The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Growing => Vegetables => Topic started by: happy larry on April 25, 2012, 09:40:22 pm
-
I had an hour or so to kill today so popped into a local garden centre in the hope of finding some wilja seed potatos.Words fail me on offer was a little 2" pot containing 2 broccoli plants for something like £1.59/£1.89 cant remember exactly but i was stunned.I know a fair bit of time will have been spent on filling pots with compost etc,and business overheads but i think
-
Cheaper to buy them from the supermarket than grow your own at that price.
-
Then people buying those tiny expensive plants will grow them in a tiny enormously expensive shop-bought raised bed, in bought-in soil - those will end up being the most expensive home-grown veggies ever ::)
-
But they'll taste good. :yum:
-
A few weeks ago I bought cucumber seed from garden centre for 3.99 to find only 4 seed in the packet :o
To rub salt into the wound, only 1 has grown :'(
In future will check carefully how many seeds are in the packs!
I'm going to write to the company involved as am disgusted
-
I grow all female cucumber varieties and there are only ever 5 or 6 seeds. So I wondered why they are so expensive....then I wondered where on Earth they get the seeds from in an all female cucumber ??? No wonder they are expensive :D
-
If you have the space , time and inclination perhaps research how to save your own seeds ..
It's quite easy so long as you don't get F1 or F2 hydbrids.
There re loads of sites on the internet giving great ideas and advice.
Another way of making the seeds you do buy pay for themselves is to use the net to find the seeds repoductive viability an ideal storage storage and germination temps .
I've recently gone thorugh just over 130 packs of seeds of various ages opened or sealed and collated this data alpha numerically . It's taken six or seven long sessions and i finally finished it tonight .
I've used Excel as a spread sheet and put on it some of the details of all the seeds & their relevent data .
The seeds are now stored in sealed test tubes with colo=ur coded labels that include seed data and are numbered in a home made rack system .
Tomorrow I'll play bwith the Excel & pull off the sowing schedules by crop groups ie flowers , legumes , salad , brasica , alliums roots and others .
Then I'll go to my master cultivation planner and using the drawn off schedules start my current tranche of sowing.
I know it sounds complicated and too tehnical for some .. it took me years to realize I was lost by trying to rely on memory alone and thumbing through endless seed packets stored in shoe boxes etc.
One day back in 1987 I started to self teach my learning how to use a computer , one of the updates / upgrades had a sort of simple spread sheet so I played with ti and as things progressed so di I . I ended up having to get excell for dummies to help sort out some of the things I was wanting to do especially the formulae to get the end results from all the input information .
Currently because of memory losses from a stroke I'm using a book from Readers Digest ISBN code 978-0-276-44384-8 called " How To Do just about do ANYTHNG IN Microsoft Excel " to help guide me through things.
-
A few weeks ago I bought cucumber seed from garden centre for 3.99 to find only 4 seed in the packet :o
To rub salt into the wound, only 1 has grown :'(
In future will check carefully how many seeds are in the packs!
I'm going to write to the company involved as am disgusted
thats for f1 hybrid seed, i buy 1 packet a year sow all 4 sell 3 plants at £1 each and grow 1 on, theyre so vigorous youll only ever need 1 plant, last year i picked all the cues i needed, about 2 a week from june till november, well worth the money.
-
I buy most of my seeds on eBay - lots of interesting varieties and excellent value. I can recommend Premier Seeds Direct and SeeKay Horticultural Supplies.
-
thats for f1 hybrid seed, i buy 1 packet a year sow all 4 sell 3 plants at £1 each and grow 1 on, theyre so vigorous youll only ever need 1 plant, last year i picked all the cues i needed, about 2 a week from june till november, well worth the money.
Glad about that as still only 1 growing so given up on the other 3