Our Sustainable Garden: Thoughts on Seeds

[Find more advice from Jess Cole's gardening column, "Our Sustainable Garden".]

At the end of last summer, under the full harvest moon, I gave birth to my first child. I will never forget the sun-filled afternoon we brought him home to—ironweed and swamp sunflowers, full bloom, bowing deeply in the wind. I watched him see trees for the first time and feel the foreign breeze on his brand new skin. There are certain feelings that only the fervent sun, and its warmth, can provoke. All sounds were unprecedented: insect wings fluttering, toad chatter, and bird song. The next day he experienced the oddity of rain. Soon, the breezes vanished and alas, he felt, for the first time, the thick humidity that defines southern Louisiana. For weeks I watched, overwhelmed, as he discovered this earth. Every day, every moment, was a new type of life to gain and catalog in his sweet, tiny mind.

These memories have been on my mind, hearkening to my annual emotions surrounding spring. New life everywhere—intense, all consuming. And somehow, year after year, it always feels as though I’m experiencing it for the first time. Each year I notice a hundred new details in my garden, our woods, the greenhouse—things that have never caught my eye or ear before. Certain sounds are sharper than last year, tiny flowers more fragrant than ever, shades of green more pronounced than I remember. These early days of March, rousing with life, are a great time to talk about the tiny thresholds of life, the little beginnings: seeds.

There is so much to say about seed. We could dedicate an entire column to seeds alone. Seeds hold history. Seeds hold community. Seeds bless our table. Seeds fall from the sky. They are everywhere. I’ll narrow in on some seed thoughts that are on my mind, as of late, as I spend day after day shuffling through my porch fridge of seeds, seeding within my greenhouse, moving around seedlings that volunteered themselves in my garden beds, and collecting the remaining seed heads from last year’s perennial blooms.

[Find more advice from Jess Cole's gardening column, "Our Sustainable Garden".]

Sourcing Seed

Historically, seed came from within your community. The sharing of seed was an anthropological act—seed spread with each generation, in the local markets, within the church, naturally on its own with the help of fauna and wind.

In today’s world, which is a lot smaller with communities more dispersed, the Internet has become a valuable resource for seed. This can be great, if approached with the right mindset. It's important to source seed as close to home as possible. Louisiana is a unique place. If you purchase seed from companies based in North Carolina or Maine, you will likely receive instruction that is not suited for humid subtropical southern Louisiana. We are in a special spot: infinite days of sunshine, lots of rain, a continuous growing season, burdensome heat. Say you purchase seed from Minnesota (which I do often! Thank you Prairie Moon Nursery)—even if the plant is native to both Minnesota and Louisiana, it's likely the seed won’t be as successful when brought here, because it's already well-adapted to the geographical environment of the upper Midwest. For this reason, I take most seed packs and their instructions with a huge grain of salt and defer to knowledgeable mentors and friends who have had previous experience with such seed.

A more surefire way to success is to find seeds within your immediate communities, to receive them directly from someone else’s experienced hands.

[Check out Jess Cole's plant of the month, here—featuring the Wild Azalea.]

When it comes to native single species seed in particular, they remain hard to come by here in Louisiana. We are in great need of Louisiana seed companies offering diverse and plentiful stock. In the meantime, we look to neighboring states for quality native seed when we can’t access within the community.

All that said, experiment and keep our environment in mind. The greatest thing to me about seeding in Louisiana is that you can break a lot of “seed rules” and more often than not get more flower and fruit yield than what that seed packet promises. Again, life almost never stops growing in southern Louisiana!

Rules on Seeding

There are no hard rules in nature, and seed is one of my favorite examples of this. There are, though, some guidelines that might increase your odds of success.

The problem I most often encounter when seeding is seeding too deeply. I find there is a tendency to throw a lot of soil on top of a seed, when most of the time a seed can simply be placed atop the soil. A decent portion of seeds need light to germinate. When a seed is sowed too deeply, it can be deprived of the light needed to sprout.  When it comes to thicker seeds, you can always defer to the old garden rule “sow at a depth equal to the seed’s diameter”. But more often than not, the best thing for the seed is light (sun!). So, simply let the seed lie atop the soil.

When we think of seeds, we can sometimes get caught up in these “rules” of planting. Instead, I encourage you to pause and look to nature, our greatest teacher. You can follow that germination code on the packet of seeds, but you can also observe the natural behaviors of seed in your garden and in the wild to tell you everything. In most cases, the flower blooms, the seed falls. It rests on the soil for months. Temperatures shift, rain pours, seed sprouts. So, don’t overthink it. Drop seed onto exposed soil and walk away. Let the wind and insects bury it. Let the winter cold take responsibility for germination. Look to natural systems, and you’ll usually find the answers. 

[Find more information on seeds in our feature story by Catherine Comeaux.]