24 Sowing Seeds

contribution by Gareth Lewis

When you start a project as (relatively) big as the experiment TM and I have undertaken here on the land we tend – that is veganic subsistence growing – it’s easy to be consumed by the vision and forget the drawbacks. In our case, we didn’t quite allow for how many seeds in the polytunnel and outdoors would be eaten by voles and harvest mice (a lot), or slugs; nor for extended periods of cold and wet soil; nor for non-germination. We always allow a small margin; just not quite enough.

Our beans are an example. I successionally sowed three good blocks of green and red broad beans, and all are up and thriving – NOW. However I had to resow around 100+ beans initially as they were dug up and eaten. We do have some blackfly on them, but the ladybirds (perhaps the ones I saved as hatchlings) are doing their thing. The bees are loving the flowers, as am I, sweet-scented as they are.

On the other hand, we’ve struggled a bit with our French beans, of which we grow about 150 to harvest and freeze as winter protein: slow and minimal germination, even in the polytunnel. I’m particularly disappointed about the Cocos de Paimpol: a delicious fat substantial white bean developed in Brittany, rather like a round-bodied butterbean, which we planted as a substitute for our pea beans (top image) and which did so well for us last year, but this year has barely germinated in the papier maché pots I used in the polytunnel (they weren’t cheap either. Loo-roll middles next time – IF I sow them indoors again.)

So I’m about to follow the advice in Gareth Lewis’ May newsletter from The Subsistence Gardener (he contributed to post #20), which I reproduce below, with his permission. Like so many other gardeners I’ve been reading lately, his advice is to build healthy soil (which also means that healthy plants succumb to fewer pests and diseases).

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SOWING SEEDS
If you are trying to sow vegetable seeds directly into your garden soil, this can be quite a stressful time of year. It is quite common for whole rows of seeds to fail to germinate, or to germinate only in patches, or for young seedlings to be ravaged by slugs, or eaten by birds. It is easy to become discouraged, but, even so, it is well worth continuing with direct planting.

Old Thinking / New Thinking
During the last century, commercial farming, and market gardening fell increasingly under the sway of the type of scientific thinking that had originally started to emerge towards the end of the Middle Ages. This sought to understand the material world by breaking things down to their constituent parts, and studying how they behave when isolated from all possible varients. This led to a certain understanding of the physical properties of inert substances, and contributed to the development of new technologies and industrial processes, but has proved to be more problematic when applied to living things.

For example, a seed, in this way of thinking, is regarded as being an individual entity that simply requires certain chemical elements or compounds from the soil, plus sunlight (or artificial light), and water, in order to grow, and eventually yield the desired crop. If anything goes wrong, it is assumed to be due to a malevolent organism (insects, fungi, weeds, etc.) disrupting a process that is otherwise working smoothly, and the problem can be solved by eradicating the offending organism with one chemical or another. To most people, this has seemed to work well over the past decades, and it has allowed the food industry to keep the supermarket shelves fully stocked with their products. However, unforseen consequences have become apparent in recent years – loss of biodiversity, health issues related to modern foods, farming not having a sustainable economic model, various environmental problems including climate change... and our seeds not growing when we plant them in the ground.

A more modern way of thinking is that a living system – such as a garden – consists of innumerable different elements (crop plants, wild plants, trees, shrubs, birds, mammals, reptiles, insects, fungi, mosses, lichens, bacteria, slugs, snails, soil types, water conditions, orientation, gradients, etc., etc.), all of which are interacting with each other to create a balanced, self-sustaining system. It is probably not possible to track all these interactions, nor to fully understand how many are having a positive effect upon the growth of any particular plant at any particular time, but it is possible to see that so many of them have now been disrupted that natural systems are no longer working properly.

Restoring Health to the Garden
The main task of today’s gardener is to try to restore enough complexity to the garden for it to start working as a coherent unit again. This is mainly done by recycling organic material through compost heaps and piles of mulch, and returning it to the soil, so that the garden can re-create its own culture of bacteria and other micro-organisms, which in turn nurture a unique insect population, and a diverse range of plants and animals, i.e. giving the garden time to heal itself, rather than trying to push it in one direction or another.

When you plant seeds in the garden, you get an indication of how things are going, and that is why it is worth persisting, even in the face of disappointments. If some sowings don’t work at all, the ground can be raked over and the crop re-sown – May sowings often work well, especially if the weather is not too dry. There are also crops, such as chicory, and turnips, that can be sown later on, and spaces in the garden can be filled by buying plants – such as leek plants, cabbages, or cucumbers. The short-term aim may be to have a well-stocked, productive vegetable garden this year, but if you keep an eye on the long-term aim of restoring the garden to health, then you can often find reasons to be cheerful, even when some crops don’t work out.

Gareth Lewis

Thanks for reading, my friends. And if you are a grower, wherever you are I’d love to know how your garden is doing this year?

I wish you joy this season.