I’m breaking up with punnets
Punnets. Fussy little seed sowing trays, self-watering nonsense, toilet paper rolls, egg cartons, grow lights, elaborate summer watering routines, stressed out seedlings, potting tables, seed labels that get lost, or smudged, or forgotten, ALL OF IT. I’m abandoning it. Packing it in. Giving it up.
I’m 33 years old (I keep forgetting I’m 33 years old and have told several health professionals recently, with confidence, that I am 32), I am still very much in the throes of learning to juggle parenthood with everything-else-I-still-need-to-be-doing, our baby’s ‘play room’ is full of 1000 of my (awesome, delicious, refreshingly fresh and inspiringly seasonal) cookbooks - get yourself one here - and I am breaking up with punnets.
But allow me to backtrack for a moment.
See, I don’t actually have a problem with seed raising per se. Up until this year I have always sown at least half of my seeds into punnets. And I responsibly labelled about half of those punnets. Over the weeks that followed, I remembered to water about half of my responsibly labelled punnets. And about half of the responsibly labelled punnets that I remembered to water were planted in the right spot, at the right time, before they’d become root bound. Which left me with, like, ONE successfully hand-reared seedling.
I exaggerate, it wasn’t that bad.
I was reasonably successful with my seed-raising adventures. And maybe I will come back to it again, once I finally find a location for a seed raising table and get myself organised. Then again, maybe I won’t. Because this year, driven largely by the newborn-baby-necessity of gardening very very efficiently, I have discovered a solution I like much, much more. I call it…
Flinging Seeds Everywhere.
Actually, I think the Flinging Seeds Everywhere method could be captured quite well under the umbrella of a concept I have recently encountered that I love even more: Chaos Gardening.
Chaos gardening is imperfection in the extreme, and it’s fun (and apparently it’s going viral on Tik Tok, but I’m 32 33 and I have no idea what the kids are doing on there).
It is the unpretentious, practical, pared-back bones of everything that makes gardening good, wild and successful. It is trucking buckets of pig manure into your garden and tossing it recklessly onto every patch of bare earth. It’s having 30 minutes to plant a boot-full of new plants before the rain sets in. It is taking too long because you got sidetracked shifting half your plants into new locations that you just decided are MUCH BETTER than their previous locations, and getting soaked by the rain anyway. And it is most certainly breaking up with punnets.
The reasons I have decided to become an advocate of chaos gardening are threefold. First, I have a 6 1/2 month old baby, and chaos gardening seems likely to be the mode of gardening I will, by sheer necessity, need to operate under for the foreseeable future. Second, you just get so much more done when you accept that none of your decisions are going to be absolutely perfect, and then carry on gardening anyway. Third, it’s basically how I’ve always gardened, it’s just now I have a name for it, and, with that name, a solid excuse to abandon my seed-raising past.
So, back to the seed-raising.
The truth is, there are real, non-Tik-Tok-related reasons why sowing all your seeds direct instead of in punnets is a good idea. But I’ll get to those in a sec.
A few necessary caveats
First, a couple of caveats upfront. If you decide to embrace seed flinging and chaos gardening, you will be relinquishing a certain degree of control over your garden. Some seeds may never germinate. Others will grow beautifully and you will have totally forgotten exactly what they are. Some - like broccoli - will likely get chomped away to nothing by the bugs in your patch. For plants like broccoli (which are targets for so many bugs) punnets would still be a good idea. Broccoli and I are still ~on a break~, so that decision was made easy for me.
If you don’t mind the occasional seed-sowing failure and you’re ok with forgetting what you’ve flung from time to time, consider sowing your seeds direct. It means you can entirely abandon the whole business of raising your seedlings in a series of pots that, like babushka dolls, get larger and larger before your plants are allowed their place in the garden. Basically, it’s a lot lazier, and so is absolutely my kind of thing.
Like any gardening method (or, let’s be honest, lack of method), if you wanna fling your seeds it’s important to stack the cards in your favour and play to your strengths.
Before you start flinging
You will need good soil. Soil that seeds will readily germinate in.
You will need to be clever about your timing - late autumn, winter and spring are generally great times to sow seeds direct in Perth. In summer, without near-constant irrigation, direct-sown seedling casualties will likely be high. And in very wet and rainy winters you do run the risk of your seeds getting washed away or, worse yet, rotting in the soil before they germinate. Seed flinging comes with risks, it’s true. But that’s what makes it exciting.
You also need to choose your plants carefully. Some (actually many) plants are much happier sown direct, so you’ll be doing them a favour. I find most of my plants that are sown direct and germinate successfully go on to be stronger and more vigorous plants than those I mollycoddle in trays. That said, any plants that need cold stratification (i.e., that need to be chilled in your fridge before planting) or that tend to be eaten as very young seedlings (looking at you broccoli, cauliflower and cabbages) aren’t great picks for a direct-sowing method.
Fortunately, the plants that are well-suited to direct sowing are many!
Why sow direct?
Ok, now back to the benefits of direct sowing. Because, like I said, there are some really solid reasons for choosing this approach.
