The first seeds of the season have been sown, with love and care and great expectation. But then disaster struck. Actually, it isn’t as bad as that, but it is extremely frustrating. I have picked up some kind of cold or lurgy that has left me unable to watch over my buried seeds with the unnecessary frequency I normally do. Those first seeds of the season are often checked 3 or 4 times a day for signs of life that often take 7 to 10 days to appear. Frequent checking on day 3 won’t speed things up but you never know. …
Instead I’m trying to recover my health and shake the cold that is clutching at my lungs and weighing down my sinuses making me want to sleep deeply during the day and leaves me wide awake during what seems to be the longest hours of darkness to be endured. But I’m being dramatic. It just seems to be a cold that has hit me harder than I would like to admit to.
Besides the wind and the rain are still raging about outside and gardening wouldn’t be fun. Although I do despair of the things still to be done. With the sowing of the first seeds, the tug of spring on the coat tails seems more urgent.
The seeds I have sown are the ones that I have decided need the best head start on the season as they take such a long time to get going. Having said that I normally start them off with great fanfare on the first day of August like a tradition that must be upheld no matter what. However, these days I seem to be a little more relaxed about things. The growing season is just that – a season and the period of time when it is ideal to sow seeds is a very wide window indeed. I’ve always known this but succumbed to the feeling that these things needed to be done at the first opportunity. Seeing others start theirs, provided it wasn’t way too early, did make me feel a little anxious. But I need to remind myself. It is not a race and if I sow seeds last week, next week or even next month, they will still be ok.
Gardening isn’t a race and I’m not competing with other gardeners and I’m certainly not competing with nature. So long as her seeds fall into warm soil with the right kind of moisture and daylight and day length, then she isn’t that fussed.
So, with my seeds tucked up in a good quality seed raising mix on a heat pad with enough water supplied, without being mollycoddled then they won’t even notice I’m not hovering about them fretting over their ability to germinate. They will just get on with it and knowing this makes it easier for me to recover from coughing and spluttering without worrying about them and before we know it, we will both be out in the garden, enjoying the warmth of the summer sun.
Come again soon – there will be better days ahead.
Sarah the Gardener : o)
Feel better soon!
All going well I think I am through the worst of it. Today is the first day my head actually feels clear! It has been a doozy of a bug! : o)
Hi Sarah! What did you plant and where do you get your seeds?
HI Danielle. I get most of my seeds from Yates and what I can’t get from there I try to find in all sorts of other places. I mostly sowed peppers, melons, eggplants, and a few other bits and bobs to get my seasonal succession planting going like salad crops. : o)