Unusual Online Seed Stores

by Nik on January 4, 2008

For this week’s Five Friday Favourites, we’re continuing the theme of planning for the food growing year ahead by picking five of the UK’s less common online seed outlets, whose catalogues may have passed you by.

Chiltern Seeds (actually based in Cumbria) sells over 4,500 varieties of rare or old seeds, covering both flowers and vegetables. With so many to choose from it has several varieties of each kind of vegetable on offer, so easily puts your local garden centre to shame. Its web site is informative, giving you a little background on much of what it sells, and delivery is very reasonable at £1.50 in the UK, and £2.50 for Europe.

The Real Seed Catalogue concentrates solely on kitchen garden seeds, so there’s no need to click through page after page of flowers and shrubs to find what you want. Its site is very personable and approachable, with ‘Ben’ and ‘Kate’ testing all of the seeds that they sell by growing them themselves and only selling the varieties that produce the best results. So, while the range is smaller it’s probably a good choice for the nervous first-time gardener.

If you love cooking Italian food then Seeds of Italy has definite bookmark potential. The tomato section alone makes it worth a visit, with specific varieties for making tomato sauce and others for preserving. It has an extensive selection of mushrooms, which will be a sensible step up for anyone who has started with a DIY or garden centre mushroom growing kit, and even truffle trees for a bit of luxury at less than restaurant prices.

If selling heritage seeds on a modern medium like the web sounds like something of a jarring contrast, then pop along to Thomas Etty Esq. Not only is the layout old-fashioned, but the pages of its catalogue are presented as attached PDFs, while a retro take on the ‘under construction’ banner flown on developing websites asks ‘May it please you to note that we continue to modify and improve this electrical website, and we crave your indulgence whilst this neccessary work continues.’

And for readers in Ireland, there’s Brown Envelope Seeds, which has excellent indoor and outdoor sowing grids on the seed description pages. More extensive information for growing each vegetable and saving its seeds for later re-use is provided in an associated wiki, linked from each seed page. Pricing is in euros, and payment handled by PayPal.