One of the things I’ve learned about gardening is that it’s a numbers game. If I intend to plant six tomatoes, I’ll start ten pots with three seeds each. Thirty seeds to start six tomatoes might sound like a lot, but there’s potential losses at each stage of the game. Some of the seeds won’t germinate. Some of the seedlings will be small or weak. Some of the plants will stall out during hardening off. Some of them might die after transplanting. Some of them might fall prey to some calamity after they’re in the garden.
Gardening is done on a time table. In my zone, zone 7, the growing season is from about April to about October, or about 6-7 months. It takes about 100 days from seed to harvest for a “typical” tomato (whatever that means). If I was to start just as many seeds or plants as I needed, by the time I found out that I wasn’t going to have enough, I would be irredeemably behind the curve.
Because gardening is a long-term game, it pays to hedge your bets. Should I plant lettuce in the north bed, where it’s more shaded, or in the south bed, where it gets more sun? Will my squash and peas do better in a traditional “three sisters” configuration with corn, or grown separately? The answer I usually choose is, “both, and pay attention to the results.” Agriculture is inherently scientific. Before we had chemical tests to tell us things about our soil (and let’s face it, some of us still don’t), farmers and gardeners used the most quantitative measures that they had: the health and productivity of their plants. As I work this site, I will develop a “way I do things” based on what has worked in the past. If somebody was to ask me, “why do you plant corn in the south but beans in the north,” I’ll say, “because when I plant it the other way, I get less corn and beans!”
The inherent bounty of plants makes the “hedging” approach feasible. Today, I took some cuttings from my sage plant to try to start some new plants. I know that rooting hormone increases the probability that the cuttings will take root, but instead, I just took six times as many cuttings as I thought I’d need. If even one of them “takes,” then I’ll have twice as many sage plants as I started out with, and either way, my sage plant will hardly notice the lack of those six stems.
Another example: right now, I have nine tiny tomato plants in a cold frame. I started a total of about twelve tomatoes (of various types) back in March or so. I transplanted them outside in early April when it was getting warm, but there was still the chance of a frost. In case I lost the tomatoes to frost, I started some new ones in pots. That way, if I lost my first batch of tomatoes to frost, I would still be able to get a decent crop of tomatoes from the second batch. Of course, the first batch was fine, and the second batch will be coming along shortly, and I may end up with a total of 25 tomato plants. These are a good kind of problem to have.
