Order Your Seeds in November, Not January

The garden’s mostly done. The beds are cut back or mulched, it’s dark by five, and the first seed catalogues have started turning up in the post. The usual move is to stack them by the kettle and get round to it after the holidays, some grey Sunday in January.

Order now instead. Not all of it, if you don’t want to, but the varieties you’d be upset to miss. There is no prize for waiting, and there are a couple of real costs.

The first is simple. Seed is a crop, and every company sells a harvest that was grown and cleaned months ago. When a variety sells through, it doesn’t get restocked in March. It’s gone until the next one comes in. The varieties that tend to run short are the ones everybody wants: the well-reviewed tomato, the pepper someone praised online in August, the bean with a story. And the small seed companies, the family-run ones that grow a lot of their own seed and carry the odd regional varieties, often have only a modest amount of each. By late winter it’s normal to find “sold out” next to a good share of the things you’d circled.

I learned this the boring way. For years I did my seed order in the second week of January, with the catalogue on my knees and a list I’d been building in my head since September. One year I got to a particular paste tomato I’d grown three summers running and it was sold out. So was my second choice. I ended up with something the website suggested instead, which was fine, and fine is not why anyone grows their own tomatoes.

The rush is after New Year

Think about when everyone else does this. A lot of us sit down with the catalogues right after the holidays, when the garden feels furthest away and planning it feels best. That’s when orders pile in, when dispatch can slow down, and when the things you wanted are being bought by everyone with the same idea.

In November you’re early. The new catalogue has just been printed, so everything in it is in stock, and the people packing orders aren’t buried yet. A November order usually costs no more than a January one. The seed will keep perfectly well in a cool drawer until you need it.

Your first sowing is closer than it feels

This is the part that catches people. The spring garden doesn’t start in spring. Onions and leeks from seed go in under lights in late winter in a lot of places, about ten to twelve weeks before the last frost, and the slow peppers aren’t far behind them. For a lot of gardens that’s January or February. If your order goes in mid-January and then sits in a backlog, the first packets you need can arrive after the date you needed them.

Count back from your own last frost date and you’ll see it. The calendar for seed starting runs months ahead of the calendar for planting out, and it’s easy to miss because it falls in the dead of winter.

You remember this year better now than you will in January

This is the one I care most about, and it’s the reason the November order is also the cheaper one.

Right now you still know which tomato split every time it rained, and which lettuce bolted the first warm week in May. You know that nobody ate the kohlrabi. You know you grew twice as much zucchini as anyone wanted and not nearly enough green beans. In two months that turns into a vague feeling that “it was a good year”, and you’ll buy the same packets again, plus a few new ones because the photos were nice.

A grocery-bill garden is won or lost on this. The crops that save you real money are the ones you’d otherwise buy every week and actually eat, grown in quantities you’ll use. A seed order made from fresh memory leans toward those. One made in January leans toward the catalogue.

So before you order, spend twenty minutes writing down what worked and what didn’t. Variety names, roughly how much you got, whether you’d grow it again. Then tip out the seed box and check what you’ve already got, because most vegetable seed keeps for years and old seed is usually still fine. Keeping those notes somewhere that survives is half the job. The garden journal in Garden Planner Pro keeps each year’s notes alongside the last, which makes this a much quicker twenty minutes the second time round.

What can wait

Not everything needs to be bought now. Big seed companies keep the standard varieties of lettuce, radishes and bush beans in stock all year, and if you only grow the common stuff you won’t miss much by waiting. And plenty of the garden is better bought as plants in spring anyway. A few tomato or pepper seedlings from a good local nursery are a perfectly sensible way to fill a bed, especially in a first year or a busy one.

What can’t wait is anything specific. The variety you’ve grown for years and would hate to lose. Seed potatoes, onion sets and sweet potato slips from specialist growers, which are often reserved in winter and shipped at planting time, and which do sell out. The odd thing from a small company that nobody else carries.

Order those this week. The rest can sit by the kettle until January if you like, and you’ll enjoy those catalogues more knowing the important part is already done.