sowing seeds

I evicted the pots of hyacinths from the greenhouse, since they should be well rooted now and able to cope with the rain, and the top growth is frost proof.  Indeed, for years I used to start them off outdoors and they were fine, until one particularly wet and cold winter when the basal plates rotted before they ever got going.  With the hyacinths gone and some judicial shuffling of the pots of violas and bags of compost I was able to make space to stand at the potting tray, and could start sowing this year's seeds.

There were more seeds than I was expecting in the packet of sea daffodil, Pancratium maritimum, and they were the sort of seeds to strike joy into a gardener's heart, large and easy to handle, with the instructions on the packet promising that germination should occur within a couple of weeks.  It may, it may not, and if they germinate the young plants may then prove tricky to keep alive, or take years to grow to flowering size.  There is many a slip between cup and lip in the dark art of growing your own from seed, and I tried not to imagine the beach themed end of the turning circle studded with exotic white flowers too vividly.  It would be fun, though.

The seeds of Hesperaloe parviflora were similarly large, and generous in number, and I tried to be equally restrained in my hopes for them while mentally indulging in visions of how I could donate the surplus plants to various garden club stalls.  I don't really have room for more than one or two plants in the garden, and it wouldn't have broken the bank to simply buy a plant, but growing things from seed is part of the fun.

I hope my latest sowing of the wood sage, Teucrium hircanum 'Purple Tails', succeeds, because I would like a lot more plants.  I raised some before, and they made lovely chunky specimens and flowered in their first year in pots, but the area where they were supposed to go was not ready in time to plant them out, and by the second year they had deteriorated markedly.  Those I eventually managed to get into the ground along the side of the wood seemed to start to recover and thicken out at the base, and I am optimistic that this year they will be fine, but I had to throw the remaining pots on the compost heap.  When you would like a couple of dozen plants or more, and they cost five or six pounds from the Chatto Gardens or Dorset Perennials, then it really does pay to grow your own from a two pound packet of seed, if you can.

The seeds of the Persian violet, Echium affine, were absolutely tiny, mere specks, smaller than a grain of sand.  It was difficult to get them out of their little plastic bag, and I hope that some landed on the compost.  They were too small to cover with any compost.  Germination is supposed to take no more than a couple of weeks, so I shall know fairly soon if I have got anything.  If any do come up then my next propagating experiment had better be learning to take Persian violet cuttings.

I inspected the tub of damp vermiculite in the airing cupboard with its three seeds of yellow flowered Clivia miniata.  One had made a good long root and begun to grow its first leaf, one had a smaller root, but the third had a lump of mould on one side where I fear that the emerging root had been.  I potted the first two and put them on the kitchen window sill, where I trust the albino leaf will green up.  I cleaned the mould off the third and put it back in the airing cupboard, but don't really expect anything else to happen.  When I was originally reading up on how to germinate Clivia I gathered that mould growing on the seeds was one of the risks.  I should have inspected them more frequently.