You know that feeling – when you go round to your friends’ homes mid-summer and see their thriving tomato plants and wish you had thought to plant some. Well this year, you can be that friend! But like everything relating to plants, having a thriving vegetable garden requires forward planning, and now is the time to start sowing your seeds.

One mistake that people often make is to try to separate different vegetables. But in fact you’ll notice that in many of our plant sets there are a number of different vegetables planted near each other in the same bed. Cross-planting, or polyculture, has a number of advantages including attracting pollinators, deterring pests and event preventing the spread of weeds.  It can also help to create a more attractive vegetable garden with plants of different heights. For example:

• Medium: tomatoes and bean peas
• Low: sorrel, cabbage, wild strawberries, courgettes, nasturtium, sweet potatoes.
• Background planting (tall plants): corn, artichokes, fennel, sunflowers, dahlia, garlic.

So what should you be planting? Well, check out our handy to-do list below. And then get going – you’ve got a lot of work to do!

Outdoors

• Peas (for August crop)
• Globe Artichokes( to harvest in August-September)
• Asparagus
• Broad beans
• Swiss chard and perpetual spinach
• Beetroot
• Broccoli
• Brussel sprouts
• Cabbage
• Carrots
• Cauliflower
• Endive
• Kale
• Kohlrabi
• Leek
• Lettuce
• Onions
• Parsnips
• Potatoes
• Radishes
• Salsify (also known as oyster plant)
• Spinach
• Turnip

Indoors

• Tomatoes
• French beans
• Peppers
• Cucumbers
• Courgettes
• Sweetcorn
• Runner beans
• Celery

Check out our great how-to guides on growing vegetables. You can also click on the links below to buy seeds from our online shop.