Make your garden grow

It’s Spring, and time to start sowing seeds. Pioneering farmer Alice Holden shares tips and advice

Published in

Do Book Company

9 min readMar 29, 2022

Not long ago my Uncle Roger, also a grower, said to me, ‘Seeds want to grow.’ Simple as it sounds, his comment struck me. A seed is a package of life that is well equipped to survive. It is merely waiting, lying dormant until the necessary conditions combine. With a little moisture, warmth and some light, miraculously, it will begin to wake up and start to grow.

Seed Compost

Firstly, you will need to get some seed compost from your garden centre. Sowing, potting and multi-purpose composts are different from the compost you make at home. They tend to be a mixture of materials such as coir (coconut fibre), shredded bark, sand and organic matter. These ready-made composts are balanced and weed- free, which makes them ideal for raising seeds. There are a variety of composts for different uses. Ask for a seed compost that is not too coarse so you know it will be suitable for sowing seeds.

I use organic peat-free composts so I know they have not been made using man-made fertilisers or produced from finite or polluting resources. If these are not available, I ask my garden centre if they can order some in. Alternately, you can make your own seed compost. Mix 5 parts leaf mould (that is well broken down so it resembles crumbly soil) with 2 parts clean sand.

Sourcing Your Seeds

Propagation begins with the seed so quality is important. There is no way to guarantee your seed will germinate — seed does vary and like everything is affected by the season and how it is kept. The best assurance you have is to use good seed companies.

I tend to bulk-buy from seed companies, placing my order some time near the end of January. If I’m less organised I buy from independent garden centres who often have staff with a wealth of information. At my local garden centre, I always get lots of sound advice and find I can tap into local knowledge about what is working (or not!) for fellow growers in the same area and climate.

I try to use organic seed unless I can’t obtain the variety I want. Organic seed has been raised from organic plants and thus in a way that has not polluted the environment. The more we use organic varieties the more demand there will be for them, and I try to support this philosophy.

Varieties

There are a wealth of vegetable varieties available to us. Seed catalogues offer a sweet-shop array of colours, shapes and sizes. The choice can be overwhelming. When starting out it is sometimes easier to opt for those marked as ‘reliable’ or ‘resilient’. However, I always look for comments on taste too. Often old-fashioned heritage varieties score well on this front, with modern plants bred more for storage durability or disease resilience. Each year I tend to grow a few trusted reliables alongside some new ‘wild cards’.

Be warned — once you have had a few successes and realise the value a small packet can offer, buying seed can become a more serious addiction than a sweet tooth.

Planting Seeds

While it’s true that different seed varieties require different growing conditions — slight variables in temperature and spacings — the general method that I use remains roughly the same. The planting methods below are the ones I follow for almost everything I grow.

The Direct Sowing Method

Direct sowing is where you plant seed straight into the ground. This way of sowing seeds is quicker but actually I rarely use it. On occasion, if I have a lovely fine tilth, the weather is good and my bed is pretty slug-free, I will sow some seeds straight out, but generally I find the module method, which we’ll come to shortly, to be much more reliable.

To get started, simply rake over the surface to make sure the ground is weed free and the soil is fine enough for the seed to create good contact with it.

Use a piece of string held in place by sticks at either end to create a straight line along your bed. Then, using this as a guide, draw a straight line in the soil parallel to the string. I use the end of a garden tool or stick in order to do this. You are aiming to create a small trench in which to place your seed. This trench should be roughly twice the depth of the size of your seed.

Drop your seed along the line of the trench. Try to thin the seed out so it does not have too much competition from its bedfellows. Cover the seeds with some fine soil, pat down the line firmly and water in gently.

Tip: If the seeds are very small it can be useful to fold a piece of cardboard and pour seed into the fold. Gently tap the card as you move along the trench. This can help to give you a more even spacing.

The Cuttings Method

Some plants can easily be grown by taking cuttings from a mother plant. This works well when growing herbs as it can save time and expense. I always use this method for growing new rosemary plants, and often for sage.

Take your cuttings from the healthy, newer growth of your chosen plant and select non-flowering branches with plenty of leaves, roughly 10 cm in length (about 5–8 cm for thyme). I do this by pulling a small side-shooting branch downwards, away from the main stem. This should give you a ‘heel’ or strip of soft bark on your removed branch. Finally gently trim off the bottom third of leaves.

Plant your cutting straight out into a small pot of firmed-down freely draining compost, making sure that the bare stem — and not the leaves — are in the soil. I usually put two or three stems in each pot to increase my chances of success.

