Seeds Ideas, Tips & Guides

July growing with Cel Robertson

The Environmental Protection Agency announced Tuesday that it will approve new formulations of the herbicide dicamba. 

You've worked hard to create a garden that's expecting a bountiful harvest, but you've also worked hard to go on a much needed vacation. The last thing you want to happen is to come home to dead plants and a garden that's long past reviving, so how do you ensure your plants stay healthy and thriving while you're away? We spoke to an expert for their professional take on the things you should do to your garden before going on vacation so you come home to happy, healthy plants.

Any bird enthusiast will tell you that one of the biggest joys is seeing wild birds enjoy backyard feeders that have been lovingly hung and stocked with birdseed. Alternately, nothing can feel more frustrating than when birds aren’t using your bird feeder.

Damp paper towels are sometimes the only help you need to coax stubborn seeds into sprouting. If you think it’s a myth, check out this list of seeds that germinate best, yes, the best in paper towels, and try it out yourself!

19 of the Best Sunflowers for Pollinators

The garden is full of seasonal stars at the moment, so picking out just six was not easy – but let’s start with the most asked about plant on our garden open days, Clematis texensis ‘Princess Diana’ (above). Almost every plant in the garden is labelled, something I like to see when I visit a garden myself, but very few visitors seemed to take the trouble to look, preferring to ask the gardener or the dogsbody: fortunately, Princess Diana is one variety that the dogsbody/Golfer knows! Smothered in blooms, it deserved all the attention it got, and is possibly flowering better than ever before, despite the issues with several of my other clematis. This variety was the first clematis I actually sought out after seeing it performing so spectacularly in a garden more than 20 years ago; up till then, I had only bought whatever clematis were available at my local garden centre. The current plant, however, is a replacement for the original, which suffered when moved to the clematis colonnade.

Q: We’ve just moved into our home, a new build in the countryside, and don’t have much of a budget to create a garden. We’d like to start by sowing a traditional lawn around the house, which is just a big expanse of bare soil and weeds. Any tips would be great. CB, Co Meath

Companion planting is the centuries-old practice of pairing plants in the garden that benefit one another. Our gardens function as interconnected communities, with different plants providing unique services. Some plants attract beneficial insects, others ward off pests, while some enhance soil health. Anyone who’s grown tomatoes knows they are heavy feeders, and often plagued by foliar diseases and a diversity of insect pests. They certainly stand to benefit from tomato companion plants that promote healthier plants and increased yields.

Planting up a flower bed can seem a bit daunting to begin with. Initially, it’s important to consider factors such as the size of your bed, how much sun it gets, the quality of your soil and what kind of planting and colour scheme will suit your house style and your own preferences.

How to Prune Anise Hyssop Plants

You can easily grow this plant with seeds.

How to Grow and Care for Nodding Onions (Lady’s Leek) Allium cernuum

Hi GPODers!

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Monday vases following any Sunday garden opening usually take advantage of flowers used for table decoration, which in June inevitably means sweet peas. However, being even more prepared this year due to an early group visit, I had time to think ahead and made my vase on Saturday.

To kids, dandelions provide endless hours of seed-blowing entertainment. To adults, they represent endless hours of weeding. To get ahead of these stubborn weeds, take a cue from the kid inside of you and focus on the seeds. Dandelions have a deep tap root and can live for many years, making them challenging to control once established. The most effective management strategies focus on prevention and removal of young plants. Here’s how to get rid of dandelions and get back to enjoying the landscape.

There is a certain day in the calendar year, a date that marks the dividing line between its two halves, whose significance as an important horticultural turning point is not lost on experienced gardeners. Known as the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere it was yesterday, June 21st, the longest day and shortest night of the year, when the North Pole was at its greatest tilt towards the sun.

Petunias have long captured gardeners’ hearts with their stunning colors and bold blooms. Get the most out of these beloved annuals by learning how to deadhead petunias to promote new growth and continuous flowering. Deadheading is a simple pruning method used to remove flowers after they die back, which encourages plants to produce more blooms by preventing seed formation. Taking the time to deadhead petunias will keep your plants blooming all summer long.

Every gardener knows that when the weather warms, it's weed-killing season. Weeds can harm your garden and lawn and steal nutrients your precious plants need. On top of that, they take away from the outdoor aesthetic you've worked hard to create.

You walk through the produce section of your supermarket and everything looks so familiar. But the fruits and vegetables you see bear no resemblance to their ancestors from thousands of years ago. Most of them don't taste the same either.

It’s always a great day when I pick the first snap peas. A lot of the harvest never makes it to the kitchen. Snap peas—which snap like green beans and look and grow just like regular shelling peas—have one delicious difference: The pods are as tender and sweet as the peas inside. I could say I grow snap peas because they yield more food per square foot than shelling peas. But that’s not it. I truly enjoy the eat-it-all peas in the pod, whether I’m snacking on them in the garden, tossing them with pasta, or featuring them in a soup.