It’s easier, lazier and more fun
I admit sowing seeds in punnets can also be fun (the orderliness, the structure, the suspense of awaiting germination and the little ping! of glee when those first shoots start to pop out of the soil), but if you want things to be easy, laaaazy and fun, direct sowing is the way to go. By direct sowing, you remove, in one fell swoop, basically all the steps in between sowing the seeds and growing the plant. There really is just one step - put the seeds in the ground. And, I guess, remember to water them. But there is no fiddling. No seed punnets, no misting, no popsicles with labels that come off in the rain, no root-bound seedlings, no parched soil in tiny growing cells. None of it. Nada. Zip. And because of that…
You’re much more likely to actually do it
A fancy car, sitting in a garage is no use to anyone. A meal, uneaten, brings no joy, and seeds that you never actually sow are worthless.
What’s more, the longer seeds sit around without being sown, the less viable they become. If you are hesitant to embrace chaos gardening because of the greater potential for seed death, just look at the seeds you have currently floating around, unplanted. How many years out of date are they?
Seeds are best sown within a year of purchase, after which time they grow increasingly less likely to germinate successfully. I know they seem full of possibility and potential sitting there in their nice little packets, but if the choice is between leaving them unsown for another year while you try to get organised, or just getting them planted now - plant them now.
It avoids transplant stress
Here are a handful of seeds that don’t like getting their roots knocked: carrots, parsnips, sweet peas and basically every kind of poppy. There are many more, but you get the idea. Actually, I suspect most plants don’t relish being moved, because at no point in their evolutionary history were they being routinely uprooted and relocated.
It’s not a normal thing we’re doing, evolutionarily speaking, to move them from punnet, to pot, to garden, so they haven’t evolved to expect (or enjoy) it. Instead, a lot of plants get transplant stress - moving them can shock them and damage their root systems. In the case of carrots this leads to wonky, freaky, deformed roots, and in the case of many other plants I suspect it leads to less vigorous growth and a greater susceptibility to attacks from bugs or fugal diseases. Sowing seeds direct eliminates transplant stress entirely, because you never need to shift them.
There’s less risk of soil drying out
Seedling punnets are - generally - teeny, and if you forget to water them, the soil can dry out in next to no time. Your seedlings might not die, but the additional stress of going without enough water can make them more vulnerable to bug and fungal attack
(bugs and fungus like to strike when plants are stressed and weak!). The soil in your garden beds is, comparatively, much slower to dry out (especially if you’ve filled it with lots of moisture-retentive organic matter), so seedlings will be safer there on hot days.
It saves space!
I have tried and tried and tried to have a functional and aesthetically pleasing potting table in my garden. One that allowed me to actually successfully raise seedlings and didn’t look messy and gross. It can’t be done. There is nowhere in our garden that 1) gets enough direct light, and 2) is in my face enough that I wont forget to water it. Maybe you’ve got a good spot for seed raising, but I find that seed raising stations often end up being collecting grounds for all the various bits of garden detritus and mess in my backyard, I routinely forget to water them, they take up valuable plant realestate and they just don’t look that good. Enter: seed flinging! Seed flinging requires no potting tables, no punnets, and no designated space, which leaves me with even more space to just grow plants. I like that.
Your plants will be healthier
Ok, this is purely anecdotal, so take it with a pinch of salt, but I swear my self-sown plants that pop up in the garden of their own accord are healthier. Maybe it’s because their roots have never been disturbed (see: transplant stress), maybe its because they ‘chose’ their spot in the garden, and so those that germinated successfully were in a prime position. I really don’t know. I DO know that oftentimes we try to control our gardens and, in so doing, rob them of what makes them truly unique and special.
Is it SO wrong to grow wild parsley right next to your philodendrons? Would it be that awful to let lettuces burst through the cracks in your pavement? And who says you can’t leave the rogue pumpkins that pop out from your compost to grow, windingly through your garden, wherever they like?
These are all rhetorical questions and the answers are no, no and boring tightasses.
How to improve your chances of success
The one adaptation I suggest you make if you decide to sow your plants direct is to double down on your seed saving. If you start consistently harvesting and saving seeds from your garden to sow the following season, you’ll have so many seeds to work with that it won’t matter if some of your direct-sowing attempts aren’t successful.
The other fantastic benefit of saving more of your own seeds is that, little by little, you’ll be creating a collection of seeds that are perfectly suited to your own specific growing conditions. Harvest seeds each season from the plants that have thrived and you’ll be setting yourself up for even greater success the following season.
My final tip, if you want to be just a little measured in your CHAOS GARDENING exploits, is to not fling all your seeds at once. If you’re saving homegrown seeds, you’ll likely have plenty to work with, so you can stack the cards in your favour by sowing a few in different patches across your garden (to see which spots they like best) and sowing a few batches across different times of year. Sow some in early autumn, some in late autumn, then sow another batch in winter and one in spring.
Doing so will also - handily - give you a bit of a lazy version of succession sowing, so you’ll actually improve your gardening even more because you wont have every single poppy blooming at once. If they all germinate successfully, you’ll get waves of colour that blow through your garden like the spring breeze. And if winter is a washout or autumn is too dry, it means you’ll have multiple shots to get your seeds going successfully.
Alright. Enough chaos for today. But if you take one thing away from this newsletter, I hope it is that we can always find ways to make gardening less stressful, less constrained, looser, more relaxed and - ultimately - more fun.
So, whether you get your moments of gardening joy from sowing seeds in perfect punnets and neatly labelling every single one, or plunging headfirst into the chaos of random seed flinging into every available patch of soil, know that the only thing that really matters is this: if you are having fun, you are doing it right.