Seed Finder from Mother Earth News

I got an email that made my day:

Melanie,
We've been reading your Bean Sprouts blog here at Mother Earth News and we're hoping you might be willing to help us test a new feature we are developing for our web site!

Mother Earth News reads my blog? I'm as chuffed as can be. It's the spiritual parent of Bean Sprouts, my inspiration and my model.

So I'm very happy to share with you the news of their new online tool:

With all the time and care a garden takes, I wanted to invite you to try a time-saving - and free! - tool from Mother Earth News magazine. Our custom Seed and Plant Finder is a quick and easy way to find mail-order sources for pretty much any vegetable, flower or herb variety, old standards as well as new and hard-to-find varieties.

The free Finder searches more than 150 garden catalogs - from the big names to small, specialized companies. Our initial emphasis is on sources for vegetables, but we plan to add fruit and nut tree and ornamental catalogs in the near future.

I've tried it and it looks good - as long as you live in the USA. It only includes American seed catalogues so far, so it's no use to me or my many British readers, and readers from other countries outside the USA. That's fair enough - Mother Earth News is an American publication. If Gardener's World magazine produced a seed finding tool, I expect it would only cover British seed catalogues.

I hope my many American readers give this new online tool a try and find it useful. If you're not American, why not visit the Mother Earth News website, where you can read thousands of online articles about sustainable living topics?

Salad Days

It's the middle of January. The excitement of Christmas and New Year has worn off, and there are still a couple of months of cold wintry weather to go. I'm sick of the rain. I'm sick of the gales. I'm sick of root vegetables and cabbage. So I curl up in an armchair with a selection of seed catalogues and choose what kinds of salad I'll be growing in 2008.

Salad leaves are a brilliant choice for a vegetable gardener. Have you seen the prices of those bags of mixed leaves in the supermarkets? You can save money by buying a lettuce from the greengrocer, but sometimes they're a bit limp, and anyway mixed salad is tastier than a heap of shredded cos. If you grow your own you get the best of all worlds - spanking fresh crisp salad, a selection of leaves, no food miles at all, and all for the cost of a packet of seeds.

I like the packets of mixed salad leaves you can get, so you get a variety of different flavours and colours. The important thing to remember is successional sowing. In other words, don't sow all the seeds in the packet at once, otherwise you'll suddenly have dozens of lettuces on your hands that you won't be able to eat before they go to seed, and then you'll have no lettuces at all. I mark out a line with sticks and string, then I sow a few seeds (you can't easily count them - salad seeds are typically very small). A week later I sow a few more, and thin out the plants that have started coming up. I do this once a week through the spring and summer for a continuous supply of salad leaves. If more lettuces come up than I can eat, I cut them anyway and give them to neighbours and friends. It's probably nonsense but I can't help feeling that when you allow plants to bolt it somehow encourages other plants nearby to bolt as well, and before you know it things are going to seed all over the garden. Have you noticed that?

Some salad varieties are good for "cut and come again". Instead of growing the plants until they form mature heads, you cut off the young leaves with scissors, and a new growth of leaves appears later from the base. You can get several crops from a single seed this way, you can sow them closer because they don't grow so big, and you don't need to worry about them bolting. Suitable varieties include chard, corn salad, endive, kale, land cress, sorrel and tatsoi.

Don't forget more unusual salad ingredients. Young dandelion leaves are delicious in a salad - they taste peppery, rather like rocket or watercress. When you pinch out the tops of your pea plants don't compost the tops. They're divine in a salad bowl, and in fact I saw bags of them in Tesco last year, but the price made me laugh. I grow spinach for cooking, but I also love to use the young leaves in a salad, especially a strong-flavoured salad with thinly-sliced red onion rings and perhaps the seeds from half a pomegranate, dressed with black pepper and a splash of balsamic vinegar. Nasturtium leaves are good in a salad if you can wash all the blackfly off them, and the flowers are also edible. The leaves and flowers together make a really attractive salad. In fact a lot of young leaves can be used as salad greens, so whenever you're thinning out seedlings such as turnips, beetroot, radishes etc., why not have a little munch on some of the leaves and decide if you'd like to take the thinnings home for salad, rather than just composting them?