On a trip through Germany in 1971, I took a train from Frankfurt to Munich. The train was half-empty, and I looked around for a while before finding a friendly face. He was a factory worker in Germany but was originally from Italy. I don’t think we had talked more than three minutes before we were on the subject of food. He asked me if I had tasted pasta with broccoletti di rape. I assured him that I had, and he clasped his hands, rolled his eyes, and exclaimed in his beautiful dialect, “It’s so good it hurts!” What he called broccoletti di rape, or rape (pronounced rah-PAY) for short, is better known in this country as broccoli rabe. However you pronounce it or spell it, this marvelous cool-weather vegetable is a joy to grow and to cook with. Learn how to grow your own broccoli rabe from seed, and take advantage of this versatile green.

In my father’s victory garden, we planted a single crop of beans in late spring. The endless rows came in all at once, and we spent a long, hot week harvesting the beans. And while I love the taste of fresh snap beans, enough is enough. I’d rather have a number of smaller, more manageable crops of beans.

Peter Piper may have picked a peck of “perfect” peppers, but for the rest of us, a good harvest of this popular veggie can be more elusive. Peppers, like their tomato cousins, can be a disease-prone, temperature-sensitive, weak-rooted crop. Success, however, can be easy to achieve if you pick the right variety. Like tomatoes, peppers come in a wide range of colors, textures, and sizes. They also can be spicy or sweet in flavor. But aside from appearance and flavor, varieties also vary in their proclivity to resist disease and drought. All of these factors will help determine which type you choose to buy.

I had never met a fava bean until I moved to Northern California in the early 1980s and started my market garden. I noticed that the local Italian folks seemed to love these strange, giant, puffy-looking beans, so I decided to try growing them. The real eye-opener came when I took my crop to the farmers’ market. It wasn’t just Italians who were enthusiastic about them; I was amazed at how excited customers of Middle Eastern descent got over the favas. They bought bucketfuls! So I figured favas must be a great vegetable.

Weeds can rapidly multiply through runners, seeds, offsets, and cuttings, taking up space and resources required by important plants planted around them.

In order to gain something, you have to lose something. This is especially true with certain varieties of annuals and perennials that bloom better after their flowers are removed. In this deadheading flowers list, we present a selection of such plants that flower profusely the more you cut them! So get your shears ready, and let’s deadhead!

When and How to Harvest Zucchini

Verbena is a varied genus of plants, mostly native to South America. They tend to be short-lived, but the abundance of nectar-rich flowers more than makes up for this.

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Summer is arriving and, all of a sudden, the kitchen garden is coming into its own. I am harvesting masses of salad leaves, broad beans and strawberries, and hopefully the first new potatoes. I can almost see things growing before my eyes, including the weeds, which I make an effort to keep on top of every few days (although I leave self-seeded dark pink poppies and some mauve linaria to encourage insects and add colour). To make the most of a small space, I grow salad leaves in large galvanised metal troughs, making sure that I sow a new crop every few weeks so I have a constant supply through the summer. Salad leaf mixes, including swift-growing, cut-and-come-again lettuce, rocket and mustard leaves, are available from almost any seed company, or at garden centres. Winter salad leaves, including mizuna, are best sown after midsummer, as they tend to run to seed quickly. I grow my salad leaves in the least time-consuming way, scattering the seeds thinly on the surface of the prepared soil or compost, and raking them in gently with a hand rake. Keep them watered and they will germinate within a few days and be ready to harvest in about six weeks. If you want to grow them in your vegetable beds, it is better to sow them in drills, so that the emerging seedlings are easily distinguishable from the weeds.

Propagating plants from seed is what hooked me into gardening. Even now, after years of watching seeds transform themselves, the magic of germination never fails to thrill me. The essence of gardening is change and the work of gardening is care. Nothing stays the same for long. The hands-on physicality of weeding, digging and planting is a great antidote to looking at a screen, which many of us are doing more than ever today.

With Chelsea fast approaching, we thought we'd give you a sneak peek into what you can expect from members of The List by House & Garden. From sensational show gardens to the very best in garden accessories and furniture, you won't want to miss out on seeing these members at this year's show…

Most fruits have seeds lodged deep within their fleshy innards. But Mother Nature loves her exceptions! Read on to learn about those peculiar fruits that appear to have seeds on the outside.

My early sweet peas, grown in the greenhouse, are now flowering prolifically and I have to work hard at picking them regularly – but will have to work even harder soon as there are now buds on my outdoor varieties. The indoor ones have been bred specially to flower at lower light levels and in the UK have to be grown in a greenhouse. For some reason the lavender blooms are more dominant this year, although I sowed the same number of seeds of each colourway.