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Every February in Oxfordshire I sat down with a mug of tea, last year’s scribbled notes, and placed one big seed order for the whole season. Over twenty years that ritual taught me which companies send generous packets that germinate, which send pretty pictures wrapped around a dozen seeds, and which are worth paying double for when it matters. This is the honest version of that knowledge, including the cheap options the glossy catalogues would rather you did not know about.

The Quick Answer: Which Seed Company for What

For a beginner buying everyday vegetable seed, start with Thompson and Morgan for the core order and fill around it. Buy your everyday salads, roots and brassicas as cheaply as you can, because a 60p lettuce seed and a 3 pound lettuce seed grow the same lettuce. Spend properly in two places: anything F1 where breeding genuinely matters, like Brussels sprouts and parsnips, and anything unusual you cannot get elsewhere. Buy seed potatoes, onion sets and garlic from a proper supplier rather than a supermarket rack, because certified disease-free stock is the one corner never worth cutting.

Thompson and Morgan: The Biggest Range and the One I Use Most

Thompson and Morgan have been selling seed since 1855 and their vegetable seed range is the widest of any mainstream UK supplier, which is the practical reason they anchor my order: one basket, one delivery charge, and everything from parsnips to their excellent sweet pepper breeding in it. Germination has been reliable for me across two decades, and their constant sales mean the list price is rarely what you pay. The honest criticism is that some packets carry fewer seeds than the no-frills sellers give you for half the price, so I use them for range and reliability rather than bulk. They are also where I buy seed potatoes and onion sets, where certified stock matters more than pennies saved.

The Cheap End: Where Bargain Seeds Are Genuinely Fine

Here is the thing the catalogues will not tell you: for common vegetables, cheap seed is usually the same seed. Lettuce, radish, carrots, beetroot, peas and beans are commodity crops, often from the same Dutch and French wholesale growers whoever prints the packet. The no-frills online sellers on eBay and Amazon, the sort sending plain foil packets with triple the seed count for a third of the price, are how I buy everything I sow in quantity. The seasonal seed racks in discount stores and supermarkets are the same story each spring: perfectly good basic varieties for pennies. Check two things before buying cheap: a packed-for date on the packet, because seed viability falls with age, and that you are buying a named variety rather than a mystery mix.

Where cheap goes wrong is F1 hybrids and specialist crops. A genuine F1 Brussels sprout or parsnip costs real money to breed and produce, so a suspiciously cheap one is either old stock or not what the label claims. My rule: commodity crops as cheap as possible, F1s and anything unusual from a proper company, and never carry seed over more than a season or two. My guide to growing vegetables from seed covers how much a packet actually yields, which is the number that makes even expensive seed cheap per plant.

The Specialists Worth Paying More For

Two companies get my money at full price without complaint. Chiltern Seeds stock varieties nobody else carries, and their catalogue is half the pleasure of winter. Real Seeds in Wales sell only open-pollinated varieties, everything trialled on their own ground, with instructions for saving your own seed printed on the packet, which means one purchase can genuinely last you years. Neither pays me a penny for saying so, which is rather the point: a recommendations page you can trust has to include the companies that do not pay commission.

Buying Plants Instead of Seeds: When It Actually Makes Sense

Some years the windowsill fills up, life gets in the way, or a sowing simply fails, and buying young plants rescues the season. It costs more per plant but skips six weeks of propagation and the whole damping-off lottery. Gardening Direct specialise in exactly this: trays of beginner-friendly vegetable plants at sensible prices, delivered at planting time. For fruit, YouGarden’s soft fruit range is where I would point anyone starting a fruit corner, since bushes and canes are a plants purchase rather than a seed one anyway. For a first-year gardener growing easy vegetables, honestly, a tray of plants plus a packet of salad seed is a better start than a windowsill full of ambition.

How to Spot Good Value in a Seed Packet

Ignore the packet price and look at three numbers. First, seed count: a 3 pound packet of 500 carrot seeds beats a 1.50 packet of 150. Second, the packed-for year: this season’s seed germinates far better than old stock, and cheap sellers shifting last year’s stock are no bargain. Third, what one plant yields: a single courgette plant feeds a family, so a packet of five expensive F1 courgette seeds costing 3.50 works out at 70p per summer of courgettes, which is absurd value however you count it. Germination percentage is printed on the packet by law, and anything above 85 percent is fine for home growing.

When to Buy: The One Big Winter Order

Buy once, in late winter, for the whole season. January and February orders mean full stock lists before popular varieties sell out, time for the post, and seed in the tin before the first sowings of the vegetable year begin in March. Buying packet by packet through the year is how sowing windows get missed and how delivery charges quietly double the cost of your seed. I keep the order list pinned inside the seed tin from August onwards and add to it as the season shows me what ran out, which means the February order takes ten minutes and misses nothing. The UK vegetable planting calendar tells you what you will need and when.

Frequently Asked Questions

A Sensible Place to Start

If you are placing your first proper seed order, keep it to one basket and one cheap top-up. Order your core vegetables and anything F1 from Thompson and Morgan in late winter, add a handful of no-frills packets for the crops you sow by the row, and resist the catalogue’s siren pages until you know what you actually harvest and eat. Keep the packets in a tin in a cool room, write the year on each, and by your second season the order will write itself. The seed is the cheapest part of the whole hobby, and buying it well is a ten-minute job done once a year with a cup of tea.