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  1. Order NOW before we close for Christmas 🎄

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    Setha Roddy and River Rose of Sethas Seeds NZ

     

    Season's Greetings!


    What a lovely spring we have had! For Hawke’s Bay we have had the wettest spring in our memory. It has been a dream for establishing all the seed crops and they are really pumping. Hoping everyone else around the country has had such a productive start to the season!?

    We wanted to touch base for a few reasons. One to let you know we have harvested a delightful crop of our Early garlics and we will be offering some seed for sale in the new year. As our crop was completely rust free, we really think we have cracked this growing in the presence of rust and we will aim to hold back more seed than we have done recently to try to boost our production up closer to what we used to grow pre-rust. We are letting you all know now that you may want to hold back more of your own seed this year, especially for our Early Purple variety, as we will not have quite as much available. So sorry for the inconvenience, but this hopefully means we will have even more available next year!

    Secondly, we are taking a wee break! We always shut our office doors over Christmas and New Year. Our website will still be live and you can place orders as normal, but we will not be dispatching or answering emails until we open back up in the New Year. Our holiday will be from December 21st 2021 – January 10th 2022. So, our last send out day for dispatch is 16th December 2021.

    We can also process Gift Vouchers this last week which can be a great gift idea for a gardener you can’t quite decide what to give them. We can offer the PDF voucher for you to print from home too, which insures you will have it in time 😊

    Thirdly, we want to give a warm welcome to our newest edition to the Setha’s Seeds team. Kiersten-Anna joined us in October working part time in our seed gardens! We are overjoyed to have her on board and the gardens are really loving some regular human attention! It is thanks to her that our spring has been such a smooth process. We are so grateful!

    We hope you all enjoy the festive season as best you can at the end of a hard year for New Zealand and the world at large. As January rolls in do remember it is time to think about your winter garden! Hard to imagine I know. We sow all our winter veggies in late January early February, usually on Moon opposition Saturn. Take time while you are lounging at the beach to dream up what you want to be eating this winter.

     
    Things to Sow in the Garden Now:

    Not much to get underway in December. Hopefully most of your garden is planted, mulched and ready to maintain and await bountiful harvests. We do a small sowing of succession crops like lettuces, beans (sorry we are sold out until we harvest this seasons!), Cucumbers Tendergreen, Deka or Port Albert or courgettes perhaps. 

    If you are light on companion flowers you could always sow some calendula, marigolds or cosmos now to see you through the season.

    Our Website is the best place to find the most up to date information on what we have available at all times during the year.

    We encourage orders through this medium, but of course we will still accept orders via email from our Catalogue or via the post using our printed order form. And stay tuned as our new catalogue and updated website will be out in July!
     
    And here is our   Order Form PDF  or Order Form Excel
     
    Email orders from the catalogue to: info@sethasseeds.co.nz

    Or post order forms to: Setha's Seeds PO Box 60, Tutira 4181

    And a reminder that selections of our seeds are also available from our Retail Outlets around the country. 
     

    Happy gardening,

    Roddy, Setha, Rebecca, Kiersten-Anna and River Rose

  2. YAMS!!! And time to get sowing seeds🌱

    Posted on

    NZ Yams - Sethas Seeds NZ

    Just a quick to note to let you all know our yams are out of the ground and ready for sale. Limited stock sorry to say. We find these heritage yams to be richer in flavour and sweetness from the ones available in supermarkets. Our favourite for flavour is Henry’s Yellow yam, but our three colours together are a lovely mix of earthy sweetness!  

    We are getting ready for spring and feeling like the heart of winter has passed. Although our focus is on the coming season, I am behind in the orchard and pressing on this week to get the last of the pruning done! Pruning is something I am still learning about and boy was I glad for a surprise visit last week from Kath Irvine of Edible Backyard. It is her pruning videos that guided me last year and this year I got to talk through with her what needed doing, before I did it. Thanks Kath! My 2 cents on pruning, it is something that comes easy to visual learners (lucky me!!!) and once you can imagine the shape you would like for the tree, then making the cuts seem easy!

    This week we are busy planning our seed sowing and garden layout for our coming season. The best all round day for seed sowing in August, is coming up this weekend! Moon opposition Saturn is on August 8th at 2:50pm. We have been using this constellation configuration for years now as our main seed sowing day each month. We have the times listed on our website for the whole year, so you can find out the best day each month to sow seeds. As with any celestial moment, the exact time is too intense energetically, so we sow seeds in the energies leading up to the moment. For this month we would recommend sowing seeds Saturday the 7th in the afternoon, or Sunday the 8th in the morning.

     
    Things to Sow in the Garden Now:

    Each season in August we sow our tomatoes, peppers and eggplant. These crops require a long growing season, and heat to germinate, we use a heat pad to keep the soil temperature stable at around 18-20⁰C. This can also be done near the woodstove or in your hot water cupboard.  Remember to bring your seeds out into the light as soon as they germinate.

