The Occasional Gardener: Can't pass a garden shop without nipping in for a quick fix? Feed your habit by mail order, writes Sarah Marriott
My name is Sarah and I buy seeds. I can't help it. Every time I see seeds for sale, I simply get carried away. It doesn't matter that I have enough seeds to grow food for several hungry families for the next five years, I can't pass a garden shop without nipping in for a packet.
"Just the one," I tell my partner. "I won't be a minute." Twenty minutes later, I emerge clutching a bulging brown paper bag. Having suffered a childhood of cold, wet Sunday mornings trailing around the Botanic Gardens after his father, he has always refused to step foot inside a gardening shop and now refuses to even wait outside one.
So my new secret vice is mail order - which turns out to be even better. I've just spent 30 minutes on the phone ordering seed catalogues for 2004. It's like a reformed alcoholic booking a booze cruise - putting yourself in the way of temptation is almost bound to lead to downfall.
It's hard to believe that over 70 varieties of potatoes are available from a catalogue but you can't buy more than seven kinds from a multinational supermarket. The Thompson and Morgan potato catalogue for 2004 makes my mouth water - I yearn for Mr Little's Yethom Gypsy for its name alone - but unfortunately T&M doesn't deliver seed potatoes outside Britain.
Closer to home, the Organic Centre's seed catalogue arrived recently. It lists 30 kinds of lettuce seed, including several for growing over the winter. I love the sound of Marvel of Four Seasons - "an heirloom variety from the 1880s . . . delicious" - but have to draw the line at a packet containing 450 seeds (even if it only costs €1.80) because I still have thousands of lettuce seeds which never got used up last summer.
And that wasn't because I didn't get around to sowing them - I sowed lettuce every fortnight from June to September and will still be picking a couple of varieties in my (unheated, doorless) polytunnel on Christmas Day.
The Organic Centre also offers 44 different herbs (from anise and lime basil to echinacea, sweet cicely, Italian parsley and wormwood); 15 kinds of oriental greens, a plant called oca, which is eaten like a potato in the Andes; and mashua, a climbing nasturtium with edible tubers (the Inca emperors apparently gave it to their soldiers as a libido suppressant, so I might give that one a miss).
I'm tempted by all 11 kinds of willow cuttings - to create a living willow structure - but have managed to control myself so far.
But tomatoes are another story. I've just ordered Simply Vegetables, a new catalogue from Plants of Distinction which features over 60 modern and heirloom tomatoes. I'm a sucker for tomato seeds and already have 10 varieties for next year, including the yellow-and-red striped Tigerella; a yellow pear-shaped one called, surprisingly, Yellow Pear; a yellow-and-green striped Green Grape; something called Mexican midget from Irish Seedsavers and something huge called Marmande I bought in Hungary.
And I couldn't resist ordering the Seeds of Italy catalogue to try to grow authentic basil, oregano and Italian plum tomatoes.
I'm not a huge fan of annual flowers - all that effort for only one year's blooms seems too labour-intensive - but I'm looking forward to receiving the catalogue from Sarah Raven's Cutting Garden. The British flower guru - who is like a gardener's Nigella Lawson - started out growing flowers for the house but has gone onto growing veggies too.
She recommends sowing seeds for hardy perennials in early winter - like oriental poppies, loosestrife and sweet peas as well as beans and peas - so I can at least use up some seeds now, to make space for all those to arrive in the mail any day now.