Anagram Competition Results

The voting is now closed on our anagram competition. The most popular anagram of "Dill's Atlantic Giant" was "Titillating Scandal", with 55% of the vote.

So Frank Marsland wins the windmill palm seeds. Congratulations Frank. Honourable mention to Hedgewizard whose entry "Gilt-clad Snail Titan" was also very popular.

Anagram Competition Poll

You've got 3 more days to vote in the anagram competition poll. Titillating Scandal pulled ahead to an early lead, but Gilt-clad Snail Titan has surged ahead in the last 24 hours, and the voting is now level. Lit in Lactating Lads and Instant Digital Call are attracting no interest whatsoever. You'd think at least their creators would vote for them, but apparently not.

Vote now for your favourite anagram of "Dill's Atlantic Giant" and choose who will be the lucky winner of two windmill palm tree seeds.

Anagram Competition

The deadline has passed for the anagram competition I announced last week. The challenge was to make an anagram from the words "Dill's Atlantic Giant". Here are the qualifying entries entries (one entry was disqualified as being too rude to print):

• Lit in Lactating Lads
• Gilt-clad Snail Titan
• Titillating Scandal
• Instant Digital Call

I've put them in a poll in the right-hand sidebar and you have one week to vote for your favourite. The lucky winner will receive a packet of Windmill Palm seeds, which grow into 40' high cold-hardy palm trees.

What are you waiting for? Go and vote!

Pumpkin Seeds

Ed's Dill's Atlantic Giant pumpkin seeds arrived in the post today. He wants to grow giant pumpkins next year, and this is the only variety to grow. Every world champion pumpkin since 1979 has been an Atlantic Giant.

The online supplier that sent the pumpkin seeds also sent us a free gift - two windmill palm seeds. These are cold-hardy palm trees that grow up to 20-40 feet tall. I don't really have any use for a 20'-40' palm tree, so I'd like to offer these seeds as a competition prize.

I will post the palm seeds to whoever emails me the funniest anagram of "Dill's Atlantic Giant". Remember to include your address - the seeds are very light so I don't mind posting them anywhere in the world. I'll publish all the anagrams in one week's time (November 9th) and the winner will be chosen by a poll.

I believe...

...seedlings are miraculous.

It doesn't matter how many times I see it, I am always gobsmacked when the dry, shrivelled seeds I sow begin to grow.

Seed Catalogues

It's that time of year of year again when allotment gardeners sit at home with a hot cup of tea and peruse piles of seed catalogues whilst dreaming happy dreams of all the things they want to grow next season. Seed catalogues are very curious in that they vary widely even though they all do basically the same job. So I thought I'd do a quick rundown of some of the catalogues I have this year, and give them each a "star rating", out of a possible maximum 4 stars.

I have compared the prices for a "standard shopping basket" of a packet each of Ailsa Craig tomato seeds, Enorma runner beans, Partenon courgettes, Little Gem Lettuce, and Early Nantes carrots (I chose the varieties because they are very common and available in almost all catalogues).

The bottom line is - I'm certainly going to be placing an order with the Real Seed Catalogue.

Dobies

*** Great Choice, Great Prices

Dobies is a well-established name in gardening, selling seeds and plants directly through their catalogues. I might have this wrong, but I don't think you can get Dobies seeds in garden centres and shops. Their catalogue is glossy with lots of photographs and detailed descriptions of each variety. Probably because they're so large their prices are very low.

Fruit and Veg Yes
Flowers and ornamentals Yes
Garden Equipment Yes
Plants and seedlings Yes
Online ordering Yes
Standard shopping basket price £7.75 inc. P&P

The Organic Gardening Catalogue

*** Reasonable Prices For Organic Seeds, Especially Good for Books and Equipment

The Organic Gardening Catalogue is a charity, and is the official catalogue of the Garden Organic (HDRA), Europe's leading organic gardening organisation. The catalogue is not glossy but is illustrated with colour photos and detailed descriptions of varieties. It sells organic seeds (and bulbs, sets etc.) and organic gardening equipment such as beneficial insect shelters, organic pest control and so on. It also sells an interesting range of books.

