In the event you don’t believe yesterday’s post, squarely taking responsibility for problems with your seedlings, let’s air out our most embarrassing, catastrophic failures at growing from seed (thus far) this season! Keep in mind, we’re experienced growers that have probably grown 15,000+ plants from seed over decades!
Exhibit A, one entire tray of onions that we very clearly overwatered and failed to correct in time. The onion’s roots slightly rotted, but not enough to actually terminate the seedling. These starts cannot stand up on their own. We’ll grow them out anyway, as they’ve demonstrated persistence to stay alive. Better luck next time.
Next up, something we talked about earlier this season. We did a bulk cold stratification at 10 weeks to last frost, a move that a couple of you questioned. Turns out, it worked exceptionally well. Almost too well. Our issue was that we were ill-prepared to transplant fully germinated poppies and saw miserable transplanting success by using our fingers. We’re adding tweezers to our germination kit because a tool out of sight is out of mind. Better luck next time.
Our artichoke crop is a disaster this season. We know these guys take a lot of water, but we just didn’t stay on top of it. More than once! Frankly, I’m at the point of just germinating artichokes into larger containers to avoid the necessary transplant once they start evaporating water. Better luck next time.
We can’t even show you a picture of all the flowers we tried to grow that just didn’t germinate. We preach seed viability here, but we don’t practice it well with our flower seeds since they aren’t “critical” to our garden. We simply try to remember or get rid of “bad” seed, but we suck at that. Better luck next time, I guess!
This is the reason we try to provide the perspective that learning how to grow is a life long thing. No one just figures it all out in a year or few. You can be decades in and just do something dumb, careless or absent minded. Not on purpose, but because you’re busy and human.
We do our best to identify what we did wrong. We do want to improve, we want to consider ourselves excellent growers. It might be said that 10,000 hours of practice develops expertise. However, thinking critically gets you there much faster. You get to critical thinking by accepting that you caused the problem and then figuring out what you can do about it.
In the context of subarctic growing, that means we fix it next season. We also have to live by, “Better luck next time!” So, welcome to the beginning of 2027’s plans!
And yes, it’s completely embarrassing putting our greatest failures on public display. When it comes to being genuine, you either walk or you talk.
