Sowing the seeds of love

I'm showing my age with an overused blog title nicked from Tears For Fears, but whenever I sow seeds it does feel an action imbued with love, so I'm sticking with it.

And right now is the perfect time to sow seeds - not only is it spring and the soil is warming, but it is also the current focus of our flagship Nature on your Doorstep project, seeking to inspire as many people as possible to grow something this year to help wildlife. After all, plants are the absolute bedrock of the wildlife-friendly garden.

So, if the RSPB is encouraging people to sow seeds, it is only right that I do it too. And this year, for the first time, we have a range of bespoke RSPB garden seedmixes that I've had the pleasure of helping create (although, sadly, rules mean that the RSPB Shop can't ship to Northern Ireland, sorry). All the mixes offer something amazing for wildlife.

Over the next few weeks, I'll highlight these different mixes. They include wildflowers suitable for pots and tubs, mixes to oversow on lawns to increase their diversity, and ones to create mini-meadows from scratch.

But for today, let's kick off with a couple of annual seed mixes. I know you'll know this, but just to confirm, these are plants that germinate, flower, set seed and die all in the same growing year. These are the 'life at breakneck speed' bunch.

It means you get to flowering stage really quickly - 12 weeks or so from sowing. The flowers are excellent for pollinators and then produce copious amounts of seed for the birds.

We've got two RSPB annual seedmixes: one we've called 'Best for Bees', which is a mix of Cornflower, Borage, Common Poppy, Echium Blue Bedder and Phacelia (Scorpion weed). This will give you a predominantly blue mix, which is the part of the spectrum bees home in on, but I've spiced it up with the red of the Poppy.

The other is a traditional cornfield annual mix - our Cornfield Colourburst, which would once have popped up in cereal crops across the country with splashes of red, yellow and white, but is now such a rare sight.

These are seedmixes to sow onto an area of bare, prepared soil or a fresh tub of compost.

If sowing onto open ground in the garden, preparation will involve digging and raking the ground and removing any 'weeds' to prepare a fine, crumby surface to sow the seeds onto. A weed is, of course, just a plant in a place you don't intend it.

The intention isn't for people to do this on an area that is already great for wildlife. This is an activity for a spare bit of the garden or a planter that currently doesn't have much value for wildlife. Me, I'm going to sow them where I had some potatoes last year.

So, here is the bed being readied for action. I dug it, weeded it (or it would have turned into a mass of solely Greater Bindweed!), raked it, and then left it for a couple of weeks for anything in the seedbank to germinate, before hoeing them off.

Then the exciting bit - sowing. My recommended sowing rate is about two grams per square metre. In the RSPB packs you get five grams - and this is what that looks like in an eggcup - not a lot!

But at the same time, that's actually several hundred seeds. Don't be tempted to sow too thickly - the seedlings will only compete with each other.

My patch is just over two metres by two metres, into which I'm sowing four grams of Best for Bees and four of Cornfield Colourburst. To help ensure a good spread, I mixed the seeds with some sharp sand, just to bulk up what I'm scattering. The bowls below are way more sand than seed!

Then scatter your seed...

Seed needs to be in good contact with the soil to germinate. You can either walk over the seed to give it good contact, or lightly rake them in.

Water in, and keep watered in dry spells as the plants establish. And then let nature do the rest.

I'll follow the progress of my plot on the blog, and hopefully you'll grow some wildlife-friendly flowers from seed this year, too. And if you do, we'd love you to share your results on our Nature On Your Doorstep Facebook group.

Oh, and I can't leave you today without just mentioning my little happy helper throughout my digging and seed sowing: