It’s been a very relaxing holiday, and although I’ve taken advantage of a couple of gloriously sunny days (amidst all the rain) to tackle some overdue gardening tasks (pruning a wayward climbing rose and taming a rampant clematis), my mind hasn’t really started to contemplate my seed order for the year ahead. However, a timely thud by the front door this morning has changed all that. This is the latest offering from Chiltern Seeds, and the front cover alone has me salivating! It’s a Scabiosa stellata ‘Sternkugel’, and such a gorgeous annual does indeed deserve to be grown from seed.
The Chiltern Seeds catalog is always an entertaining read, packed full of fantastic cultivars to experiment with, but this year it seems to be peppered with even more tempting images than before. Deep purple lab lab beans vie for the most gorgeously velvety near-black image with a Sweet William called ‘Sooty’ (sadly with no reference to Sweep and Soo though), and Lunaria rediviva looks like a glorious perennial honesty with wonderfully pointed seed pods. I haven’t started on the rest of the catalog yet, let alone the accompanying veg book, but Chiltern’s will be making it difficult to hone my seed order this year.
So onwards for 2014. I can’t wait to start trying out new tomato varieties that I saw at Château de la Bourdaisière this summer (many of them available from Nicky’s Seeds) and there are so many ideas for annual flowers and decorative lettuces scattered around in my head that I’m already wondering how I’ll squeeze them all in. Ah, the joy of it all! I hope you have a great growing year ahead, experimenting with all the fruit, veg and flowers of your dreams. Time to get sowing again can’t come soon enough!