Petunias – the growing from seed adventure

This year’s experiment was to grow the flowers for our hanging baskets ourselves rather than buy plants from our local garden centre.

This would be the first time we’d grown flowers from seed so it was a bit of l new adventure for us and as usual I went into full research ninja mode before doing anything.

Normally when planting seeds, well I say normally but what I mean is that for all the seeds I’ve planted so far, you place the seeds onto damp soil and then cover them with more soil.

Research ninja however discovered that for petunias, you don’t cover the seeds they actually need the sunlight to spark off germination.

I have to be honest, this felt a bit weird and I REALLY wanted to cover them.

The second think to know if you should ever fancy growing petunias from seed is that they apparently are notoriously difficult to grow. Every article I read was full of doom and gloom telling me to plant 50 if I want 10 etc. I wasn’t filled with confidence, especially since we have 10 hanging baskets to fill at a rate of about 5 plants on average per basket. So back onto t’internet for a quick deal with old Mr Fothergill and another few packets of seeds were winging their way to us.

When it was time to plant up, I had lots of seeds, TINY, TINY seeds and I patiently made lots of little paper pots. The plan being to scatter the seeds throughout lots of these little pots and then IF any seeds germinated I could pot them on later as needed.

It took an age, I was getting so jittery as nothing was coming up and I took to staring at things really intently everyday as if my sheer will could encourage the little sods to get going But they did eventually start coming up and they were so tiny.

The advice was right, hardly any germinated, infact a couple of weeks after germination seemed to start I only had 16 plants… sod it, I planted a wee drop more.

Well the wee sods only almost all came up eventually!!!!!! So much for advice on t’internet.

Well potting on was fun let me tell you, 4 hours of making over a hundred new paper pots and transferring the now bigger seedlings into them. The only reason that it only took 4 hours was because Kate took pity on me and jumped in to get a production line going.

So 5/6 weeks later and we have just planted up our hanging baskets with copious amounts of baby petunias plants which hopefully in a few weeks will start to look lush.

All good, we have the start of our hanging baskets out there and all being well we should have the most awesome cascade of colour in a few months filling the baskets and trailing over the sides.

There is just one thing though… what to do with the spare 36 plants that weren’t meant to germinate????????

Potting up the petunias