Fruit and Veg Yes
Flowers and ornamentals Yes
Plants and seedlings No
Online ordering Yes
Garden Equipment Yes
Standard shopping basket price £10.52 inc. P&P, but you get a 10% discount if you join Garden Organic which costs £28 for individual membership.

Mr Fothergills

*** Good Choice, Good Prices

Mr Fothergills is another long established name in gardening. Its glossy catalogue has flowers on one side and if you flip it upside down and back to front the veg is on the other side. Lots of colour photographs and descriptions of varieties. They're not cheap, as you'll see from the price of a standard shopping basket. But if you order 5 non-offer items you can order any packet of seeds valued at up to £1.69 for 10p, and if you order 15 items you can order another packet of seeds valued at up to £2 for just 10p.

Fruit and Veg Yes
Flowers and ornamentals Yes
Garden Equipment Yes
Plants and seedlings Yes
Online ordering Yes
Standard shopping basket price £10.44 inc. P&P (Mr Fothergills don't sell Partenon courgettes so I substituted Tosca)

Thompson & Morgan

** Confusing Catalogue, Confusing Offers, Most Expensive

Thompson & Morgan have been supplying seeds since 1855. Like all the other catalogues described so far it is glossy with full colour photos and full descriptions of varieties. The fruit and veg part of the catalogue is arranged unusually - all the patio vegetables are grouped together on a single page, there is a page for salad (except that patio tomatoes aren't on that page), all the tomatoes are together on a tomato page (except for the patio tomatoes which are on the Patio page, and Gardeners Delight tomatoes which are listen on the Salad page), and almost everything else is listed under Kitchen Garden Favourites. You might like this arrangement but I found it confusing and hard to find specific things I wanted. In fact, I couldn't find Enorma runner bean seeds, Ailsa Craig tomato seeds, or Partenon courgette seeds in the catalogue, which is surprising as those are pretty standard. But I did find them on the website. So a low "ease of use" score for T&M. They're quite pricey too, the most expensive "standard basket" of all the catalogues in this review, although they have a confusing array of offers - the catalogue says "2 free packets of seeds", for example, but when I went through the ordering process online I got one free packet. I don't follow it at all.

Fruit and Veg Yes
Flowers and ornamentals Yes
Garden Equipment Yes
Plants and seedlings Yes
Online ordering Yes
Standard shopping basket price £12.14 inc. P&P

Real Seed Catalogue

**** Rare and Heirloom Seeds at Very Good Prices

This is one of my favourites. The Real Seed Catalogue is printed entirely in black ink on non-glossy paper, even the orange cover which is nonetheless very attractive and based on classic 19th century typographical designs. The whole operation is run by Kate and Ben (who have a new baby Josephine) and represents a private collection of rare and heirloom seeds, all non-hybrids (no F1s here). All the expected types of veg are available (tomatoes, lettuces etc.) in interesting and unusual varieties. And they also sell strange and rare things, such as amaranth and mustard greens for the home gardener. They even encourage customers to save their own seeds instead of buying it each year, and provide instructions on how to do so. I think that's extremely cool. Instead of the standard shopping basket, I have picked a typical example of carrots, lettuce etc for the price comparison here, because they only sell unusual varieties. They're surprisingly cheap. So cheap in fact that my shopping basket didn't reach the minimum order of £8 before P&P. I'll just have to buy something else to make up the difference - hmm, what shall I choose...?

Fruit and Veg Yes
Flowers and ornamentals No
Garden Equipment No
Plants and seedlings No
Online ordering Yes
Standard shopping basket price £8.27 inc. P&P (all varieties were substituted as The Real Seed Catalogue only sells unusual and heirloom varieties)

Chiltern Seeds

*** Interesting Selection and Quirky Catalogue

Chiltern Seeds are another unusual seed company who eschew colour photos in their catalogues, in favour of careful descriptions and quirky cartoon illustrations. Like The Real Seed Catalogue, they specialise in rare and heirloom varieties, but unlike TRSC they also sell F1 hybrids. Their prices are comparable to Mr Fothergills and The Organic Gardening Catalogue, and significantly cheaper than Thompson & Morgan.

