I’m only a semi-serious amateur gardener. I like poking about in the garden (especially my Greenhouse) and trying out different ideas. Some work. Some don’t. Particularly I like keeping seed from one season to the next. It seems few people bother to do this any-more. I do it with a mild religious fanaticism. Mainly because I’m tight.
I don’t like forking out a couple of quid (or more) for a packet containing often ten or less seeds. Especially when I can easily collect several hundred from my own crop from the previous year. But the results can be “interesting”. I also make my own planters out of scrap wood. They get designed using LibreCAD. There’ll be some more on this here too.
Growing “Stuff” by Experimentation
As an amateur gardener I mainly grow easy plants like hot Chillis (I am amazed how easy they are to grow) and tomatoes. But I also like to get experimental. Like this, my first horticultural post on why growing an apple tree from a pip (seed) is somewhat sub-optimal. See this post: Growing Apple Trees from Seed? Here’s What Happens.
As I said – I’m tight. So I hate throwing away stuff. This includes (so-called) out-of-date seed. So I ran a simple experiment on some herb seed I has that was well and truly out of date i.e. 10 years! I had some surprising and pleasing results see this post: Does Old Seed Grow?