2nd Generation Seedlings - So Exciting!

I started working my garden 6 months ago and went out and bought a lot of seed, carefully raised seedlings for the polycultures and hoped that they would self-seed there after. Our Borage has just finished flowering (early spring here) and has been madly dropping seed everywhere into the garden beds. I retrenched this bed by putting more organic matter into the soil at about a foot deep and raking the soil back over the top. We have heavy clay so it takes years to loosen it up and compacts very easy. I only break up the aggregates by hand into smaller ones and till as little as possible. I then mulched these beds and put a new crop into it, perennial kang kong and some excess capsicum seedlings we had. This morning I went out to check on the progress and discovered borage seedlings popping up everywhere! My first lot of self seeded plants. There are too many for just this bed so I will be thinning them out and transplanting the excess to the new beds we've just established to provide shade, pollination help and improve the terrible soil in this new area. I love this plant, it turned our yard into a bee highway at the end of winter and we intend to help the local bee population out more with this 2nd generation.Everywhere it was planted the soil was much better, and since I've been digging the spent plants back into the ground hopefully the nutrients will all go back too.

You'll find that after a few years of keeping up the strain, the resulting plants will be better adapted to your growing methods and environmental conditions.
Stick with it, you're doing great!

Apple awarded because the joy of discovery by observation and the sharing of that discovery is the very core of permaculture.

Borage is a wonderful plant.
If you are growing strawberries, plant borage amongst them - the 2 are supposed to help each other.

John Polk wrote:Borage is a wonderful plant.
If you are growing strawberries, plant borage amongst them - the 2 are supposed to help each other.

Thanks. We already created a peach guild down the back with strawberries and borage under the peach tree. The strawberries are in a raised bed so they wont steal nutrients from the peach tree and borage seed was scattered into the strawberry bed. So far we have 20 strawberry plants and 5 borage plants in that area. That peach tree is old and produces massive peaches but also has a hard time some years. This year we are not spraying with copper sulphate and instead are going to see how the peach guild works out. The area around the peach tree has been cleaned out to allow better airflow and more sunlight. It was previously overgrown with pumpkins which probably made the rust problem worse. It's now a really sunny warm spot, here's hoping.