They bolted out of the soil a few days later and had overcome the seedlings within a week.
Now, needless to say, I'm a seed saver.
Civilisation has been saving and exchanging seeds for thousands of years, initially out of necessity since they had to grow food and the local garden centre was a thing of the future. The ancient Romans, Greeks and Persians understood its importance and the administrators of the Roman Empire exchanged information on agriculture, animal husbandry and botany. They also had an active seed- and plant-exchange system, which is partially responsible for the agricultural diversity we are now enjoying.
Seed saving in the modern world is considerably easier.
Obviously you can either save your own seeds, or buy at nurseries and online.
But buying seeds seems a bit self-defeating to me, so I'm a convert to saving then swapping with friends.
The great advantage for me, anyway, is that the seeds can sit in the shed until I get around to dealing with them, whereas seedlings don't have the same level of tolerance to my lackadaisical attitude.
I've had a great time cruising around the garden this week collecting seeds, and now have several envelopes and jars labelled in the shed. One or two have code names so my eco-warrior mate won't know I plan to extend the population of certain plants he disapproves of. Who mentioned agapanthus?
Unless you want to immerse yourself totally in the seed-saving culture, consider what seeds you want to save and why.
I'm saving albizia because I want to grow more albizia trees, agapanthus for erosion control in a specific area, and capsicum because I love them dearly and I've never had great success growing good, strong plants from seedlings.
A few others are purely experimental but they're all plants I need more of.
Saving vegetable seeds is, of course, the real deal and may re-establish for you a tangible connection to what you eat.
It's fabulous to be able to eat food you have a history with - from garden to seed to storage shed to garden, season after season. I'm an absolute beginner at this and, to be honest, most of what I've read about it seems immensely complicated.
I was almost put off until I came across some simple information from a Nelson seed-saving group.
It could be all you need to get you started.
Earmark the plants you want to save seed from, let them flower and form seed.
When the seeds are ripe or dry, collect them from the plant.
Make sure the seed is completely dry and free of insects and mould.
Label with date, type and source of original seed.
Store in airtight containers in a cool, dry, dark place.
That's stage one of seed saving.
Stage two is about how to treat the different types of seeds.
Although some need only to be collected and stored, others have to be dried, and some need to be washed, cleaned, scraped, soaked, fermented and frozen.
Tomato seeds, for example, benefit from fermenting before storing.
One gardening expert suggested the following: remove seeds from the fully ripe tomato and soak them in a bowl of water for three days.
When you notice mould on the top of the water, indicating fermentation has begun, add more water, stir and gently remove the mould and debris.
Repeat this process until all that is left is clean seeds.
Strain off the water, rinse the seeds and keep at room temperature until they are completely dry.
Not exactly straightforward, then.
Capsicums and chilli?
Scrape the seeds out, put them on a plate and let them dry until they break when you bend them. My kind of seed.
There's a different method - or several different methods - for every seed you can think of so, if you plan to get seriously into saving seeds, do some internet research or buy a book.
I suspect that if you have success in your first season, you'll be hooked.