Fruit and Veg Yes
Flowers and ornamentals Yes
Garden Equipment No
Plants and seedlings No
Online ordering Yes
Standard shopping basket price £10.43 inc. P&P (I substituted Polestar for Enorma runner beans and Nero Di Milano for Partenon courgettes)

D.T.Brown & Co.

**** Cheapest for a Standard Basket of Seeds

D.T.Brown & Co. are approaching their centennial as a seed and bulb supplier. Their non-glossy colour catalogue has far more fruit and veg than flowers (which is what I like to see), and is full of photos and detailed descriptions of varieties. They have a small selection or organic seeds, but most of their seeds are conventionally grown. They are the cheapest catalogue in this review, and if you order 5 packets of seeds you can choose a Centennial Collection for 5p, after 12 items you can pick a free packet worth up to £1.50, and if you order 20 items you get another Centennial Collection for 5p, 25 items and that's another free packet worth up to £2.50. Not to be sniffed at.

Fruit and Veg Yes
Flowers and ornamentals Yes
Garden Equipment Yes
Plants and seedlings Yes
Online ordering Yes
Standard shopping basket price £7.50 inc. P&P (I substituted Defender for Partenon courgettes)

Broad Beans

Ellie and Sam helped me plant loads of broad beans on the allotment last weekend. I like broad beans. They'll be one of the first crops we can eat next spring, but we've planted far more than we'll ever eat.

It doesn't matter, though. I had packets and packets of seeds that people had given me, so it costs nothing. And the land will be unoccupied over winter anyway. It's better that there's something growing on it rather than just leaving it bare for weeds to colonise, or for the soil to erode. The bean plants will add nitrogen to the soil, so the ground will be great for brassicas and other hungry crops next year.

I might be able to barter my surplus beans at the farm shop. But even if I just dig it back into the soil - basically use it as a green manure - it's a worthwhile thing to do.

Mystery Vegetable

Does anyone know what this is? I grew it on the allotment from a packet of seeds someone gave me. The packet had a picture on the front and the times for sowing etc, but the top was ripped off so I didn't have the name.

The plant was large and sprawling rather like a butternut squash or pumpkin. The "fruit" is about 9" in diameter. I don't even know if it's ripe or if it would get bigger if I left it on the plant. I cut two of them today, and there are several more still on the plant.

The flesh has a pleasant mild taste, somewhat like a marrow but sweeter.

Guesses on the back of a postcard.

Nasturtiums

I was once a told a story about someone who moved into a new house and asked a friend of mine "What can I grow in my new garden that's edible but also decorative, and is quick and easy to grow?" My friend suggested nasturtiums, and the would-be-gardener's face fell. "But I just dug a whole load of those out!"

Nasturtiums are beautiful, and extremely edible. The leaves have a mildly pepper taste like watercress and make an excellent salad green. The seed pods are also peppery and can be eaten like capers. And the flowers are a colourful addition to salads.

They're annuals so they die each winter. But they're very easy to grow from seeds, and will self-seed so you may find you can develop a perennial patch without the effort of planting them yourself.

They'll climb up any framework such as a wigwam of canes, a lattice screwed to a wall, or through a hedge. They also tumble attractively and I like to drop a few seeds into hanging baskets or window boxes. In Ireland I saw lots of them grown in clumps in people's front gardens.

I love them very much, even though I'm not normally a big fan of flowers. Oh, I like to see them when somebody else has grown them, I just can't be bothered to grow the darn things myself. But nasturtiums are undemanding, unpretentious, pretty, and edible. Now that's my sort of flower.

What's Sprouting

This blog isn't called Bean Sprouts for nothing. I love sprouting dried seeds and beans, and almost always have something sprouting on my kitchen windowsill. At the minute there's some good old mustard-and-cress.

