It was only a few days ago when I went to buy my first lot of seeds. I can remember walking into the garden centre and wandering around for a good 10 minutes before finding where I needed to be. It’s like I couldn’t miss it. There was a huge abundance of seeds to choose from, all sorts of varieties of flowers but, I came for the vegetable seeds. It was quite daunting staring at a massive wall of seeds; I didn’t have a clue on where to start.

Standing there overloaded with information

I picked up each seed pack at a time, reading through the instructions on the back. This is where it felt like I got confused, every single seed I picked up had lots of numbers on the back, temperature it needs to germinate, size the plant grows to, best months to sow/plant. As a first timer/beginner, I found all of this information too much to process because I couldn’t figure out how to plan it all correctly, in the end this led me to just buying seeds of what I wanted to grow in my head… and I don’t think this is a bad method of doing it.

Rather than basing what I am to grow around what kit I have, what time of year it is etc, I found that just buying what I wanted seemed to work. What could go wrong? Really. Once I had returned home, I could then go through what I had brought I plan around them instead.

Why some plants are harder to grow than others

I chose to buy two types of chilli seeds, a sweet pepper seed, carrots, red onions and strawberries, just for now to have some practise on. What I didn’t realise when buying these seeds, is that the peppers and chillies and strawberries require to be kept warm moist for quite a long duration of time. This is what led me to buying a heated propagator, which so far has been perfect for what I needed it for! I sowed my seeds three days ago and since then the temperature of the soil has stayed between a steady 18 – 25 degrees Celsius.

I explain my full indoor setup and how I’m keeping the soil warm in my cold conservatory in a separate post. Now if I didn’t have the propagator, I don’t think it would be possible to sow and germinate these kinds of seeds at this time of year in the UK. I honestly thought that I could just buy some seeds, dig a small hole in the garden, plant them and they would start growing… I can confirm that is not the case.

If I wanted something easy, I could have gone for something like radishes, where maybe that would have been the case but, I’m not keen on the sound of radish sauce and I probably don’t eat enough salads to be able to use them all up. And that’s why I went for the seeds I chose, they sounded fun and it will be an achievement if I can successfully grow them.

The variables I didn’t think about

In all fairness, what I’ve learnt so far is that when choosing what seeds you want to grow, there are a handful of different variables that come into play. These variables consist of:

• The type of soil you are using
• Temperature they like to be kept at
• How much water they need/soil moistness
• The space each individual seedling requires
• How much light is available (once seedling emerges)

So, the only way that other seeds are going to become more difficult than others, is that they require a different environment to what we live in, which in turn means you must buy some kit to recreate that environment they like, but really, that’s a hard as it gets.

What would I buy differently next time

I don’t think that if I went back in time I’d do anything differently. I think that’s the whole fun of gardening, growing things that you enjoy yourself, not others and not just because it seems ‘easier’. So, it’s down to you, choose something easy to start off with that you can plant outdoors instantly and see results in a months’ time or, choose something a bit different which will wont necessarily be harder, but will just require more thought and planning. There’s no right or wrong when it comes to this, just be prepared to adapt your setup to what you have bought.