Keep calm and sow on: Even the very best gardeners can have seed failures

Sales of gardening equipment have soared on-line in recent weeks as people forced to stay at home have discovered the joys of sowing and growing.

Those new to gardening have enjoyed the perfect start, with weeks of blue skies and sunshine making this one of the loveliest spring seasons in many years.

There’s fun to be had in discovering a new hobby, but to get the most out of gardening you can’t be put off the first time that things go wrong, because they will.

So if those seeds you sowed two weeks ago still haven’t sprouted and you are thinking of giving up – don’t. Learning from your mistakes is how you earn your green fingers.

So why would seeds not sprout? Well it could be that they were too wet, too dry or not sufficiently warm. Seeds, and seedlings, need to be kept moist, but not swamped, and many need the gentle heat of a sunny windowsill or a greenhouse to get them started.

If you’ve nursed them through the first phase, pricked them out into trays and they are now refusing to put on any growth, check your compost.

Seed compost is low in nutrients, but once they develop their first “true” leaves seedlings need something extra.

The best way to add this is by giving them a weekly feed, diluting the liquid to half the suggested concentration, and watering from below by sitting the seed trays in a container filled with the mixture in order to prevent young leaves from becoming scorched.

Like everything else, it gets easier with practice and the more closely you observe your plants, whatever their size, the better you get at working out what they need.

And it is comforting to know that even the experts can get it wrong.

On a visit to a well-known nursery, winners of a clutch of Chelsea medals, I noticed a group of dead plants in a corner. “We are good at killing things,” the owner told me, before explaining the irrigation system in that part of the greenhouse had failed and no one had noticed.

Sometimes its hard to work out what’s gone wrong.

Of the 12 courgette seeds I sowed a month ago, only five have sprouted. I say ‘only’, but five are enough to feed a village so I’ll have to find homes for the ones I don’t need.

But the fact is they all came from the same packet of seed and were treated the same way, yet some of the seed failed. Even with perfect conditions it’s impossible to achieve 100% germination and most of the time you don’t need to, most packets contain far more seed than you could ever need and perhaps the biggest mistake you can make is trying to sow all of the contents at once.

When dealing with seed that’s not much bigger than dust, then a pinch is all you need and then, if something goes wrong with the first sowing, you can always start again.

As lockdown continues, more and more people are turning to growing plants says our expert Agnes Stevenson. But they musn’t be put off by a few false starts