Eleanor helped me prepare this batch, by placing some damp paper (kitchen roll, blotting paper, whatever) in our bean sprouter, but you could use a saucer. Then she sprinkled mustard and cress seeds liberally but evenly on the damp paper. If we keep it moist, in a few days we'll have lovely fresh mustard and cress to eat.

Saving Tomato Seeds

I have been saving tomato seeds to plant next year by scooping them out onto pieces of kitchen paper (or toilet paper or blotting paper) and letting the jelly dry out. Then I put them into unlabelled envelopes so that next spring I have great fun planting seeds without any idea what's going to come up. For even more fun, put the unlabelled envelopes in the shed and forget about them until 2012, so that you also have the fun of wondering whether 5-year-old tomato (probably) seeds will even germinate at all.

Sprouts

I love sprouting beans and seeds, hence the name of this blog. Whenever I visit the health-food shop or ethnic grocer I look out for new types of seeds and beans to try sprouting them.

Recently at The Unicorn (a fantastic wholefood co-operative in South Manchester) I bought a bag of "sprouting mix" which contained sunflower seeds. I hadn't considered sprouting sunflower seeds before, but they sprout very well. This discovery led me to experiment with pumpkin seeds which also sprout well. And at Matta's (an international food shop in Liverpool) I got some raw buckwheat. That also sprouts well and very quickly, and you don't need to soak it overnight - an hour is plenty.

Through the winter, lettuce has not been available in my organic veg box, so fresh bean-sprouts have been the main ingredient in our salads.

Winter Bean Sprout Salad
Use your own sprouted beans or shop-bought ones. The familiar Chinese mung-bean sprouts will work fine, but if you have more interesting sprouts such as alfalfa, broccoli, chick-pea etc. that's even better. Now add whatever salad ingredients are in season. I've been adding grated carrot, chopped hothouse tomatoes (remove the seeds) and cucumber and finely chopped onion. The general rule I follow in making salads is to aim for a constant "particle size" - that is, try to chop everything about the same size as the main ingredient. So when I'm making rice salad everything gets chopped as small as I can and when I make sprout salad they can be a little bit bigger, but still fairly small (there are exceptions of course, I don't make potato salad with lumps of onion an inch across, it's just a rule of thumb). Now add a dressing. I have lots of dressing recipes. The simplest would be lots of ground black pepper, some sea salt and some freshly squeezed lemon juice. But feel free to use your own favourite salad dressing recipe (mayonnaise, especially home-made, adds a touch of luxury).

The Spice of Life

At the supermarket you don't get much choice of fruit and vegetables. Oh, I know you can buy lots of different fruits - pineapples, oranges, apples, pears, bananas, guavas, passionfruits etc. Vegetables too. But you don't get much choice of varieties of each different type. You might get a choice between Granny Smith, Gala and Golden Delicious [yuk!] apples, and you'll probably get a few choices of spuds as well. But you don't get to choose your own variety of tomatoes, say, or celery, or swede.

It came as a surprise to me that every kind of fruit and vegetable comes in a huge range of varieties to the gardener. The humblest of vegetables - turnips, say - requires you to choose from dozens of cultivars, each with their own qualities of taste, texture, time of ripening, resistance to pests and diseases, preferred soil and climate etc. You get no clue of this shopping at Sainsbury's.

That's because the supermarkets pick their varieties based on qualities that might surprise you. They want produce that is tough enough to survive packing, chilling, transportation and storage, and still look cosmetically blemish-free at the end of a few weeks. Did you ever see tomatoes in the supermarket labelled "grown for flavour" and think "Aren't they all"? The answer is "No". The properties prized by supermarkets are of no interest to the gardener at all, for whom flavour is likely to be paramount, although suitability to our own local conditions is also of interest (and few of us can resist the promise of a "heavy cropper").

If you suspect that those who claim home-grown food tastes better are kidding you, or themselves - you're wrong. It really does taste better, not because it is grown organically (although that's true), not because it's fresher or has travelled fewer food miles (although that's true too), not because knowing you grew it yourself adds self-satisfaction to the culinary experience (although that's certainly true) but because even before the seed was in the ground, it was chosen for its taste.

