Country Mouse

Sowing the seeds

THE seed catalogues I ordered last month are starting to arrive and are providing the sort of thrill I experienced as a boy when visiting the sweet shop with a shilling in my pocket. In those days, I could get four fruit salads for a penny and, with extremely diligent financial planning, my shilling could go a long way—a Mars Bar was threepence.

The planning around seed purchasing is less numerically taxing—a packet of ‘Poloneza’ radishes, for instance, contains 1,000 seeds and costs £1.55. If they last, I will have more than enough to grow for several years. However, the challenge is space: even before a single thing has been planted, my vegetable garden is already looking too small.

The catalogues now are full of circles highlighting must buys, yet how many different types of strawberry do I really need? How will I organise the serried ranks of vegetables, so that they do not all need harvesting just as we are spending that week in Cornwall in July?

In the end, it doesn’t matter; it has fired my imagination and I am getting as excited as a little boy with a shiny coin in his pocket.