January is a good time to sort garden seeds, inspired by Monty Don

The columnist suggests that January is the perfect moment to sort garden seeds, drawing inspiration from a photograph of Monty Don’s seed stash in a potting shed.

She copied the idea with six Ikea Moppe mini drawers painted an earthy green, assigning each drawer a couple of months for sowing. It quickly became clear that April and September each needed their own drawers, and that some packets in the pile—broccoli or rainbow chard, for example—were unsuitable for a tiny balcony or a north-facing garden. A smaller “capsule” box, she says, holds the seeds she will actually use: hardy annuals sown direct, several varieties of poppy and some sweet peas; a shoebox would do the job.

She recommends the task for January partly because there is little else to do on those hangover-free weekends and because it lets you time travel through an imagined garden, picturing wild carrot, Ammi majus and cornflowers in different shades. As the rag-tag pile is pared back, it becomes easier to conjure what the plants could be when alive and growing.

Seed-sorting, she writes, is a way to shrug off the “shoulds” and choose what you want to grow, with room for a surprise packet or two; it is as close to a resolution as she gets.

Key Topics

Culture, Monty Don, Ikea Moppe, Garden Seeds, Potting Shed, Poppies