We all know weeds grow from seeds. Nobody grows them on purpose! Weeds know how to survive and thrive without any help from us humans.
Can we get our gardens to do the same? I love the outcome of gardening, but I find hard work quite distasteful.
The knack, I found, is to buy heritage, open-pollinated and organic seeds. Unlike hybrid seeds and seedlings, one outlay of cash goes on giving season after season. If you find them the right conditions, plants grown from open-pollinated seeds will happily seed themselves without any care except water and sometimes a little food. My jolly patches of yellow and black rudbeckia, and my feminist-pink coloured snapdragons, are two wonderful examples of this. Most of the time I don’t even realise they’ve re-sprouted until they burst off their first few flowers.
Bulbs, like seeds, are also the gift that goes on giving year after year. How cheery I feel when their leaves start to poke themselves above ground for another show!
Joni Page 