Chitting Potatoes

I bought some Desiree, Pink Fir Apple, Kestrel and Red Duke of York seed potatoes. They're currently chitting (that means being exposed to the light so they start to sprout) in some apple trays I scavenged from the greengrocer. I'll plant them in the spring.

I'm also chitting some random potatoes of mixed and unknown varieties which I excavated from the bottom of the spud bag because they were starting to sprout already. They might as well go in the ground, but there's no knowing what they'll do. That's all part of the fun.

By the way, my choir, St George's Singers, are singing the Daily Service live on Radio 4 on Monday. If you tune in to Radio 4 (198 LW) at 9:45 am you'll hear me (and a few dozen other people) singing two hymns and a spiritual. Don't worry if you miss it because you can listen again on the Radio 4 website afterwards. I'll post the link once it's up.

Update: You can listen at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/mondailyservice

Updated Update: The previous link no longer points to the St George's Singers' daily service, but whoever sang the service last Monday. However we have been invited back sometime so you'll have a chance hear us again. Watch this space.

A Great Day

Yesterday was a great day. Lots of little but nice things happened. I found a stash of about 50 packets of seeds I had forgotten about, so that was exciting. Then a neighbour came round to ask for a favour, and she gave me some home-made cookies as a "thank you". I also spent over an hour at the allotment for the first time in months. I moved the compost heaps, which was a bigger job than it sounds. Whilst I was doing it I found one of my favourite gardening gloves which I lost back in May or something. It needs a good wash but then it will be as good as new.

Today's picture is of the sock monkeys my sister, Steph, made for the kids for Christmas.

First The Farmer Sows His Seeds

Sam helped me sow some vegetable seeds (and a few flowers). We'll grow these on indoors to the seedling stage, then harden them off and plant them in the allotment in spring. We sowed some tomatoes, cauliflowers, cabbages and sweet peas.

Sowing seeds is easy, child's play you might say. Most of what you need to know is printed on the back of the seed packet - what time of year to sow, whether indoors or out, what to do next and so on.

Apart from that the main things to remember are these:

• Sow more seeds than you want plants. Some seeds will fail to germinate. Some will grow weak and spindly. We sowed three seeds in each station. When they've sprung up, we'll thin out all but the strongest.
• Don't bury them too deeply. Generally speaking, they need to be buried under the same thickness of compost as their size. So big seeds like broad beans are about an inch long, and need to be buried under about an inch of compost. Small seeds like tomatoes are about 1/16" and need to be covered with a pinch of compost from your fingers. Tiny seeds like lettuce are barely specks, and can be sprinkled on the surface.
• Keep the compost moist. Don't let it dry out but don't flood them either. A plant mister is just the job for seeds and seedlings, or let water soak into the pots from below.

Sunflowers

I was telling you about the sunflowers Ed grew from saved seeds. They must have been F1 hybrids because they grew very tall stalks with very small flowerheads. Here they are.

Terminator Technology

I've kept seeds from some of my crops to grow next year. I have plenty of packets of seeds, but I thought it would be fun to save a few as well. Ed saved some sunflower seeds last year but they must have been F1 hybrids because when they grew they had tiny little flower heads on top of very tall stalks, unlike the parent plants which had tall stalks and large heads.

That was pretty funny, but it wouldn't be so funny if you were a small farmer. Agriculture has always been based on selecting, saving, sharing and replanting seeds. Genetic modification is a threat to that, especially terminator technology which is the modification of plants to produce sterile seeds. You can see why the biotechnology industry likes this idea - it forces the farmers to keep buying seeds every year. But it undermines sustainable farming.

Don't panic - the technology doesn't even exist yet. But the agribuisiness industry is developing it, and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has placed a moratorium on field-testing until it can be proved that the technology is no risk to people or the environment.

I mention it because it is an issue I was only vaguely aware of before. But now that I am involved in growing some of my own food, and saving my own seeds, I can understand much better what a threat this is.