VEGETABLE SEEDS Aubergines Beans Beetroot Broad Beans Broccoli & Rapini Brussels Sprouts Cabbage Cauliflower Carrots Celery Chilli Peppers Courgettes & Summer Squash Cucumbers, Gherkins & suchlike things Fennel Flowers Grains Herbs Kale Leaf Greens for Cooking Leeks Lettuces Melons & Watermelons Mustard Greens ( for cooking) Onions Oriental Greens for cooking & salads Parsnips Peas Pumpkins & Winter Squash Radishes (salad, & cooking types) Root Parsley NEW Salad Vegetables Sweet Corn Swedes Sweet Peppers Tomatoes : Bush Types Tomatoes : Vine Types Tomatoes : New Centiflor types Tomatilloes & Groundcherries Turnips Unusual Tubers: Oca & Ulluco Gift Seed-Collections Seed-Selection Lists NEW 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 Processing Brassica Seed Drying your seed Isolation cage plans Seedsaving Courses   INFORMATION Read past Newsletters Give us Feedback Browse the Reference Section Tips for Beginners How long seed lasts Monthly Sowing Calendar Guide to Summer Sowing Guide to Autumn/Winter Sowing Why GMO vegetable seed is stupid   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 young 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. As well as sowing in Spring outdoors, you can alternatively sow it in a polytunnel in late summer/early autumn 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. Delicious. Sow spring/summer for use late summer through into winter. Order KaNT - (250 seed) £1.64   Sutherland Kale ("Càil Cataibh" in Gaelic) 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. 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] £2.17   When? For sowing in spring, transplant out when bigger, and harvest in autumn / overwinter. Red Ursa Kale This is a great kale particularly useful for winter and spring harvest. The large upright plants have beautiful deep red-purple leaves with a unique shape - 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 when it finally bolts 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] £1.64   When? For sowing in spring, transplant out when bigger, and harvest in autumn / overwinter. True Siberian Kale A new fast growing Kale, with large frilly blue-green leaves. This great kale (originally from Seeds of Change) was given to us by Andrew and Sarah, the ‘Seed Ambassadors’ who toured many small seed collections in 2006, taking the best varieties from one country to another. We really like it because not only is it particularly tasty and tender, it is also very cold-hardy. It can be picked through winter in many areas. Quick & Hardy, but still tasty. Order KaTS approx 200 seed £1.64 When? For sowing in spring, transplant out when bigger, and harvest in autumn / overwinter. "Komatsuna" Japanese Kale This new addition to the catalogue is an incredibly versatile green from Japan and Korea with leaves used just like Kale. It is delicious, cold tolerant and easy to grow all year. There are so many ways to grow this, you can't really go wrong. Either sow direct - or in a seedbed, or in pots and then plant out. You can sow several times from spring to autumn. The main sowings are in spring and summer. You get small plants after about 30 days, or big like a Kale plant after about 70 days - and you can harvest at any time. So best practice could be to sow in a drill about 5cm apart and then progressively thin to about 45cm apart as the plants get bigger, eating the thinnings as you go. The plant is not only delicious, but drought and cold resistant - you can also sow in late summer/autumn under cover and they will grow well overwinter in an unheated polytunnel or greenhouse. Order OVKo - approx 200 seed £1.59 Saving Brassica Seed: 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 - 20 plants absolute minimum - 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.