If you order your seeds early for the coming gardening year, you can beat the rush later. You won’t have to wait for delivery and lose good growing time, and you will have your pick of the available varieties before the popular ones sell out. Check the catalogues and online websites, but also support your local shops and garden centres if you can. Use your notes from past years to guide you: what varieties did well or poorly? Did you have any gaps in your harvest from your tunnel or glasshouse? Try something new every year; a different variety may have better flowers or produce fruit or vegetable crops of better quality than your usual one, or a new vegetable might become a favourite.
Check whether the seeds you are buying are F1 varieties. These are raised by crossing two inbred lines of plants so that their seeds will grow fast and well. If you try to save seeds from them for the following year the resulting plants will be all different and many will be poor, so you have to buy fresh seed every year. F1 plants are also very uniform, and if you want a few lettuce plants for your own use you may not want them all maturing together. In either case, you may do better with traditionally produced, open-pollinated seed varieties.
Once your seeds arrive, store them immediately in a dry, dark and cool but frost-free place. If you leave them on the garden shed windowsill they may be killed by frost or the sun’s heat, or fooled by dampness into false starts at germination that use up their food reserves before sowing. And, if you saved any seeds yourself, make sure they are in clearly labelled packets!
Buying Seeds – horticulturalist Peter Whyte gives some advice
Buying Seeds – horticulturalist Peter Whyte gives some advice
