Vegetable Seeds for Every Grower

The 74 packets on this page cover a very wide range of patience. Worth knowing which end you are buying into before you order.

Our vegetable seed range

Peppers, carrots and the kitchen-garden classics

Six peppers run from the sweet Yolo Wonder, a relative of California Wonder that wants 45 to 60 cm between plants and a potassium feed once it flowers, to the Hungarian Yellow Hot Wax, which shrugs off cold better than most and gives a moderate heat. Four carrots (Daucus carota) sit side by side: Amsterdamse Bak 2 is the sweet orange standard, Purple Haze F1 is purple outside and orange in the core, Yellowstone F1 comes up yellow, and Interceptor F1 is the slim snacking one, ready July to October. Seven tomatoes, five cucumbers, six squash and a row of peas and beans fill out the rest. Proper heat lives next door on the chilli and pepper shelf.

Microgreens and sprouting seeds

This is the shortcut. Alfalfa needs a jar, an 8 to 10 hour soak and about five days. Basil sprouts take roughly ten. Daikon radish microgreens are cut after about a week, kale after 7 to 10 days, and endive germinates in 2 to 3 days with the first pickable leaves at 8 to 15. Eight microgreen varieties and seven sprouting seeds between them, all of which work on a windowsill in January.

When to sow your vegetable seeds

Germination rate depends mostly on warmth and steady moisture, but timing decides whether you get a crop at all. Rough guide, from the packets themselves:

Picking varieties that suit your space

Tigerella is the tomato we would hand a first-timer: heirloom, hardy, resists mould reasonably well and fruits in 55 to 60 days. Supersweet 100 F1 will out-produce it by a mile, over a hundred tomatoes on one vine, but only if you stake it properly and keep feeding. Great White Beefsteak has the best story of the lot, pioneered by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, and needs sowing indoors eight weeks before the last frost.

Two honest warnings. Dwarf Pepper Mixed looks superb on a windowsill and is not really worth eating, so treat it as a house plant. Cardoon is hardy to the point of being invasive, so give it a corner you do not mind losing. And Atlantic Giant Pumpkin can pass 100 kg, which is a set of scales rather than a dinner: for something you actually cook, take Uchiki Kuri. Fruit rather than veg is on the fruit seed page, and the whole plantshop sits under all seeds.