When I was barely able to walk, I became fascinated with the garden. My Dad was the gardener in our family, growing both flowers and vegetables. When I was 5, he finally let me help him plant a row of flowers. He showed me how to make the straight furrow in the middle of the annual flower bed. (He planted all the rest of the bed afterwards.) I was very precise in filling the row with seeds, carefully covering each with fine soil. Then I watered them tenderly and waited day by day for any sign that things were growing.
Then finally one day, I found that some had started to break ground. Within 24 hours, there was a long row of green for it seemed like every seed had spouted! After another day, they were visibly bigger as the first set of true leaves were starting to appear.... I was so excited, so happy, so proud.
Then my Dad dropped the bomb... he said we needed to now "thin" the seedlings. Huh? What's that? He explained that we now had to pull out excess plants so the remaining ones stand about 10 inches apart. WHAT?!?!?!? Basically, we were suppose to pull out over 90% of these new plants... my first babies... WHAT!!! Murder! I'm sure I cried and put up a fuss but he explained as patiently as he could that it was the only way we would have any healthy flowering plants. So thin we did. I wasn't happy about it but the end results were some great looking marigolds.
But to this day, I do NOT plant seeds that thickly nor even as thick as stated on the seed packet. I space the seeds as intended for the final "thinned" goal. Then if a few do not sprout, I just fill in with another seed. This gives me seeds for several years from one packet AND no anxiety about having to destroy what struggled so hard to grow.
Happy Gardening!
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