There really is no end to the richness and variety
of Australia's amazing plant species.
Whether you are fascinated by beautiful flowers,
by their incredible form
or those amazing adaptations in the foliage,
the diversity is mind-blowing.
And if you want to bring a few more native species into your garden,
there is a great way to do it.
And that is by growing them from seed.
It can be really low-cost.
You get a lot of plants for little outlay.
But everything, from a West Australian wildflower,
right through to a towering eucalypt, starts in the same place.
And, really, it is very simple.
If you've had a go at growing some tomatoes from seed,
you can have a go at this.
And I'm going to show you how.
When it comes to sourcing native seed,
you can collect it in your own garden or a friend's,
but you must never collect it from the bush.
You need a license.
And most of mine has come from the local seed bank.
And my hope is that if I can grow them successfully,
plant out a lot of plants, even share some with my neighbours,
that we can produce a little bit of seed to go back into the bank.
To get started raising some native seeds,
you really need very little.
Remember in nature, they raise themselves.
So it's easy to get involved.
But if you want to get consistent results,
there's a few things to remember.
You need some containers. You can use almost anything,
but it's important to keep them clean.
So I give them a really good scrub to get any old dirt out.
And then I put them in the sun for a couple of weeks
to get those UV rays on them and keep them really clean.
The other thing you need, of course, is a seed-raising mix,
which is easy to make.
To make a basic seed-raising mix
use four parts of a high-quality potting mix...
..then about one part perlite,
which helps to hold water and oxygen.
I'm also sterilizing the mix using some boiling water,
which is worth doing if you're going to plant something precious.
Let it cool, and you're ready to plant.
While some seed are absolutely raring to go at any time,
many others have periods of dormancy
and they have protection to help them survive in nature.
Imagine being a little seed, you hit the ground,
you've got to wait out a really hot summer or even a cold winter
before you get to germinate.
So they have different mechanisms to protect them.
One of them is a hard seed coat, which you see in a lot of wattles,
and many of the pea species which I've got here.
I've got some Kennedia here.
And that hard seed coat can be quite difficult for moisture to penetrate,
and therefore for them to get germinating.
So a really simple technique you can use
for a lot of those hard seeds is to use some just-off boiling water.
You're using heat.
Just pour it over and leave it to sit for a few hours, even overnight.
And then your seed are ready to sow.
You can see here, I've actually got a few seed that are floating,
which means they're very unlikely to be viable.
You can chuck them out.
But the rest are ready to go into the mix.
I'm just scattering the seeds across the surface,
making sure that I don't bury them too deeply.
And then I'll cover them with a layer of vermiculite,
which hold the moisture in, but let the light through.
The next seed I want to sow is also a local species,
and it's dormancy can be broken
by something that's quite common in the Australian landscape,
and that's fire.
Now, in some cases, fire will help seed to release from a seed pod.
But in this case it is actually the smoke
and the chemicals contained in it
that stimulate that seed to germinate.
Now, it's a little thing called a trigger plant,
the grass trigger plant, in fact.
And it's called that because it has the most amazing mechanism
for delivering pollen onto the back of its pollinator.
It literally gets triggered, and bonks it on the back of the head.
It's an incredible little plant. But it's also really pretty.
And they're not that easy to cultivate in gardens.
But this one is reputed to be one of the easiest.
You can see it is really, really tiny.
So I've got the same propagating mix here,
and I'm just going to add just a small amount of sieved mix on top,
because that seed is so small
I want a nice little fine surface for it to hit.
And the other thing that I'm doing is I'm sowing it into individual cells
because that seed is so tiny,
and it is quite difficult to separate those tiny little plants
out of a big tray.
I'm hoping to get one or two plants in each of these cells
and be able to thin them and grow them on to a bit of maturity.
Now, I know what you're thinking. Where's the fire?
I've made this. This is smoked vermiculite.
And what it means is that the porous nature of the vermiculite
soaks up all those chemicals of the smoke,
thinly spread them over this.
And then the chemicals from that vermiculite
can wash through the mix and stimulate the germination.
The beauty of this method is that the vermiculite goes a really long way.
I'm only just covering these tiny seeds.
The next thing you need to give your little seed is time,
and the time it takes for them to germinate
can be anywhere from days, to weeks, to months - or even years,
depending on the species that you're going to grow.
Now, these are some of the little Stylidium that I've sown coming up.
Tiniest little plants, and on their way.
And here, there's some Kennedia, which are much larger.
But of course, it's just the start of the journey when they germinate.
You do need to prick them out, pot them up,
before you get them into the garden.
So I'm going to show you how to do that.
This is just a patch of acacias which are coming up.
And you can see that they have
these really fantastic, distinct seed leaves,
these little round ones,
and then they're starting to get their new foliage.
And it is useful if you can hold them by those seed leaves -
they are sort of dispensable -
and avoid holding the root system or the stem.
You just lever them out.
Gosh, that's got quite a lot of root on it.
And then into the new pot.
Once I've got these pricked out and potted up,
I'm going to put them in a sheltered spot, give them a drink
and grow them on until they're ready to go in the ground.
But really, you can see how rewarding it is to grow things from seed.
From a little bit of work, you get hundreds of plants
they're genetically diverse,
which means you can even contribute to the local gene pool
and maybe throw a few seed back in the bank.
All of those reasons, plus it's lots of fun.
I reckon you should give it a go.