Looking for a way to get more bang for your buck in your landscape this year? Try growing your own flowers and vegetables from seed. For a mere fraction of what you'd spend on one potted plant, you can buy a grocery sack full of seed packets. Seeds for many of our favorite ornamental and edible plants can be had for only a dollar or two a packet at home improvement stores, department stores and sometimes even grocery stores and dollar stores. Some seeds can even be had for free if you have the plants in your own yard or permission from the landowner where the plants are located. Many people don't mind a bit if you 'deadhead' their flowering plants for them. Just put the dried up flowers and seed pods in a paper bag and take them home and keep them in the bag until you are ready to plant.
Take the first picture, for example. All we did was take the 'puffballs' that those little yellow flowers in everyone's yard turn into and covered them up with a sprinkling of potting soil and then watered them daily. Now, we have dandelion greens for salads growing in a flower pot on our patio. We spent exactly nothing on them as I already had the pot and the potting soil. Compare that to three or four bucks for a bag of greens from the grocery store. If you planted several pots over the course of the spring and summer, you'd have free greens all season.
We also love radishes but they aren't cheap at the grocery store either. For $1.50, we got a packet of radish seed and had these seedlings in only a matter of days. In a few weeks, we'll have so many radish plants that we'll have to transplant some of them to a new pot in order to get nice big radish roots to eat. As you'll find with most domesticated vegetable species, almost every seed germinated. This is not always the case with wild flowers or native grasses, but even in those cases, a packet of seed for those plants is much cheaper than buying a potted plant. In the case of some wildflower and grasses, you can't even find them in pots and can only get them by seed.
We think that all plants are beautiful and find it interesting to watch them grow by seed. Peas are a great example of this. Their large seeds (you know how big they are if you've ever eaten snap peas or green peas) are easy to see and plant. They are a great choice if you want to show your kids (or students if you are a teacher like Joani is) how seeds absorb water, germinate and grow new plants. As they grow, they create cool looking vines and eventually grow beautiful little flowers. If those flowers get pollinated, you'll even have new pea pods soon. The pods can be eaten while they are still small (which is a popular ingredient in oriental dishes) or you can wait until the new pea seeds form inside the pods, then pop them open and eat the peas raw or cooked. Save a few of the peas and let them dry out for next year's crop for even more savings.
Growing plants by seed takes a lot of patience, but your patience will be well rewarded by the amazing nature show right in your own home and by all the money you'll save over buying already grown plants. Plus, your newly grown plants will be acclimatized to the micro-climate of your patio, yard or indoors and may actually live longer than the potted plants you see in the stores that were in all likelihood grown in very different conditions than you have at home and that will have been through a lot of stress by the time you get them transplanted into a pot or the ground at your place (especially when you consider the times they were transplanted at the growers, the transportation they went through to get to the store etc.) Give it a try. The key is to avoid letting the seeds dry out as they are germinating and later to avoid over-watering the seedlings as they grow. Otherwise, it isn't as difficult as you might think.
Take the first picture, for example. All we did was take the 'puffballs' that those little yellow flowers in everyone's yard turn into and covered them up with a sprinkling of potting soil and then watered them daily. Now, we have dandelion greens for salads growing in a flower pot on our patio. We spent exactly nothing on them as I already had the pot and the potting soil. Compare that to three or four bucks for a bag of greens from the grocery store. If you planted several pots over the course of the spring and summer, you'd have free greens all season.
We also love radishes but they aren't cheap at the grocery store either. For $1.50, we got a packet of radish seed and had these seedlings in only a matter of days. In a few weeks, we'll have so many radish plants that we'll have to transplant some of them to a new pot in order to get nice big radish roots to eat. As you'll find with most domesticated vegetable species, almost every seed germinated. This is not always the case with wild flowers or native grasses, but even in those cases, a packet of seed for those plants is much cheaper than buying a potted plant. In the case of some wildflower and grasses, you can't even find them in pots and can only get them by seed.
We think that all plants are beautiful and find it interesting to watch them grow by seed. Peas are a great example of this. Their large seeds (you know how big they are if you've ever eaten snap peas or green peas) are easy to see and plant. They are a great choice if you want to show your kids (or students if you are a teacher like Joani is) how seeds absorb water, germinate and grow new plants. As they grow, they create cool looking vines and eventually grow beautiful little flowers. If those flowers get pollinated, you'll even have new pea pods soon. The pods can be eaten while they are still small (which is a popular ingredient in oriental dishes) or you can wait until the new pea seeds form inside the pods, then pop them open and eat the peas raw or cooked. Save a few of the peas and let them dry out for next year's crop for even more savings.
Growing plants by seed takes a lot of patience, but your patience will be well rewarded by the amazing nature show right in your own home and by all the money you'll save over buying already grown plants. Plus, your newly grown plants will be acclimatized to the micro-climate of your patio, yard or indoors and may actually live longer than the potted plants you see in the stores that were in all likelihood grown in very different conditions than you have at home and that will have been through a lot of stress by the time you get them transplanted into a pot or the ground at your place (especially when you consider the times they were transplanted at the growers, the transportation they went through to get to the store etc.) Give it a try. The key is to avoid letting the seeds dry out as they are germinating and later to avoid over-watering the seedlings as they grow. Otherwise, it isn't as difficult as you might think.