The joy and heartache of starting plants from seed

I enjoy starting plants from seed and try to find something new every year to extend my gardening budget and test my skill. It’s become a tradition now, with both successes and failures on my record.

My seed starting branched out from the vegetables we’d always grown when Waves petunias hit the market. They were perfect for the window on our house. But they were only available as pricey plants, so the year the seeds first appeared I bought several packets.

I’d been told petunias were difficult to grow, but my investment in 20 seeds was about what I’d pay for a single plant, so I didn’t have much to lose. To my surprise, every seed produced a plant. My window boxes looked so lush an employee of Jung’s seed came out to look at them. I was hooked on growing my own everything.

I didn’t realize petunias are actually a snap to grow, so overcome by hubris the following year I decided to fill our garden with my favorite perennial — delphinium. I’m particularly fond of the plants that have marine blue flowers with white bees in the middle, so I ordered tons of seeds.

I started them exactly the same way I start all of my seeds and waited for the first green sprouts. And I kept waiting. I planted more flats, used bottom heat, used more light and tried to urge them to life with curses. Total plants produced – zero. The project produced a lot of humility, though, which is probably more valuable to a gardener than all the delphinium in the world.

Cukemelons, or Mexican sour gherkins, were another experiment. The plants were easy enough to start and grow. We ate lots of them straight off the vines, but I dreamed of serving cute, miniature watermelon-like pickles made from cukemelons. We pickled jars of them, but the outside rind of each was tough and the insides were mush. Bad pickling technique or bad planning, we didn’t love them enough to grow  more cukemelons.

Black sesame seeds, a more recent introduction to our garden, were easy to grow and tasty once we wrestled them away from the chipmunks. They’re now home standards.

That brings me to last year, when I decided to use short cannas in our front pots and window boxes. I spent $10 on seeds and crossed my fingers, fearing another delphinium disaster. But each seed sprouted. They looked like blades of grass for a long time, but once summer arrived the plants took off. Last autumn I pulled starts of both the ivory and pink-flowered corms out of the containers.

Each canna produced six starts. Some of the more unusual cannas can be difficult to coax out of dormancy, so I put my home-grown corms under lights in the basement. They’re flowering now and growing like weeds.

For 2020, I was tempted by peanuts, but black rice seeds were finally penciled in on the order sheet. After all, I have a water garden and lots of old water lotus pots to plant them in. Rice seedlings should feel right at home around here. And if I actually get a decent harvest, maybe I’ll take another shot at those delphinium. Surely I’ve learned enough to coax at least one seed to sprout.