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

~ KALE ~ For those of you who don't grow Kale - you should! An easily-grown plant, it is a great cooked 'green' for winter, and the small leaves are also fantastic in salads. Nero Di Toscana (Early strain) A non-heading traditional kale from Tuscany also known as Palm Kale or Black Tuscan Kale. It has long strappy leaves that are quite deeply savoyed. We don't offer Curly Kale because we think it is too prone to aphids - they love to live in the curled up bits of leaf edge - but we do really like Tuscan Kale which is a different thing altogether: aphid-free, and even more importantly tastes fantastic. Normally you use the mature leaves as a cooked vegetable, but this has such a nice flavour (different from normal kale!) that we have been eating the thinnings and baby leaves raw in salad. Not quite as hardy as the other kales, but will stand well into winter, and often right through into spring in milder years. It is not generally known, but as well as sowing in Spring outdoors, you can alternatively sow it in a polytunnel and pick a few leaves at a time all winter when other salad ingredients are scarce. When it finally bolts, the flower shoots are a gourmet treat raw or cooked. We tried several different strains before settling on this one. It works out a few pence more expensive but has a much better flavour than the others! Delicious. Sow spring/summer for use late summer through into winter. Order KaNT - (250 seed) £1.45   "Sutherland" Kale NEW Back in 2003 we were sent a small sample of kale seed by Vicky Schilling, of Ullapool, with the following note attached: “I am sending you some seed of Sutherland Kale given me by an 80yr old in Sutherland, its an old variety grown by the crofters. We grew it last season and its lovely, very tender green leaves on plants that grow waist high - need staking! Cooks just like spinach and lasts through the hungry gap.” We tried it out and were really impressed. It is the most vigorous and resilient kale we have seen. It shrugged off attack by aphids, cabbage white caterpillars, ravenous goats, and 70 mph freezing sleet overwinter. In each case it sprang back, growing new leaves with no trouble, and forming large heads of Kale in spring when at its most valuable. And when it starts to bolt in spring, the flowering shoots are good to eat too, very much like sprouting broccoli shoots. It was so good that this year we grew a whole bed for seed. We will be maintaining this rare and useful heirloom from now on, but due to space, there will only be a few packets available each year. Order early! News in 2007: We just recieved a bit more history about this kale, from Vicky, who has been researching the background of the Kale she sent us: “The old lady the Kale came from is Elizabeth Woolcombe, of West Drummie in Sutherland. She is in fact 93, and her daughter has remembered where they got the Sutherland Kale from. It was given to them by Angus Simmonds about 50 years ago, he was doing research on Kales at Edinburgh University at the time." Its really nice to know a bit more about this Kale, and good to learn that it was chosen as being particularly valuable by someone working on Kales in the past. Give it a try, your orders directly support our efforts to keep this variety in production. This is - as far as we know - now extinct other than our seedbank. Do keep your own seed using the instructions supplied! Order KASU approx 150 seed [OG1] £1.95   When? For sowing in spring, transplant out when bigger, and harvest in autumn / overwinter. "Red Ursa" Kale This is a great new Kale we have found. The large upright plants have beautiful deep red-purple leaves with a unique shape - they are gently frilled at the edges. It was bred by Kale expert Frank Morton specifically for home gardeners - with emphasis on extra cold resistance and flavour. The leaves are tender and sweet even when big, and the flowering shoots are also very nice both cooked or in salads. Sweet & Hardy. Very rare. If you like it, keep your own seed using the instructions supplied! Order KARU approx 200 seed [CO1] £1.55   When? For sowing in spring, transplant out when bigger, and harvest in autumn / overwinter.     Saving Brassica Seed: Here's Kate processing some Pak Choi. You do need to make sure they aren't crossed with anything, as many of the brassicas (kale, cabbages, cauliflowers etc) will cross with each other very readily. Flower stalks from a good-sized population are hung up to dry, then broken open over a bowl (or old baby bath in this case!). The bits of pod are screened out with a sieve or a soil riddle - but you can instead winnow them off in a breeze pretty easily if you prefer. Seed-saving instructions are included with your seeds, so you can do this yourself. And of course, seed-saving is only possible because these are all real, non-hybrid varieties.