Choosing Greenhouse Fruit Seeds

I can't possibly list all the fruit and vegetable seeds that we will be ordering this year in a blog post. If you are curious and want to see our full list of choices, then it can be found here.

Instead I'm going to restrict myself to writing about just a selection  starting with the  greenhouse fruit (some of which may also be tried outdoors). 

Let's go alphabetically and start with aubergines. We don't really have much success with aubergines. The plants grow, they produce flowers and often that is about it. Sometimes they manage to set mini fruitlets but we have only rarely ended up with a fruit that we can use.

We usually grow the plants in our garden greenhouse and maybe more attention is paid to the tomatoes than anything else. Maybe the tomatoes shade them out. Whatever the reason we refuse to give up. This year we are trying a mini aubergine variety called Jackpot from Plants of Distinction. It claims to be a prolific cropper - we will see!

Next choice is a melon. We have tried melons in the past and even managed to harvest a couple of fruits.

I know they were on the small side but they were perfectly formed. Anyway we're having another try with a variety called Alvaro also from Plants of Distinction. It claims to be the only melon to ripen outdoors in the UK. Again we will see - if we have a repeat of last year it will be struggling.

Then we haven chosen four varieties of Sweet Peppers. (We do have some freebie chilli seeds Mark but will we dare plant any?) We have grown the long thin varieties for a few years and these usually produce a reasonable quantity of fruits - that was until last year.

This year's choices all from Plants of Distinction includes Jimmy Nardello - the red one pictured above but we are adding three new choices, King of the North which claims to be 'arguably the best cool season cropper' - stand-by for a heatwave next year, Palladio, a long thin yellow pepper (apparently they are called bulls' horn pepper) which is supposed to be exceptionally high yielding and Solero a mini pepper which is supposed to be happy in a 9" (23cm) pot.

Then we have along list of eight varieties of tomato. Some are old reliable favourites - Alicante, Amish Gold and Gardeners' Delight but there are also some newbies. These are all from Plants of Distiction. Firstly a beefsteak variety, Pink Wonder which is supposed to be equally at home indoors or outdoors. Next is Sioux, this is said to be prolific and was bred in 1944 for extremes of climate. The final choice is Brandy Boy which is supposed to be an improvement on Brandywine giving five times more fruit! When we have grown Brandywine in the past we have ended up with some monster fruit as shown in this post.

I'm just hoping that the tomatoes actually ripen when they should next year!

Our complete vegetable and fruit seed list including suppliers is available here.

Copyright: Original post from Our Plot at Green Lane Allotments http://glallotments.blogspot.co.uk/ author S Garrett