I’ve just done an auto sum of the seeds I have. Seems it’s 150 varieties, so little wonder I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. The biggest whelm is of course digging plots to house them, or getting them in seed trays, but even just filing them is becoming an issue.
Most of them have been from Eden Seeds, a local supplier, and their germination rates have been great, on the whole. This means that I can probably blame poor-shows like Mitsuba on my planting conditions (which just makes me want to grow Mitsuba more, isn’t it the way?). There were a few extra things I wanted to try, so I got them from another local (Queensland) company, Green Harvest. They have much more information on the packet, even more than in their catalogue, which is great. Consequently I am now soaking my Burdock seeds overnight to go in tomorrow, and have my Perilla seeds in damp sand in the fridge until Thursday.
150 plant varieties seems a lot, but I have a lot of bottled up enthusiasm from all those websites I’ve been looking up for years, and plants I’ve seen but not been able to grow. The Perilla, for instance, was a herb I was able to buy from my local market stall in Sydney, and never anywhere else that I saw. I thought it was pretty special, so now I have two varieties to try out. Cleome is something I saw in Switzerland for the first time and put in my mental list of flowers for the dream garden. Queen Annes Lace is something I saw as a boy in Perth and admired, then rarely saw again, so it will go in the meadow.
There has been a bit of a rush to get these and get them in. After our dry winter we had good rain in late August, and now today it is raining again, so I was out hoeing beds as much as possible this week to make the most of the sowing opportunity. Watering will get seedlings sprouted, but there seems to be something about rain that really gets things up and going. I suppose it’s the days-long moisture.
As for curating the collection, thank goodness for spreadsheet software! And good garden planning software that lets me keep track of what was planted where and when. I think the next step will have to be getting all the packets in order so that I can find them again. They are already getting shuffled as I plant them out in batches. And with my first lot of asian greens beginning to fill out their pods, it will soon be time to dry and store some of my own collection.