Sow There!

A reader sent an e-mail this week after reading my column about scattering old seeds all over the yard and seeing if any of them sprout.

By the way, I forgot to mention in that article that my friend Fabulous Phil heard that germination rates decrease if the seed packets are old. However, he said they only decrease about 10 percent a year. So even if you had seed packets that were years old, you might as well stick them in the ground and give them a chance to grow.

Reader Mario shared a quaint story. He loves to garden but has limited space at his home. He also thinks its important that his kids enjoy it as well.
When his daughter Amy was about three (she’s six now) she watched her dad applying fertilizer to his grass with a hand-held spreader.
Amy decided to “help out” and dumped about 20-30 packets of vegetable seeds into the spreader.
You can guess where this is going.
Mario spread his fertilizer and planted oodles of vegetables throughout his lawn.
He said if he didn’t live “in the middle of suburbia” he might have let them grow.

I’ve actually seen some yards where the people were so adamant to grow veggies that they did so right in the front yard, even taking over that strip of turf between the curb and the sidewalk for plants like tomatoes. However, the likelihood of passers by just helping themselves to your harvest would be high, not to mention a little extra fertilizer from people walking their dogs.