Vegetable seeds

Nothing can compare to harvesting your own vegetables full of freshness and flavour straight from your garden.

The following information was kindly provided by Jamie at Home Channel 4 & Grow Your Own magazine, the UK's leading kitchen garden magazine.

Jamie at Home on Channel 4
Jamie Oliver goes back to his roots for a mouth-watering new series filmed at his Essex home.

With the help of gardener Brian, Jamie has transformed the garden of his Essex house, and discovered a passion for growing his own produce.

Now he wants to show just how easy it is to cultivate amazing fruit and vegetables at home.

Even if you only have a balcony or back yard, Jamie shows how to grow fantastic veg and fruit and turn it into simple, tasty and delicious food. Grow the vegetables featured in the series.

Episode 1 Featured Growing Tomatoes

Easy to grow but difficult to resist, there's little that can beat the taste of a vine-ripened tomato, eaten when still warm from the sun.
Varieties to try
There are many excellent varieties of tomato that are easy to grow. Remember, vine tomatoes must be staked, and kept to a single stem to concentrate their energy on producing fruits.
Bush tomatoes are compact plants with side branches that end in a cluster of flowers. Hanging basket types are bush varieties that trail more freely.

Seed available for the varieties mentioned in the series.

Vine
Moneymaker - a well-known and much loved variety for the home grower, equally good in the greenhouse or outdoors. The smooth, medium-size fruits have a fine flavour.

Bush type

Totem F1 - this heavy-cropping variety produces large amounts of crimson-coloured tomatoes low down on its stocky stems. One of the best varieties for growing in pots and suitable for growing both indoors and out.

Trailing (hanging basket) type

Gartenperle (Garden Pearl) - a good choice for growing in baskets, containers and window boxes. It is a prolific cropper, producing delicious fruits through the whole summer.

Episode 2 Featured Growing Courgettes

Courgettes are one of the easiest vegetables to grow and will rarely disappoint.
Give them decent soil and plenty of water, and each plant will produce up to 20 fruits (they're small, summer squashes - baby marrows in fact).

Seed available for the varieties mentioned in the series.
Courgette Deffender - A heavy cropper with good disease resistance, this reliable variety will produce courgettes all summer long.

Courgette Green Bush - An early-cropping plant that produces masses of small, tender fruits.

Courgette One Ball - Produces round, yellow courgettes with excellent flavour, good for roasting and stuffing. The yields from this novelty variety are high.

Episode 3 Featured The Perfect Barbeque

Lettuce to go with all that delicious barbeque food

Every kitchen garden, whether a full-size allotment or a handful of pots, should include lettuce.

Fast-maturing, undemanding and requiring very little space, they come in an astonishing variety of leaf shapes, colour and textures, offering an almost year-round salad source.

Seed available for the varieties mentioned in the series.

Lettuce Little Gem - Small cos lettuce perfectly suited to closer spacings or as a catch crop. The dark green heads can be harvested well into autumn.

Lettuce Llollo Rossa - A crimson looseleaf lettuce that will bring colour to salads. The leaves are frilly and resistant to bolting.

Lettuce Tom Thumb - This small but reliable lettuce produces tight heads in double-quick time. Can be grown under cloches through to October and is slow to bolt.

Lettuce Valdor - Cold resistance makes this hardy head-former the perfect choice for growing through the winter to ensure a year-round leaf supply.

Episode 4 Featured French Beans

Whether you know them as French, waxpod, string, snap, haricot, flageolet or green beans, a summer vegetable garden is seldom complete without them.

They are simple to grow, tasty and highly nutritious - so what better reasons could there be for you to make room for a few on your veg patch?

You'll find the taste of home-grown beans far superior to those you can buy in shops and you can grow a wide range of different varieties not suitable for commercial production.

Varieties to try.

Goldfield - A reliable climber that will reach around 1.5 to 1.8m (5 to 6ft) in height. Produces broad, fleshy, bright yellow pods.

Hunter - A high-yielding climbing variety that provides a heavy crop of delicious, long, flat pods for several months.

The Prince - Popular dwarf variety that grows to around 60cm (2ft). Produces extremely tasty slim pods that are good for freezing.

This information was kindly provided by Grow Your Own, the UK's leading kitchen garden magazine.

The cultural information should be used as a guide only, I have found a number of different sowing techniques for the same seed from different sources there does not seem to be a standard. With this in mind you should use this website as a guide only, you probably already have a tried and tested way of sowing different seeds. As a rule of thumb the larger the seed size the more cover it requires, and fine seed like Lobelia Begonia etc requires no cover.
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