best place to start is in our own lawns and parks. Maybe you can go about it a little more legally than I am, but whatever you do, know that the ticket to helping our planet is caring for it’s life-giving soils. Where the soil is healthy, as is all else! And this action doesn’t only need to be taken in Florida— research your native groundcovers, look at your local laws and HOA bylaws, and make your community work WITH nature, not against it!
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Testing your germination rate on seeds is especially important if you have any interest in knowing roughly how many seeds to plant.
Let’s talk seed germination rate testing, how to do it, and why you should care.
What Is Seed Germination Rate?
For a given batch of seeds, the germination rate represents the average viability rate of a sample of seeds. That is to say, the average success rate at germination.
If, for example, a sample of 50 seeds is germinated from a batch of 5,000. 34 of the 50 seeds sprout successfully. We would say that the germination rate of the batch is ~68% (34/50).
Why Should You Test Seed Germination Rate?
In the hypothetical example above we saw a germination rate of 68%.
Since this is closer to 50% than 100%, we could use this data to inform our decision about how many seeds to […]
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