Seed catalogues

When your stack of seed catalogues reaches critical mass and the weather stops you doing anything useful outdoors, it’s time to make out your annual seed order and post it off.

Oh, I know you could probably buy what you want from your local garden centre in spring, but there’s a lot to be said for shopping in advance from seed catalogues – or their online versions – as in practice they offer a far more extensive range. Everything you need to make an informed choice is there at-a-glance. It’s all very armchair-friendly.

But if, like me, you invariably find yourself picking out far more seeds than you have room to grow and end up with a mind-blowing bill, try my back-of-envelope calculation method.

Starting with flowers; if you want enough bedding plants to fill a few tubs and hanging baskets on the patio, as a rough rule-of-thumb, allow one packet per container. You can still ‘mix and match’ the varieties that go into each, but you won’t massively over-produce or over-spend. Veggie-wise, it pays to draw up a paper plan of your veg plot on squared paper, and do it to scale, so you have a rough idea of the number of rows you’ll have room for given an average spacing of – say – a foot apart, and calculate your seed purchases accordingly. It’s the easy way to avoid over-buying.

That’s not the only place you can make savings. As you skim through the catalogues you’ll see there’s a huge difference in the price you can pay per packet, from one variety to another. So do you really need to pay top whack?

As a general rule the seeds that cost most are the very newest varieties, (particularly when they are F1 hybrids, which cost far more to produce); as a double-whammy, these also have the fewest seeds per packet. Now, that’s fine when you want to try the very latest new things, or they have some big in-bred advantage – a lot of new veg varieties are specially bred for resistance to pests or disease, so you can grow them organically without spraying.

New varieties may also have other assets. Amongst this years crop of catalogues you’ll find several with useful benefits. There’s ‘Butterbush’ squash – a compact butternut type that’s ideal for growing in containers on the patio (Dobies and Suttons), and white baby beetroot ‘Albania Vereduna’ that’s said to be far sweeter than red kinds, and likely to appeal to folk who don’t enjoy red goo oozing all over their plate. (Dobies)

From Thompson and Morgan comes a purple-podded mangetout pea ‘Shiraz’ which also has two-tone mauve and pink flowers, pretty enough to grow as sweet peas with a plus, up trellis on the patio; the same firm bring us ‘Best of British’ courgette which is bred to crop well even in a traditionally poor British summer. DT Brown have introduced a range of seeds to produce exhibition veg, so give them a go and make this the year your enter something in your local show. (They make great eating too).

But when you want lots of the same variety – perhaps for stocking-up the freezer, feeding a big family or dotting flowers round a large garden – then you might find that older and cheaper varieties of seed fit the bill perfectly well. So find a happy medium, with a few old favourites and some new varieties to try-out. Best of all, you’ll stay within budget.