How to treat seeds during the first year?
Sheer total utter neglect? or Pampering as much as possible?
I’ll offer the classic permaculture answer… It depends.
I have found that the ecosystem does 80% of the selection, regardless of whether or not I do or don’t do anything at all. It varies by species. For example, when I plant tomatoes from a seed catalog, 97% of them fail. When I plant moschata squash, 75% fail. But when I plant spinach, the failure rate is only 50%. Any turnip that I plant will thrive.
In the first year, I like enough pampering that the varieties can cross-pollinate with each other. My number one priority during the first year is to get seed, and hopefully get seed that has had a chance to cross-pollinate with other varieties. So I consider it worthwhile to do some coddling during the first year. Then, once I have an abundance of genetically-diverse seed, I can start throwing large numbers of seed at the survival of the fittest issues in my garden.
Common seed from catalog
For inexpensive, readily available, common, ordinary seed I do little pampering other than providing irrigation, and token weed suppression. Because of the easy availability of replacing this seed, I see little reason to coddle it. Treat it with sheer utter total neglect if you want.
New grexes and landraces
When I plant grexes or landraces developed by other people in other locations, the strengths and weaknesses of each individual seed become apparent. I still like a little bit of pampering, so that they can make seeds in my ecosystem. But if I have 75% failure on these seeds, that seems perfectly fine to me.
Rare varieties
When I obtain a tomato variety from a seed bank, that was collected 50 years ago in the Peruvian Andes, I devote a lot of resources to pampering it the first year. And maybe even for a few more years. I place a high priority on preserving and increasing the seed. Then, once I have an abundance of seed, I can work on growing it under neglected conditions.
New F1 hybrids
Sometimes, if I have made the effort to do manual pollination to create a new F1 hybrid, I will do a lot of coddling of that plant so that it can survive to make abundant seeds. Then, in the F2 or F3 generation, I can switch over to neglect.
Selfers
Crops that primarily self-pollinate undergo binary selection the first year. Either they survive and continue on, or they die. I’m happy with ordinary growing conditions for these, even neglectful growing conditions if their eventual growing system tends towards neglect.
See also: Postponing the brutal first year