The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 18 – First Fails


This post will be a bit of a downer, I am afraid. Like every spring, it is a bit nerve-wrecking to buy seeds without actually knowing if something comes out of them. In hindsight, I now know that I could have saved a lot of money.

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I had several packets of different pumpkin seeds – pattypan, butternut, courgette “Květa”, and hokkaido. I put all of them on wet paper towels to germinate before putting them into the ground, and so far, only the Květa germinated pretty well. Butternut and pattypan failed to germinate at all, and of all the hokkaido seeds, only three germinated. And those three did not emerge from the ground yet, so I do not know if they are still alive. Thus, so far I have about 12 plants of Květa and exactly 0 of others. That is pissing me off, but not as much as the next thing.

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I planted beans and sweet corn behind the house. These are red runner beans that I have grown successfully there for years now. I had a 100% germination rate with seeds sorted out of the previous year’s harvest. I also had the luck to find white runner beans on the internet, and I bought a packet of 20. Only four germinated into sickly looking plants; the rest rotted in the ground. In the fall, I bought two varieties of bush beans and a new variety of pole beans to try out. They all rotted without germinating. On the same website, I bought some sweet peas and sweet corn. Both had a germination rate of about 30%. And do you remember the failed onion seeds? The same website. It is a real disappointment because it is the same site where I bought my seeding garlic that turned out well (so far). Not the wintering onion, though, that too mostly failed. Needless to say, I won’t be buying seeds from that company again, except maybe the garlic.

All this means that I have essentially nothing to plant on my big prepared three sisters patch. So I bought several packets of seeds of beans, pumpkin seeds, and corn from a different supplier, and now I am again in the nail-biting waiting stage, if something sprouts. I also planted an additional 160 red runner beans from my own seeds since that seems reliable.

If it were not for the 100% germination rate for my own beans, I might be inclined to blame a failure on my part. But 100% germination of my own seeds and 20% germination of bought seeds of the same species proves that I did nothing wrong.

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The spinach is also a bust. Not only did it have a poor germination rate – about 50% – but most of the plants that did emerge were tiny and sickly looking. And some are already going into blossom, despite being barely five cm tall. I am completely at a loss to understand how this could have happened. Maybe April and May were too warm and dry. I honestly do not know, and it is a real head scratcher. This really pisses me off. I like spinach, and I was really looking forward to growing my own. I might still get some out of the few plants that look healthy and do not go into bloom, but I will be lucky to get enough for one lunch. I still have some seeds left over, so I might try for a fall harvest by planting them in July. If I try that, I will plant the seeds in an egg-tray first.

Carrots started to sprout, though not all that I planted. And yesterday, voles dug under one of the trays, completely destroying it. I hate those fuckers.

Potatoes sprouted too early and froze. Funnily enough, nothing else did, not even nearby oak trees, which are also susceptible to late frost. They seem to be recovering and are sprouting again now.

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At least the muck heap continues to rot successfully. I turned it over on Tuesday, and this time, it did not heat up as much and as quickly.

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It is still warmer than the outside temperature though. Today it had over 30°C when the outdoors was barely 10°C. I will continue to monitor the temperature, and I will probably delay turning it again until it starts cooling off.

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To make liquid fertilizer, I took an old plastic canister and an old solar-powered aerator, and I built this contraption. I will put some shredded weeds in there to ferment and dissolve. Then I will add it to the watering cans for citrus trees and tomatoes. On YouTube, some gardeners swear by this “compost tea”, and some say it is a waste of time and resources. I looked up scientific studies on the subject, and I found one meta-study that said that aerated compost tea is actually a good fertilizer, and since I had all the necessary components lying around, it cost me nothing. I should have no shortage of nettle leaves and other nitrogen-rich weeds to feed it.

In the past, I was making only anaerobic compost tea. That stinks to high heavens, which is a bad thing even if it bothers no one. The smell means loss of nutrients (mainly sulphur and nitrogen) due to off-gassing. Allegedly, this should not be a problem for the aerated method. We shall see, or more precisely, smell, if that is the case. It has been three days and I smell nothing so far.

To end on a hopeful note, if the weather remains frost-free, I might have apples, pears, and walnuts again this year. If, however, frost comes in the second half of May – something that I do not remember happening here, ever – it will be a catastrophe.

Comments

  1. billseymour says

    Your muck heap reminded me:

    When I was living in Pittsburgh, Pensylvania back in the late 1970s, I got a tour of the Butler County Mushroom Farm.  The owner was a member of Mensa (which I also belonged to at the time); and one day he gave the local group a tour and had a party in the evening.

    One thing I remember from the tour is that the company manufactured its own soil from a precise mixture of horse and chicken manure which was trucked in from particular sources as far away as Arkansas.  (I think there were other ingredients like straw, but I don’t remember that.)

    They first put the mixture in long rows as wide as I am tall, about twice as tall as I, and maybe a quarter of a mile long.  Periodically, a machine that the company invented would run down a row and turn the shit to keep it well aerated.

    At some point, they would load the shit into huge trays that were maybe three meters square and which were put in an airtight room for a couple of weeks where the new soil would cook in the heat of its own decomposition.

    Finally, they would move the trays into an old limestone mine.  Apparently the mushroom plant (a fungus that grows underground…the part that we eat is just the sexy bit) loved the soil and the temperature in the mine; and there were teams of pickers working 24 hours a day seven day a week.

    I was fascinated by it all.

  2. says

    I admire your work and it keeps showing me that I’m just having a little fun on the side. I need to plant my beans, but everything here is dry as fuck.
    BTW, my parents have one of these plastic composters and one of them once started burning spontaneously.

  3. says

    @Giliell, thanks. If I had commissions or a job, I would just plant potatoes and mow the grass, but since I don’t, I try my best to squeeze as much value out of my land as I can.
    I have never heard of a composter catching fire, but I do believe it. When too much dried grass is piled up and it gets damp just enough to start decomposing, it can catch fire. When we had rabbits and had to store hay for the winter, my father was meticulous about not putting it under the roof unless it was really bone-dry. In the uni, I even learned the name of one specific bacteria most likely causing this, but I forgot the name, and I cannot find it now. Dry grass spontaneously combusting is a thing.

  4. Jazzlet says

    We bought Crown Prince squash seeds, two packets of five seeds, and got none from one packet and four from the other. Deeply frustrating.

    I would guess the spinach was too dry, it doesn’t like being too hot either, and May has been pretty hot here and dry until this last week. We were on holiday the week before and I don’t think anything would have survived had Paul’s sister not watered everything for us, three good waterings over seven days left it all looking good.

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