King Seeds And Egmont Seeds Seed Haul
Hello friends,
Over the course of this winter I bought seeds from both Kings Seeds and Egmont Seeds, for growing vegetables, herbs, and flowers in the garden this growing season.
First up are the seeds from Kings Seeds, where I bought carrot, spinach, onion, and rocket vegetable seeds for the vegetable garden this spring. I also got a bunch of herb seed varieties including, parsley, feverfew, chamomile, catnip, catgrass, calendula, and basil seeds. I also bought a few flower seeds including zinnia, cosmos, yarrow, and dwarf lupin.
From Egmont Seeds I bought a pile of seeds including cucumber, capsicum, chickpea, stevia, thyme, and lavender, along with a bunch of new pansy varieties after I fell victim to the pansy mania hitting the world at present. Egmont seeds have a great range of pansy seeds available, with lots of varieties with frills and pretty colours that I haven't seen before.
I can't wait to see the plants that grow from all these seeds in the coming spring and summer, and then the harvests and flowers I will get from them...
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
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Harvesting My Own Sugar Beet Seeds
Hello friends,
Back in the Winter of 2024 I was perusing the Kings Seeds website looking for seed packets to buy for the upcoming spring season. One of the packets I was looking to purchase was Sugar Beet seeds, which Kings Seeds had supplied for many years. As you may have seen in my blog, I grow Sugar Beet plants as a source of my own sugar. You can read all about my Sugar Beet extraction method in this blog post from 2023.
Except there wasn't any Sugar Beet seed packets available on their website. So I contacted Kings Seeds and asked them if they were going to be selling Sugar Beet seeds that year, and they told me they were no longer going to be stocking them. I had a little panic, but then went online to see if anyone else in New Zealand was selling Sugar Beet seeds for the home gardener. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any Sugar Beet seed suppliers, and all of the big commercial seed companies were only selling fodder beet for farmers.
So now I was panicking big time. All I had left was one packet of Sugar Beet seeds, and it was only half full. The expiry date had run out as well, and Sugar Beet are biennial, which meant that seed harvesting from any plants was two years away.
Determined not to give up, in Spring I direct sowed all the Sugar Beet seeds I had left, and impatiently waited for them to germinate. I managed to get a small number of seedlings dotted around the vegetable garden, with each plant growing under slightly different conditions, with the hope that some of the plants would survive the two year wait to collect my own Sugar Beet seeds.
A number of Sugar Beet plants managed to survive the first growing season, including a very cold winter with -6˚C frosts, and then started growing again in their second year. The Sugar Beet plants began bolting over summer, and started flowering in February of 2025. By this time the plants were very tall, about 1.5 m high, and were prone to toppling over in the wind. A number of plant supports were erected to keep the plants upright until the Sugar Beet seeds were ready to be harvested.
In late March 2025 it was finally time to start harvesting the Sugar Beet seeds, and I made the decision to harvest them by hand, picking off each of the seeds one by one as they became brown. This long and drawn out period of harvesting the seeds took around two months, and then once they were nice and dry, I stored them away over this winter.
Now I have my own Sugar Beet seeds to use year by year to make my own sugar, and to collect my own seed in Autumn, whenever I need to. And I'm also pleased to say that I have enough Sugar Beet seeds at the moment to sell my excess to other home gardeners through my small business Hearth & Oak. If you are interested in buying some of my Sugar Beet seeds so you can grow your own Sugar Beet, and then collect your own Sugar Beet seeds in the years to come, please follow this Sugar Beet seed packet link to my Felt Store.
I had not intended to use this blog commercially to sell anything through my small business Hearth & Oak, but the thought of home gardeners in New Zealand not having access to Sugar Beet seeds and plants in the coming years, was too much to bear. Rare and interesting seed varieties in New Zealand deserve to be saved, and this is my attempt at doing this for Sugar Beet at least. I hope that if you do buy some of my seeds, my blog posts on Sugar Beet will help you grow your own plants, and then collect seeds, so that you can grow Sugar Beet every year.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
Sowing Seed Potatoes
Hello friends,
I've recently sown two of our potato varieties into the vegetable garden. At this time of the year I plant Rocket and Jersey Benne potato varieties, and that way we'll have new potatoes ready for Christmas day eating.
I dug two deep trenches side by side, with the Rocket on the right,and the Jersey Benne on the left. This way the Rocket and Jersey Benny potatoes both get good light, and don't fight for sunlight. Rocket potatoes only need 60 days before they're ready to harvest, and they grow quite fast. Jersey Benne on the other hand require 60 - 90 days before they are ready to harvest.
In a couple of week's I'll plant the rest of my potato varieties into the garden, Ilam Hardy and Haylo. They have longer days until harvest, and will be ready to be dug up in January. We use these varieties for roast potatoes, and for making gnocchi.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky.
Early Spring Vegetable Garden Update
Hello friends,
I just wanted to update you on what's been happening in the vegetable garden over winter.
The garlic I planted in late autumn has been growing well, and I even got a couple of surprise garlic plants after we forgot to harvest some bulbs last summer.
The onions and spring onions have also been growing well, and I've been harvesting our spring onions as we need to use them in recipes.
The sugar beet plants I'm growing to harvest for seed are also growing well, and I hope they'll soon send up flower buds.
And finally, I sowed peas seeds direct a couple of weeks ago as well. And as a bonus I finally have a use for the old wooden trellis I took down off the woodshed last autumn while we were painting it.
The next thing to direct plant into the ground is our seed potato varieties, but first I need to prep the garden bed they're going into.
Have a wonderful day
Julie-Ann
Want to discuss my post? Feel free to chat with me on Instagram or Mastodon or Bluesky
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