This is a quick and easy way of making new plants. Along the way I have had some failures but they have been far outweighed by success. Don’t worry about being too technical — cuttings will often survive simply being bunged into a pot, watered and left on a sunny windowsill.

The Marvellous Module Method

Of all the tricks and techniques used to successfully grow plants, starting them somewhere protected in a module tray is my preferred method as it greatly increases the chances of success.

Thinking back to the basic conditions that plants need this makes perfect sense. If you begin by planting seed in trays you can easily give the seed and seedlings the optimum conditions required — food, water, light, heat and shelter — because they are portable.

Rather than open seed trays I nearly always use module trays. These are simply seed trays that are divided up into compartments. Unlike open seed trays, when transplanting out your seedlings you can plant the whole module into the ground without disturbing or pulling apart a plant’s roots. Working on a flat surface, pour seed compost over the tray and fill each hole then shake it down by banging the tray a few times on a hard surface. Then top up the tray with more compost, making sure the tray is full and the seed compost is firm and even. It is important there are no air pockets as the seeds need to have good contact with the soil in order to germinate. Next make an indent with your finger, a stick or pencil, the depth of which should be approximately twice as deep as the size of seed you are planting. Some seeds like lettuce are so small they can sit just under the surface of the soil. Sprinkle another thin layer of seed compost over the tray to cover the seed and gently pat it down. Again, you want the seed to be snugly in contact with the soil. Finally, gently water the tray using a watering can or hose-head with a fine rose so the seeds are not displaced by the flow.

With the basic plant requirements in mind, try and keep your module trays in a warm, light, sheltered place and don’t let the trays dry out. The seed compost will offer the seedling all the food (i.e. the nutrients) it requires for its early stages of growth.

Greenhouses are ideal for raising young plants in module trays. They are light, warm and protected from the elements and pests. If you don’t have access to a greenhouse you can try and mimic greenhouse conditions as best you can. For the last few years, from February onwards my bathroom has doubled up as a nursery for all of my most heat-hungry plants. I germinated 300-plus healthy tomato plants (plus all my cucumbers, courgettes and peppers) in there! This is perhaps an extreme example; however, it does show what you can do with minimal resources and limited space.

So, on a small scale, windowsills, conservatories or simple outdoor cold frames (a box with a glass or clear plastic lid like a mini-greenhouse) can be used to help nurture plants through their early stages. While indoor growing offers warmth and protection for plants from frosts, the main challenge is finding somewhere light enough to keep seedlings healthy after germination. Seedlings will naturally bend towards the light source so you will need to turn them around or move them regularly as they grow.

Mixed Planting

It may be easier to create order in a garden by planting the same crops side by side, but sometimes I like to experiment. And there’s a reason for it. Raising complementary plants together can bypass the need for a strict rotation plan.

Through the very variety you create, you are achieving its goal — not to exhaust the same nutrients year after year. Mixing crops can give excellent results and fits in well with the principle of achieving balance in your system. It can also be a good way of making the most out of a small space.

In 2005 I worked on an organic farm on Vancouver Island, Canada. Here, Steven, a sensitive and practical farmer, showed me a system first used by the Mayans that used one crop’s traits to benefit another. These were regarded as the ‘three sisters’ — courgettes, sweetcorn and beans. Established courgettes were planted first, offering ground cover to suppress weeds. We then planted sweetcorn at intervals between the courgette plants.

The sweetcorn would rise tall above the courgette leaves, seeking out the large amounts of sunlight it required. Finally, a climbing bean seed would be planted at the base of the young, module-raised sweetcorn plant. As the bean germinated and grew, the sweetcorn would offer the support it needed to climb. Meanwhile the bean, being a legume, would benefit the soil by fixing nitrogen. The three plants together created a relationship of mutual benefit.

If you want to try mixed planting think about the eventual size, shape, height and depth of a vegetable in order to gauge what may work together. Plants need space to grow, so look at their shapes to make sure they will not be competing with one another in the same space above, and below ground.

Some plants are grown together for other reasons of mutual benefit. For example, the smell of onions may camouflage the position of another crop from predators like carrot fly. Here are some useful combinations of companion plants:

For good use of space:

Tomatoes with basil (under cover); cucumbers with dill; courgettes with climbing French or runner beans — courgettes also give ground cover which minimises weed growth.

For pest control and attracting pollinators:

Tomatoes with tagetes (Chinese marigolds) — as their scent deters whitefly; nasturtiums — position at the corners of your vegetable patch to draw blackfly and other pests away from your crops.