Free Plants!

I apologize for the click-bait title for this blog post.

What I meant the title to be was “Self-sowers!”

Self-sowers in my garden are mostly annuals—though there are plenty of self-sowing perennials—which cast seed about every year and germinate in the spring, so you never have to buy seeds for them again.

Annual flowers like nicotiana, also known as flowering tobacco, which drops seeds in my vegetable garden all through the summer so that in the spring, seedlings pop up everywhere.

They are no bother because they are easy to prick out where I don’t want them such as in the center of paths or amongst the bean plants. I mostly let the nicotiana stay on the ends of the beds where I plant snapdragons and alyssum in the spring.

(Hey, is that a lightning bug trying to pollinate my flowering tobacco? Perhaps! That means more seeds for next year!)

Another reliable self-sower in the vegetable garden is dill. Those seed heads shatter with just the slightest touch, sending seed scattering across the raised beds. Then in the spring, the dill comes up all over the area where they were last year

While it isn’t as easy to knick out as nicotiana, if you get to them when they are tiny, they aren’t too much of a bother. And when they are tiny, you can also transplant them to where you really want them to grow.

Another wonderful self-sower is borage.

It sometimes shows up a little later so I think that maybe this is the year it will disappear but by mid-June, I have a lot of borage flowering in the garden. I’d rate it as easy to pull out like nicotiana. In fact, it seems to have such a tenuous hold on its spot in the garden that I’ve pulled them out sometimes while pulling weeds around them.

A new self-sower in my garden is sunflowers!

I sowed seeds for ‘Van Gogh’s Fantasy’ from Sunflower Steve last year and didn’t plan to have them self-sow but some of those seeds must have dropped to the ground because I had many seedlings show up. I let them grow on, which means I also got sunflower blooms much earlier than usual. I think I’ll let some more seeds drop to the ground this fall.

One other annual that I would love to have self-sow all over my garden is, of course, violas.

I transplanted all the violas I had growing in containers in the spring out to the flower borders when I switched out the containers to their summer plantings. While most of the violas have shriveled up in the heat and are now just brown stems, there are a few like this one growing in the shade of a hardy begonia that are still making a go of it.

I want them to set seed so that in the spring, they’ll be everywhere, like this one that I found growing in a raised bed in the vegetable garden earlier this spring.

Now who wouldn’t want that little beauty in their garden?

Some gardeners may think that self-sowers make their gardens look messy. I bet those gardeners put plastic covers on their couches and fan magazines across their dust-free coffee tables.

I think self-sowers give gardens a lovely “lived-in” look. When you step into a garden with self-sowers, you can immediately relax and be delighted by the discovery of flowers that tucked themselves in where they decided they’d grow best.

If those flowers could talk they’d say something like, “Now here’s a garden we enjoying staying in.”

Except maybe this basil…

If it could talk, I’m sure it would say, “Oops, I made a mistake. I meant to self-sow in an actual garden bed. But here I am, so I’ll just make the best of it, try to flower, and maybe send some seeds where there is actual soil to grow in.”

Where do you stand on self-sowers? For them? Or are those magazines fanned just so on your dust free coffee table?

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In other news, I officially launched my new weekly “In the Garden with Carol” newsletter Sunday evening, with just those subscribers who specifically signed up for it on Substack. I haven’t moved over all the people who subscribed to my previous newsletter, but I will before the next newsletter comes out next Sunday. If you’d prefer not to get a weekly newsletter, you can let me know, and I’ll unsubscribe you. Or, if you’d like to be sure to get it, go over to Substack and subscribe there. You can unsubscribe at any time, and it’s free.