A common question for backyard gardeners, who now make up a large section of the ever-growing urban agriculture movement, relates to the benefits of growing food from seed saved in their own garden. In part, urban food growers are increasingly looking for ways to achieve some level of self-sufficiency and reduce their carbon footprint by growing their own vegetables, fruit and herbs.
Growing from seed or seedling is an important question because it not only relates to the physical practice of food gardening, but it also connects to the feeling one gets from gardening and gaining a deeper experience from growing your own food.
City people involved in growing vegies are generally short of time and committed to many other things. They tend to take shortcuts in order to manage the little time they have. Therefore, buying a seedling is very enticing when one wants to get a vegetable garden underway. Someone else has done the work of carefully tending the young plant from seed when it is in its most fragile stage.
Growing from seed requires diligent monitoring of the seed during its growth to ensure it’s getting enough moisture, the appropriate heat, sun at the right time, is grown in the right soil mix and is located in a place where it will not get pounded by extremes in weather or eaten by pests. The seed also needs to be good quality. It is important to remember that it’s hard to ascertain from the exterior of a seed if it is worth planting.
In deciding to grow from seed or seedling, one could ask sensibly, why not just go to the seedling shop, buy a seedling and place it straight into your garden? No messing around with checking the seedlings each day, making sure they are “happy and comfortable”.
You can watch those bought seedlings grow in your garden, but there are some hidden traps worth considering:
- The seedlings may have been grown out of season, i.e. grown in a temperature controlled environment and sold to you in a ‘healthy state’ but when they hit the real climate of your garden, they weaken and die very quickly. This is a very common experience for food gardeners.
- You may not know how the seedlings were grown and whether any artificial stimulants were applied to make them look robust. Artificially stimulated seedlings are not likely to survive in many gardens.
- You may buy the seedlings on impulse after visiting a nursery and not really know if it’s the right time to plant the seedlings based on their local climate. Planting at the wrong time will either stunt the seedling growth or bring about its early demise.
- If you want to grow a lot of food, seedlings can be very expensive and you would need to get into your car to buy them, thereby contributing to CO2 emissions.
- You miss the opportunity to be involved in the seed-to-seed method with growing food; a marvelous process which adds a level of ‘magic’ which you cannot appreciate until you experience it.
In reality, it’s not always possible to have enough, or the right kind, of seeds saved from plants grown in your garden. In such circumstances it is worth considering buying seedlings from a supplier who uses locally propagated seeds for seedling stock or you buy certified organic, non-hybrid open pollinated seeds. Favourite seed suppliers in our part of the world are Green Harvest and Eden Seeds.
Growing from seed saved in your garden brings many benefits worth paying attention to. We know from conversations with many urban food growers, including those committed to organic produce or who practice various methods such as biodynamic agriculture, that they prefer to use their own seed because they know the provenance. Seeds propagated in one’s own garden from healthy plants have already commenced their adaptation to local garden conditions. When looked after properly, they are more likely, than seed propagated elsewhere, to germinate and become healthy plants.
One of the benefits of growing from seed saved from the plants in your own garden is a highly rewarding experience of observing a process which is not too dissimilar to how we live our lives. The seed process starts with dormancy before it proceeds its transformation into something with root and stem. Soon after it comes out into the world and draws upon the forces around it to grow. When it is strong enough, it is ready to flower, to bring something beautiful into the world. This flowering then leads to a state of chaos in the plant where the seed is formed, the blueprint of the next plant.
Food gardening is well regarded as an activity that brings many health benefits. It is not surprising then that many backyard food growers like to grow from seed they have saved in their own garden as it provides them with the opportunity to broaden their thinking about food growing and actively participate in plant growth. In fact, we could go as far as say that it is this attitude to food growing that can help one develop the green thumb they felt they never had.
Growing from seed saved in one’s own garden is then a much more complete process which is not only more likely to produce better plants, but also can help one engage more meaningfully with their own garden and glean some additional pleasures from it.
We have added new resources about seed saving and managing including a new video on selection criteria of plants to save seeds from and new tips on how to store seeds. For these and other resources about seeds and planting, check out our Toolshed once you register as a member at Gleanr.
