In April I counted seventy-four basil seedlings on a shelf in my basement. Two adults live in my house. Neither of us is a restaurant. I sat on the basement step and did some quiet arithmetic about how much pesto that represents, and then I went upstairs without doing anything about it, which is the part of this story that repeats every single year.
I sow too much. I have sown too much every season I have gardened. I know it while I am doing it. I would like to explain why, because I suspect I am not alone, and because the fix that finally worked for me was not willpower.
The packet always wins
A packet of basil holds an absurd number of seeds. They cost the same as a coffee. And when you are sitting at a kitchen table in early spring, pressing tiny things into a tray, the marginal cost of one more feels like literally nothing.
Then there is the fear underneath it, which is that some will not come up. So I put two or three in each cell as insurance. And they all come up, because seeds are generally better at their job than I assume, and now I have three seedlings in a cell built for one and a decision I do not want to make.
The other trap is that a full tray looks correct. A tray with eight cells used and thirty empty looks like a mistake in progress. So I fill it. Nobody made me fill it.
The thinning I do not do
Every guide tells you to thin, and thinning is the correct answer. You snip the weaker seedlings off at the soil line so the strong one gets the cell to itself. I know this. I have written it on my own planning notes.
What I actually do is stand there with scissors over a cell containing three perfectly healthy small plants and put the scissors down. Then all three go out, crowded, and I get three mediocre plants where I could have had one good one. Crowded roots, competition for water, and something in the middle of the clump that never gets air.
Direct sown rows are worse, because the seedlings are further away and the guilt is more diffuse. I have grown beds of carrots that were essentially a green mat, and pulled a harvest of things about the size of my little finger. Carrots do not negotiate. If they do not have room, you do not get carrots, you get roots.
What overplanting actually costs
The obvious cost is worse plants, but the one that got me was worse eating. Sixty crowded lettuces all reach usable size in the same ten days, which means a week of aggressive salad and then a bed of bolted, bitter plants that I feel bad about. Meanwhile there is nothing coming behind them.
The second cost is that overplanting takes space from things I would have liked to grow. I have given a quarter of a bed to a squash plant that a reasonable person would have known was one plant too many, and then had nowhere to put the beans.
The third cost is emotional and slightly silly, which is that a garden with too much in it stops being restful. Every weekend has a backlog. Things I planted turn into obligations, and the point of a weekend garden is not to build a queue of chores you have imposed on yourself.
The one place excess is fine
Cut and come again greens. Sow those thickly on purpose. You harvest with scissors across the top, they regrow, and crowding is more or less the operating principle. Same with radishes if you actually eat radishes at the rate they arrive, which I did not until I started roasting them.
Giving plants away also counts, but only if you do it deliberately and early. Handing someone four healthy seedlings in spring is a genuinely nice thing. Handing someone a bag of zucchini in August is a joke people make for a reason.
What finally helped, sort of
Not discipline. Discipline has never once worked for me at a kitchen table with a seed packet.
What helped was writing down the number before I opened anything. Six tomato plants. Four basil. That is it, written on paper, decided by the version of me who is thinking about how much space exists rather than the version holding a packet. Then I sow a couple extra for insurance and give away the surplus while it is still a nice gift.
The other thing that helped is sowing greens in small batches spread across the season instead of everything at once. It sounds like more work. It is less, because I am not dealing with a wall of lettuce and then nothing.
This year, honestly
This year I wrote four basil on the paper and ended up with somewhere over thirty seedlings, so the system has clear limits. But thirty is not seventy-four, and I gave a dozen away to a neighbor who has since sent me a photo of them looking better than mine, which I have decided is a good outcome.
I do not think I will ever fully stop. Sowing too much comes from the same place as the reason I garden at all, which is a basically unreasonable optimism about how much food a small yard can produce and how much of it I can eat. I would just like the optimism to arrive in a slightly more organized form.