About Us

A Brief History

We are keen gardeners with a couple of small greenhouses, a polytunnel and various raised beds. We grow vegetables and fruit (not enough to be considered self-sufficient but enough to keep us amused). A few years ago, my children bought me a selection of tomatoes seeds for Christmas and I was hooked. I had never realised that there were so many different varieties of tomato of different sizes and colours. I thought about selectively breeding them but this seemed more complicated than I could manage and there were enough people out there doing just than that I decided I would try to identify my favourite 20 varieties. To do so meant that I needed to grow 30 or so different varieties each year and decide which ones I liked best.

I started collecting seeds from a number of commercial suppliers and growing them. The problem was that my amount of growing space was fairly limited, so I would buy a packet of seeds (with 20 or so seeds) and only want two or three plants, so the rest would get thrown away.

That seemed to be a waste to me so we thought about setting up a web based backyard nursery and growing tomato plug plants and selling them via eBay. For a couple of years it worked fine (stressful but we sold enough plants to break even). However, after a couple of years, postage became the main cost and the professional suppliers started doing the same and I couldn’t compete.

I decided to change tack and just write about my experiences and direct people to where they could buy seeds themselves. That’s what this website is about. My experience of growing (mainly tomatoes), where you can buy the seeds and other things (recipes, diseases, problems, etc.).

I hope you enjoy reading it and let me have some feedback.