Eli5: why we need to plant seeds, but in nature they just grow where they fall?
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In nature, the huge majority of seeds don’t germinate. That’s why plants create so many seeds, to swing the numbers in their favor. But by planting and caring for a seed, you can nearly guarantee that it will germinate and grow successfully.
A few reasons:
1) nature is playing a numbers game, most seeds will never grow or will be outcompeted and die young. We’re usually trying to make something orderly. We get greater predictability by ensuring as near to ideal growing conditions as possible and arranging them as we like can improve aesthetics, crop yield, make it easier to maintain and harvest fields, etc…etc…
2) fields and pots are much more controlled circumstances than nature. Nature will often provide some covering in the form of droppings, wind blowing detritus over the seeds, animal action packing the seeds down, rain sinking them in, etc…. Which are often limited or removed in manmade locations.
3) a lot of the ornamental and agricultural plants we use do not and have never existed as part of nature. They were created by human selection and that may or may not have impacted their ability to grow naturally. An extreme example would be fruit trees, many of which are actually cloned by taking cuttings rather than planted from seed because planting from seed would result in unpredictable and often unpalatable fruit.
If you leave it to nature, it won’t produce as much as we like it to. That’s how farming was invented. Humans (and our ape ancestors) had been *gathering* wild plants to eat for millions of years. But at some point, someone had the idea “y’know, if we took the seeds and planted them ourselves we could grow more and in a more convenient location than the plants would naturally.”
That’s farming, baby.
You need to plant seeds *of the specific plant you want*, and *where you want it*.
In nature, the plants which are already native to your environment will successfully grow in the places that are the most viable for them.
Supposedly every tree that you see that grew to a seed bearing age is a 1 in a billion chance.
Because we don’t want them to grow where they fall. We want them to grow where WE want them to.
We don’t plant every seed. We scatter grass seed and there are/were some flower mixes that worked the same way. But there are thousands of seeds we’re scattering and we don’t care that much about the positions. We plant them because we care that they grow in rows to make harvesting easier or a plethora of other reasons we want specific placement. We plant seeds because we’re trying to optimize the output be it flowers , fruits or vegetables. And if we don’t plant them birds will eat them.
I think you’re not asking why we choose which seeds go where, but why can’t we just let plants we want make seed and drop them and then come up on their own the next year. I’m a market farmer that grows hundreds of different plants so here’s why I do it. 1. Some plants evolved to grow in warmer climates and seeds that drop naturally won’t survive the winter here. Or some things will survive winters but get diseased when they get wet in the spring so we have to plant the seeds once the weather improves. 2. Succession planting. It takes weeks or months for a plant to make seeds, during which time it isn’t producing. If I pull plants as soon as they stop being productive, I can replace them with younger ones or with a different type of plants with a later growing season. 3. Some plants are way too good at spreading by seed and if I let them drop, I’ll be paying for it for years, pulling plants out of pathways and beds where they’re not wanted. They become weeds. I grow some flowers that can make thousands of seeds each, and then I grow thousands of those flowers… it’s astronomical the chaos those seeds can have.
A lot *don’t* just grow where they fall.
A lot get eaten. Then they’re buried in poop when the germinate. Or squirrels bury the seeds and get eaten by a hawk before they can come back for them. Or some animal steps on it and pushes it into the mud.
Not saying it doesn’t just germinate on its own. Some species are better about it than others. But a lot of seeds get some kind of germination help.
In nature, the seeds don’t tend to fall by themselves, a lot of them, particularly seeds of fruit bearing plants, fall in a piece of fruit. As far as the plant is concerned, that fruit isn’t for us, it’s for the seed, it’s meant to either be eaten whole along with the seed to be pooped out later somewhere in a pile of manure where it can grow, or the fruit itself is supposed to rot away and mix with some surrounding material to create a bit of compost to cover the seed.
Either way, it creates conditions that we’re basically trying to replicate by planting them.
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