It can be fun to experiment with growing seed when you're a beginner, but it can also be incredibly frustrating! I suggest you take a visit to your local plant nursery and start off with seedlings (baby plants). This is a double advantage. First, your plants have a head start, giving you rewards sooner; second, you have the opportunity to taste and smell the plants before you buy. Slow-growing plants like Bay take forever to grow from seed - and rosemary can be a very slow starter, too. One of the major gripes on this forum is the fact that there is very little regulation regarding the labelling of plants or seeds. Too often, you'll see a label on a packet of seeds saying 'French Tarragon', but you can be quite confident that it will NOT be French tarragon - because FT rarely sets viable seed! Similarly, the plant you buy may be Russian Tarragon (an almost tasteless weed), or even Winter Tarragon (which is a very fair substitute, actually, but not a tarragon). Another example of fraud is peppermint. Peppermint is actually sterile, so it must be propagated vegetatively - by cuttings, layering or division. Yet people merrily continue to sell packets of seeds labelled 'peppermint'. It makes me grind my teeth! So - while you're browsing amongst the plants, don't be afraid to pick off a leaf - crush it, smell it, taste it. With Tarragon, you should get an astonishing mouth-numbing effect (great for tooth-ache!). Taste the difference between spearmint and peppermint - there is no mistaking the differences with a taste-test! Do some WWW-searching to learn the botanical names of edible herbs. For instance, there are hundreds of species of sage, but only a very few are edible - you'll be looking for Salvia officinalis. For bay leaves, you'll be looking for Laurus nobilis, and no other. You can be somewhat more confident that seeds bought in the herb/spice deparment in your supermarket are correctly labelled. Herbs like fenugreek, mustard, coriander (what you call cilantro), caraway, cumin etc usually germinate very well - and haven't been chemically treated like many propagation-purpose seeds. You can also look out for fresh herbs from the fruit/vege section of your supermarket. You'll often get plants in small pots - these are usually fed with lots of nitrogen to hasten leaf growth, while the roots will be a bit pot-bound, but you can often get them to grow if you don't leave them too long before transplanting them. And in amongst the veges, you'll find onions and garlic and ginger and lemongrass. When planted, onions and garlic and ginger roots will grow; and if the lemongrass stems have even a tiny little root on it, that will grow, too. With a lot of the herbs you'll end up with, you can collect seed from them, or take cuttings, and you'll end up with a perpetual supply. Of course, you'll need to provide the right conditions for all your herbs, so it helps to know where they originated, and to copy as near as possible the conditions there (climate, soil, etc). Also learn about which plants are annuals, and which are perennials. Any good nursery should be able to supply lots of that sort of information on request. Don't forget to browse through this forum, using the Search facility if you like. There is some excellent information to be found here.

I have seed of fenugreek from 1997 and mung beans, probably the same age, from when I ate sprouts as a semi-vegetarian. I bought a special plastic sprouter for the purpose. Now that I am retired I started doing sprouting again because sprouts are nourishing and good to eat. Seeds for sprouting have become very expensive here so I decided to grow my own. To my surprise almost all the fenugreek and mung beans sprouted. I planted a mung bean in a large pot when it started to sprout and took 2 fenugreek seedlings just after they started to sprout and planted them too. The mung bean is thick and strong in my window facing south. Unfortunately I did not know fenugreek would grow as tall as a metre or more so they are in the small pots I use for presowing seeds and rather thin. Although I have read that fenugreek does not like to be transplanted I have moved 1 to a larger pot. How wide should the pot be? On recommendation by Swedish and Finnish gardening experts I fertilize all my house and garden plants (including orchids) with my own urine diluted with the correct amount of urine except the ones that shun calcium which I fertilize with coffee grounds (for example my blue hydrangea which I do not want to turn pink), and my geraniums (pelargoniums actually) which need low-nitrogen fertilizer and for which I do not know how to make a natural fertilizer yet. Can anyone tell me if urine is a good fertilizer for fenugreek or does it have too much nitrogen? Perhaps coffee grounds would be better as they prefer slightly acidic soil. I wonder if urine diluted with 30 or 40 parts water is low in nitrogen or if the diluting makes no effect on the quantity of nitrogen. I have never had any success with pelargoniums and they are not doing well this year either. Thank you for any help you can give me.

Sheri, I'm sure they were packed in. When I read the book, I was amazed at how many plants he had in a small space....and he was doing it in a colder zone than ours (Colorado). Tomato mania makes people do crazy things. Caspian Pink usually makes 5 or 6 feet in height easily before the killer summer heat slows it down and it really spreads OUT a lot too. After a while, it has grown so far beyond the cage that you cannot tell it even has a cage. By contrast, Cherokee Purple gets as tall in my garden, but not as wide and bushy. I think the duckies probably did greatly enrich the soil as they decomposed, so maybe that is why the spot seems to be a prime spot for growing tomatoes. I've had lots of blooms and fruitset, but the heat did slow everything down some I think. Now that the wind has backed off some (although I think it returns here either today or tomorrow), the plants are looking a lot better, and yesterday's inch of rain helped. One thing I have noticed this year that seems peculiar (maybe it is the weather) is that a lot of my plants have had more megablooms than usual. I know megablooms are common early in the growing season, but so far they continue to pop up here and there. (I guess if I was trying to grow giant competition/exhibition tomatoes, I'd be thrilled to have all the megablooms.) I have 5 paste tomatoes that have looked bad the last few days, and I finally realized they must have been hit by some Round-up drift when I was spraying the garden fenceline near them with Round-up to kill the bermuda grass that was trying to creep through the fence and into the garden. This week I am going to lay down cardboard and cover it with mulch along that fenceline, because I have a persistent bermuda grass problem there, and don't want to use Round-up again. I think the plants will recover as only the top few inches were affected. For some reason, all my Roma tomato plants are much larger than usual this year and I can't imagine why. They are in some of the worst soil in the garden, they were shaded by a willow tree that was growing on the banks of the retention pond at the northeast edge of the garden (DH cut that tree down Sunday), and they haven't gotten any special attention. I guess they thrive on neglect. In any season, I have found that tomato plant varieties can behave completely differently from what they did the year before, and can even behave differently from another plant of the same variety planted right next to them. When I comment on that, my DH reminds me that plants are like children--each one is a unique living creature, and that each sibling in a human family is different from the others, just like the plants. He has a good point! Dawn

Hi all! Been meaning to post here for a while, but it seems there's always something conspiring to divert me anymore. If it isn't diabetic neuropathy and its minions, it's my MIL's medical problems, my SIL's frustrations, overall negative attitude, and lack of empathy, it's our autistic son's recent mystery gastric affliction with attendant vomiting and inability to keep down his meds (can we say "grand mal seizure") and yet another ambulance ride to the emergency room for IV meds, etc. - Yeah,...it definitely hasn't been boring around here lately, although we absolutely, totally wish it were otherwise. Anymore, Elly & I are thinking our son, Roy, may very well be suffering from constipation. Headache, stomach ache, nausea, lack of appetite, etc. Hospital tests couldn't find anything specific. No high temperature or elevated white blood cell count. --shrug-- To add to this, I have yet to properly acknowledge at least 4 wonderful individuals who have traded with me lately. OTOH, our container grown "Little Finger" carrots are doing nicely, and we've harvested some nice shallots, not to mention a continuous bounty of "Ever Bearing" and "Alpine" strawberries. So, I guess, it all kind of evens out, maybe, in a weird sort of way. - Looking forward to fullfilling the seed wishes of others! Totally jazz's me! :)