Free seeds offer

For some time now Andy and I have been saving seeds from our own home-grown, organic heirloom vegetable varieties in hopes that we would eventually be able to pass them along to others interested in trying them for themselves. Finally, and to celebrate crossing the ‘100 articles on our website’ threshold, we have enough seeds to start. We’re not selling them, and this is not a seed swap. It’s entirely free, no strings attached.

We still have to decide who is going to do what, but the plan is to provide an address to which you can send a stamped, addressed envelope together with your seed preference – and we’ll pop in a few seeds and send it back. These are not new, experimental varieties – they’ve been around for ages, and we grow them for ourselves. We think they’re great, and we think you’ll agree. Best of all, they’re open-pollinated varieties, so you can save your own seed.

We won’t be able to give you very many seeds – after all, there are only two of us – but we intend to give you enough so that you can grow some to try and save your own seeds for the following year.

As this is a good time of year for gardeners all over the UK to sit down with a seed catalogue or two and try to plan next year’s veggie plot, here are the varieties we plan to offer:
Pak choi

Parsnip – ‘Tender and True’

Pea – ‘Prew’s Special’

Pole bean – ‘Cherokee Trail of Tears’

Runner bean – ‘Czar’ and ‘Black Magic’

Tomato – ‘Heart of Catalonia’

Pak Choi

Pak choi is a very popular green leaf vegetable. An ‘oriental’ brassica, it’s great in stir-fries or steamed on its own. The stems are crunchy and succulent and the leaves are full of flavour. Not especially hardy, it can still be grown right through the winter in the shelter of a polytunnel, if protected with a fleece cloche. It grows well outside once the weather is a bit warmer and can be planted any time from April for a crop starting in June. Re-sow in June, July and early August for late autumn / overwintering crops, or in late August for a hungry-gap crop. Pak Choi will cross with other brassicas, so it’s best to keep them isolated.

Parsnips – ‘Tender and True’

Parsnips do much better outside than under cover, so don’t take up valuable polytunnel or greenhouse space with them. They are a long-season crop, planted in early spring and harvested through the following winter and into the spring beyond. Parsnips were a staple of the UK diet before potatoes were introduced.

Saved parsnip seeds generally have a faster and higher germination rate than you might expect. Don’t sow them too thickly or you may spend the rest of the season thinning them out! Tender and True is a lovely variety, producing big, tasty parsnips.

Parsnips will cross with the common roadside weed ‘Queen Anne’s Lace’ and others. If you want to save seed, don’t let it!

Peas – ‘Prew’s Special’

Originally from the Heritage Seed Library, I’ve now been growing these peas for 10 years. According to the story in the HSL catalogue they were originally found in Tutankhamen’s tomb by Lrd Canarvon, but according to Wikipedia the peas actually came from a vendor at a Cairo market. Either way, they’re fantastic. Not particularly early, and with fewer peas to the pod than found in some varieites, they are still the best peas I’ve ever grown. They’re incredibly tasty, freezes well, and will hopefully continue to be a welcome addition to our table for years to come.

Peas don’t usually cross and are one of the easiest varieties from which to save seed.

Pole beans – ‘Cherokee Trail of Tears’

This was one of the few treasured possessions that survived the forced relocation, in 1838-9, of the Cherokee native Americans from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River to what is now Oklahoma. The Cherokee named this journey the ‘Trail of Tears’ as so many of them (over a quarter) died on the way.

These are just about the best pole beans you could ever wish to grow. They are delicious in their ‘green bean’ stage, and the dried beans are a wonderful addition to winter soups and stews. They are incredibly prolific – just six plants should give you plenty of beans for your own use and many seeds for the following year. Like most pole beans they are unlikely to cross.

Runner beans – ‘Czar’

One of the most widely grown vegetables in the UK, every allotment and garden vegetable plot seems to have a row of runner beans. Czar is a white-seeded variety, prolific – so long as you keep them picked – and tasty right up until the first frosts. Black magic is (surprise, surprise) black seeded, and crops heavily enough to make it worth growing for your own dried ‘mock kidney beans’.

Runners will cross easily with any other runner bean nearby. In order to save seed, these were grown in isolation in a polytunnel in a rural area.

Tomato – ‘Heart of Catalonia’

While visiting friends in Catalonia a couple of years ago I met Louis, a market gardener with a large plot on which he grew organic vegetables in wonderful profusion.

He showed me a special tomato plant, saying that he’d grown this variety all his life, his father had grown it before him, and his grandfather before that – and that as far as he knew, it was unique.

It’s a tall variety, producing large fruit pointed at the bottom, and the flavour is just wonderful. Best of all, they appear to be highly disease and blight resistant. I grew them the following year here in Wales and had my first tomato in…June. They kept on producing until November. If you look at the cover of ‘How to Grow Food in your Polytunnel’, you’ll see one spreading across the far end.

Tomatoes don’t cross easily in general, but make sure the plant – and fruit – is healthy with no sign of blight before you save seeds.

If you’re interested, find out how to get your free organic seeds here. We’ll send them out as long as our stocks last. And a Happy Christmas to all from Farm In My Pocket. Ho ho.