VEGETABLE SEEDS Aubergines Beans Beetroot Broccoli & Rapini Brussels Sprouts Cabbage Cauliflower Carrots Celery Chilli Peppers Courgettes & Summer Squash Cucumbers, Gherkins & suchlike things Fennel Flowers Grains Leaf Greens for Cooking Kale Leeks Lettuces Melons & Watermelons Mustard Greens ( for cooking) Herbs Onions Oriental Greens for cooking & salads Parsnips Peas Pumpkins & Winter Squash Radishes (salad, & cooking types) Salad Vegetables Sweet Corn Swedes Sweet Peppers Tomatoes : Bush Types Tomatoes : Vine Types Tomatoes : New Centiflor types Tomatilloes & Groundcherries Turnips Unusual Tubers: Oca & Ulluco Mini-Collections Useful Books Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties   SEEDSAVING Why Save Your Own Seed? How to Save Seed Start a Seed Circle! Seedsaving Book Threshing & Winnowing Drying your seed Isolation cage plans Seedsaving Courses   INFORMATION Read past Newsletters Give us Feedback Browse the Reference Section Tips for Beginners Guide to Summer Sowing Guide to Autumn/Winter Sowing   PAYMENT

~ Tips for Beginners ~ If you are just starting out growing vegetables, here are a few bits of advice we think might help: Tip 1: Don't buy too much seed. It is really easy to get overenthusiastic and carried away reading catalogues. Lots of first-time gardeners order huge amounts of seed, far more than necessary or advisable. If you try to grow loads of different things, and try to learn how to garden at the same time, you won't be able to look after them all properly, and you may end up discouraged. We think you will do best trying fewer things the first year, as you'll be able to give them each more attention and learn from what they do. In general, if you spend more than £20 or £25 on seed in your first year, you may be setting your sights too high. Growing veg is really easy & fun, but it is a learning process and you need to walk before you can fly . . . . Tip 2: Get a really clear gardening book. There's only one worth it: Grow Your Own Vegetables by Joy Larkcom. This is THE BOOK. You really can't garden without a book - we're constantly checking things in it - so you simply just need a copy. (Yes there are lots of other trendy books that promise you all sorts of things, whatever the latest craze is, but these are fads that come and go, and what you really need a simple, utterly reliable gardening guide. Just get a copy of this one. You will not regret it. ) Tip 3: Don't use cheap compost. Really, just don't. We learnt this the hard way. We use a couple of bags of compost each year to start seed off in trays and pots. Cheap compost simply doesn't hold water well, especially the cheap peat-free ones. So you water it repeatedly, washing out the nutrients. And cheap compost has almost no nutrients added to it in the first place. The result? Small, yellow stunted plants that never get going properly. Its a completely false economy; you might have saved £5 or even £10 buying bargain compost, but wasted a years produce. Plants feed from the soil; so poor soil = poor plants.You wouldn't deliberately feed your newborn baby the cheapest, least nutritious food you could find, and expect it to grow healthily, would you? Tip 4: Weeds are easy to kill when small. Weeds absolutely hammer your crops - it's not just light but water and nutrients they steal in huge amounts. And things like onions just give up when they get green light on them (they're spring ephemerals, eveolved to grow under trees and stop once the trees leaf out) Many people leave the weeding until too late - once they get their roots down it is hard work to pull them out - especially without disturbing your plants. But the secret is this: when only an inch or two high you can kill them with a very light and easy hoeing. Weed on a hot dry day and they die from the damage with no chance to recover and re-root. Tip 4: Cold spells will prevent seeds germinating. Seeds need to measure a certain time of warmth to germinate. And cold temperatures reset their 'clock' back to the start again. So your seeds may not germinate on a windowsill or greenhouse even when they days are warm - because they are getting too cold at night. If you are having problems with germination, 99 times out of a hundred, you need more heat, or rather,(to be precise)you need to miss the cold periods that are keeping them dormant. An easy test is to wrap the 'stuck' pots & trays in a carrier bag (to keep them damp) and stick them in the airing cupboard for 2 days. Often they will come up straight away. Once you see the problem you can come up with other solutions: Bring your seed in from the greenhouse at night. Or cover it with cardboard boxes , or a quilt or something at night to keep the heat in. We actually germinate a lot of our seed in the airing cupboard, and whip it out into the greenhouse as soon as it comes up. It doesn't need such high or constantly high temperatures once it has germinated - but it does need light once it has broken the surface of the soil.   Tip 4: Plants run off direct sunlight. Now this might seem obvious, but many people are just vastly overly optimistic. Veg WILL NOT grow in the shade. Its the same as suggesting that you only ever have light snacks for every meal all year - you simply wouldn't do very well. People ask us 'what can we put in the shady part of the veg patch?' and honestly, the only possible answer is 'the shed'. You really can't grow much on a windowsill by the way. Not enough light, even if it is south facing. Outside, plants get light from all around. On a windowsill, they get it from only a small sector of the sky. Tip 5: Learn to save your own seed. Seed saving is VERY EASY. Even doing it really well is still PRETTY EASY. It constantly amazes us that people keep buying seed from us year after year. There's really no excuse, we give you seed saving instructions with every packet, and we offer a subsidised seed-saving book, so there's no need to give us your hard-earned cash for the same seed next year. Seed saving allows you to select varieties that suit your soil, keep growing veg that are commercially unavailable, and will give you really great seed to share with your friends. We won't be doing this for ever (maybe another 10 or 20 years at most), so if you want to keep on growing these great varieties, you should have a go at keeping your own seed occasionally. Do read our free instructions though and check the basics: might it cross? if so what do I do to fix that? have I chosen the right number of plants? have I chosen the good plants? how to physically do to clean up the seed ? have I dried the seed really well? All the answers are easy, by the way. Tip 6: Befriend the oldest gardener you can find. You will learn the most from the oldest gardeners. Want to know when to sow cabbages? Find the oldest person you can who has truly great cabbages, and do exactly whatever they say*. They will have seen it all, and they will know what you can and can't get away with in your particular local climate and soil. *of course, if they use F1 Hybrid seeds, lots of chemicals and pesticides, then this doesn't count. But in that case their cabbages won't actually be truly 'great' cabbages, they'll just be big shiny cabbages full of toxic residues, which isn't the same thing at all, so the advice still holds. But most of all, enjoy growing your food, and pay attention to what is happening to the plants as they grow.