My first batch of seeds (from the Real Seed people) for next year arrived today, so it’s perhaps time to start thinking about a planting plan. The delivery arrived with two and a half pages of instructions for saving the seed of each variety I bought. Some don’t really sound viable if I’m honest. They claim that you need a minimum of 200 plants to save seed for sweet corn, for example. Others appear to be exceptionally promiscuous and will cross with any other variety nearby, or even not even necessarily nearby (they say cucumbers can cross with any other variety flowering at the same time within about a mile). There are quite a few that should be really easy to save though, and some that look fairly straightforward as long as I have plants to put somewhere that they won’t be in the way and can be left to go to seed the year after they’re planted.
The in-laws have someone coming tomorrow to do some tidying up of some of their bits of garden, so I will probably be on duty with the shredders (or a lawnmower for the straggly soft stuff) so it can all go into the compost.