It seems so elementary but you know, sometimes you have to review little lessons. Here’s a birds and the bees lesson. Flowers are the sex parts of plants. They do it in their weird and I suppose for them wonderful ways and then they make seeds. Seeds make little plants. The gardening lesson follows. If you want little plants, then you have to have seeds and if you want seeds, you can’t cut off or pull up or otherwise tidy up your garden too much.

Letting Things Go to Seed

Right now, in the garden I have have tons of winter stuff going into flower. Big purple leaved mustards, golden frilly ones, cabbages and kales. When you buy those in the fall they’re expensive. So let them flower, let them do it, let them go to seed.

Purple leaf mustard will actually seed itself in so youll have plants that just come up next fall. But you can collect and save the seeds in an envelope too.

I know you’re tempted to cut them down. They get powdery mildew. They get lanky. They’re doing all their dirty deeds right out there in the front yard with your tulips. Get over it Santorum, turnip flowers want to have fun too. At least, choose a few to leave in the ground.

Garden Chores

At the same time, you can do some cool stuff to come up and begin to take over. Here are a few cheap, fun, quick little gardening things I did this week to fill in around perennials and cover the gaps left by winter annuals:

Seeded in Nasturtium. Soak the seeds overnight and already I see little sprouts. Youll have bright colors through mid June.

Spread Sedum. You dont have to divide it, just pinch off a bunch of leaves and drop them on the ground next to your clump, or in a new place. Throw a little dirt over them. Theyll grow.

Seed in Southern Peas. They make pretty plants and small edible flowers, lots of peas of course, but they also add nutrients to the soil for your other plants. Just for fun, I bought some unspouted mung beans in the dry section of the grocery and did them too.

Stick some Purple Heart. My purple heart never went dormant this year. I broke off pieces of it, stuck them in the ground nearby and watered a lot. Theyll root.

Collect Corydalis seeds. See picture of seed with purple vinca flowers. This ferny, yellow flowered perennial grows through the winter, flowers now, and sets lots of seeds. It too will come up next fall. But I collected seeds for summer sales because its a fantastic companion to crinum lilies – its up and pretty when theyre dormant. And vice versa.