Grow a garden for free

That whole thing about people having green fingers? It is just a few really basic skills. There are advanced skills that really set some people apart (my mother makes a clear distinction between gardeners and ‘plantswomen’), but this is a bigger step between a complete novice and putting a fork in the ground. 

 Green fingers are generally a matter of timing in accordance with the seasons and the conditions, knowing that the growing medium needs to be nutritious, and knowing when to water so that the plants experience neither drought nor drowning. 

There is one thing that will make the biggest contribution to a full, voluptuous and abundant garden means getting down on the ground and inspecting very carefully.

Know your seedlings. 

There are three types of seedlings sprouting in my field at the moment: weeds; precious, self-sown volunteers; and bronze fennel. (The latter is sort of a joke, although there is bronze fennel everywhere, but what I mean is there are plants that I have intentionally grown and which are self-sowing but which I do not necessarily need more of. Salad burnet, yarrow, and echinops also fall into this category.) 

I have spent the morning with my trowel and a bucket and I have very carefully dug up about twenty tiny tiny ammi seedlings. The row of ammi was in my Dyeing Garden this year and no, it made no sense to me either, but this is where they self-sowed last year and I did not move them in time. This year I am going to be a little more organised. I am putting them into 9cm pots until they get a little bit bigger and then they will be planted into neat, flower farmer rows, and everyone will think that I am the most organised grower in the West Country. 

I am not sure if anyone has developed an app for seedling identification yet, although they should. Grown-up plants in full flower are relatively easy to tell apart; seedlings, not so much. And I cannot be the only one to have very carefully nurtured a fireweed to full flower and regretted it.  

There are two ways to learn this skill. I think the quickest way to learn is to go and peer at your soil. Unless you have been assiduous with hoeing, in this late August ‘second spring’ there should be a flush of tiny seedlings all over the place. Look at the colour and the shape of the first true leaves. If they are all over the garden, absolutely everywhere, it is likely that they are weeds (this is not the time for a philosophical debate about the anthropocentric stance of whether we have the right to categorise a plant as a weed or wanted, you get my drift). If they are only in the place where you grew a certain plant, it is likely that they are the seedling of that plant. 

The other way requires a bit more forward planning. If you are growing from seed, spend a bit of time with the plants when they are at their ‘uninteresting’ stage. Photograph them a day or so after they have put out their true leaves. Get your eye in by learning what flowers look like at every step of their life cycle and you will be able to read your garden all year round. The secondary benefit of this is that you can tell if you have rogue seeds in your seed trays, I have just pulled a seedling out of a tray of violas because I know for a fact that violas are dicotyledonous and the first seedling up was a monocot. Yes, I had to google how to spell it, but it just means that violas have two seed leaves when they first sprout. 

There is a third was for the studious and scientific amongst us. Spend a bit of time on this website and you will be an expert in no time.