The Real Seed Catalogue

The best vegetable seeds for the Kitchen Garden

VEGETABLE SEEDS Aubergines Beans Beetroot Broccoli & Rapini Brussels Sprouts Cabbage Cauliflower Carrots Celery Chard & Greens for cooking Chilli Peppers Courgettes & Summer Squash Cucumbers, Gherkins & suchlike things Fennel Flowers Grains Kale Leeks Lettuces Melons & Watermelons Mustard Greens (for cooking) Herbs Onions Oriental Salad Greens (also great cooked) Parsnips Peas Pumpkins & Winter Squash Radishes (salad, & cooking types) Salad Vegetables Sweet Corn Sweet Peppers Tomatoes : Bush Types Tomatoes : Vine Types Tomatoes : New Centiflor types Tomatilloes & Groundcherries Turnips Unusual Tubers: Oca & Ulluco Mini-Collections Useful Books   SEEDSAVING SeedSaving Instructions Seedsaving Courses   INFORMATION Read past Newsletters Give us Feedback Browse the Reference Section   PAYMENT

~Seed for CAULIFLOWER ~ We are being as generous as possible with packet sizes - we feel that commercial packets have become absurdly stingy in recent years. But when to sow them? Just with the Cabbages, there are different classes. To eat cauliflowers in SPRING : Use a 'spring heading' type. Sow late spring, plant out mid summer, and harvest the following spring. To eat cauliflowers in EARLY SUMMER : Sow in autumn or midwinter under cover, plant out very early in spring. We find this too much trouble! To eat cauliflowers in LATE SUMMER or AUTUMN: Sow in spring, plant out late spring to mid-summer. "Angers Mix" Early Spring Heading Cauliflowers Back in 2003 we found an interesting old French variety of super-early cauliflower - "Hatif d'Angers" . And then we discovered that it also has a sister variety called 'Tardif d'angers that is identical except that it heads up a couple of weeks later. Now the problem with cauliflowers is that you wait and wait and then suddenly they tend to come all ready at once . . so what we have done here is mix seed of these two closely related varieties - the idea is to spread out your harvest over a longer period and so avoid a glut. This seems to work quite nicely and this mix was very popular last year! Early cauliflower, a mix of two sister strains for longer cropping . Sow in April/May/June for harvest the following March-April Order CfAM - 1g (about 250 seed) £1.63     Autumn Giant - Late Summer/Autumn Cauliflower For later crops we have chosen this well-known and respected maincrop cauliflower with large dense white curds. It is generally sown in spring for harvest in autumn, but you can vary this by sowing earlier or later: Sow in Early Spring for an Autumn harvest, or Late Spring for a Winter harvest. Reliable autumn cauliflower. Order CfAG - 1g (about 250 seed) £1.49 'Ottobrino' Autumn Romanesco And you thought cauliflowers were boring! Romanesco cauliflowers have an acid-green fractal head that makes spiral rosettes. (The overall effect is not unlike a pine cone.) Many Romanesco cauliflowers are spring maturing but we have found this rare one that comes ready in the autumn, thus avoiding the need to overwinter it. Autumn romanesco. Green. Sow in Spring, harvest October-November. Order CfOT - 1g (about 200 seed) £1.39