A reseeding annual, allowed to reseed, is an act of subversion. Corporate garden seeds are hybrids, crossed and crossed to provide one year’s robust growth, and then an astounding lack of fertility afterwards. They’re like a come on with nowhere to come to.
Last year, I broadcast California poppy seeds in a new garden bed in the front of my house. I got a few plants from those seeds, which then produced a huge number of new plants that are sprouting this spring – more than can actually grow in the space where they are growing.
If I had followed corporate garden advice, I would have “cleaned up” my flower bed in the autumn, and that would have resulted in removing a lot of poppy seeds from the bed, turning over the soil with no roots left in it to hold the earth together, thus allowing seeds and soil alike to be washed away. Would I have had so many California poppies growing this year?
I certainly wouldn’t have had enough seedlings to allow me to thin and redistribute them as I did yesterday, taking poppy seedlings back to this year’s new flower bed, a patch of hardy plants like mint, lily of the valley, Japanese iris, chives and yarrow that is growing where last year there was only lawn.
I will not need to cultivate this new bed. Perennials and self-seeding annuals will establish dominance quickly, and not allow more weeds than can be pulled by hand. Soon, I’ll be able to take more divisions and seedlings from that bed and put it in other areas, pushing the lawn back further.
My garden will expand without me needing to go to any garden center to buy overbred, pumped up annual flowers. As the years progress, those California poppies will become less and less like what’s available in the sealed seed packets. They’ll breed, and mix genes, and evolve locally.
No fertilizers. No pesticides. No mowing. No rototilling.
Yesterday afternoon it rained, right after I transplanted the California poppies. It was free water distilled at no charge from a puddle far away using solar energy. That may be bad for the garden supply corporations, and for Pepsi’s bottled water business, but it’s good for me.