    We also sow, brassicas like Broccoli De Cicco, Broccoli Raab, and faster growing Asian greens like Tat Soi, Mizuna as well as Rocket.   All our lettuces can be sown now along with some other salad greens like Spinach Bloomsdale, Salad Burnet and Wild Arugula.  It is also a good time to get Silverbeet Fordhook Giant established, as well as some companion flowers like Calendula, Poppies, Sweet Peas, Echinacea, Stock, Cornflower and Hollyhocks.


    Our Website is the best place to find the most up to date information on what we have available at all times during the year.

    We encourage orders through this medium, but of course we will still accept orders via email from our Catalogue or via the post using our printed order form. And stay tuned as our new catalogue and updated website will be out in July!
     
    And here is our   Order Form PDF  or Order Form Excel
     
    Email orders from the catalogue to: info@sethasseeds.co.nz

    Or post order forms to: Setha's Seeds PO Box 60, Tutira 4181

    And a reminder that selections of our seeds are also available from our Retail Outlets around the country. 
     

    Happy gardening,

    Roddy, Setha, Rebecca and River Rose

  3. 🌱 Seed Potatoes Now Available! 🌱

    Posted on

    Seed Potatoes NZ Heirloom varieties Sethas Seeds

    Limited stock of our Heritage Seed Potatoes!
    Hope everyone is enjoying their autumn gardens! We are definitely enjoying ours. Having a tunnel house in the mix means we still have fresh tomatoes, and peppers! Wow!!! And we have started eating our winter lettuces and picking greens. We only wish our broccolis had not been devoured by slugs! Yes, we even get caught out at times 😊 I was so keen to protect them from the cabbage white butterflies, so they were covered up. The ol’ out of sight out of mind got me again! When I peeled back the frost cloth about a month ago! Darn almost completely gone. So, I got right on it with night patrols and the chickens thanked me for the tasty treat! And added some ground egg shell and sand around each plant, and now, I am pleased to say, they are growing! Just a bit behind what they would have been had the slugs not had a munch.

    Seed potatoes are in stock on the website! I want to apologise in advance, as again, limited quantities available. We are so sorry for those of you who will miss out. This is a common problem we have been having with garlic, multiplying onions and seed potatoes as the demand is so high on these crops, but we cannot dedicate all of our time and garden space to them or we wouldn’t have all the other lovely seeds for sale. We hope to be able to produce more of these in future, but until more people are established here and helping in the gardens, we will have to grow what we can and keep the varieties going. We hope you understand.

    If living here on the farm and working in our seed gardens and being part of our land-based activities sounds like you and your families dream come true, then get in touch as we are looking at inviting more families to live here soon.
    We are listing today all of the stock we have. So even if a day after this newsletter goes out our website states, we are sold out some of the varieties, I am sorry to say this will be the truth.

    And remember the best thing you can do is to save some of your harvest of potatoes for next season! So, we wish you all bountiful harvests and some spare to hold back for the following year. 
     
    Things to Sow in the Garden Now:

    Broccoli Raab Spring Rapini, Spinach Bloomsdale, Orach Red, Coriander, and Salad Burnet. We sow lettuces each month to keep in constant supply, now we focus on the cooler season varieties like Winter, Lollo Rossa, Tree, and Speckled. Now is also a good time to get Asian greens like Mizuna, and Tat Soi in, as well as Rocket and Wild Arugula to keep in supply. As the cabbage white butterfly has mostly dissappeared now, no need to worry about them! We have removed our frost cloth protection and starting eating the first leaves from our leafy plantings in late summer.

    Don’t forget about flowers for the winter garden! Calendulas, Poppies, Lupins and Sweet Peas are frost hardy and beautiful!


    We often follow the biodynamic calendar and their recommendation to sow seeds at Moon Opposition Saturn, for these dates, check our website.

     

    Attention!! For Seed Potato Orders Only - YOU MUST USE THE WEBSITE TO PLACE YOUR ORDER. We have such limited stock that it is likely that email orders will not get processed in time before the stock has sold out online. So do not delay and order online. For those who cannot use our website to place an order we are very sorry for this inconvenience and potential disappointment. Please email us at info@sethasseeds.co.nz with subject EMAIL ORDERS ONLY and we will see what we can do in the future. 

    Our Website is the best place to find the most up to date information on what we have available at all times during the year.

    We encourage orders through this medium, but of course we will still accept orders via email from our Catalogue or via the post using our printed order form. And stay tuned as our new catalogue and updated website will be out in July!
     
    And here is our   Order Form PDF  or Order Form Excel
     
    Email orders from the catalogue to: info@sethasseeds.co.nz

    Or post order forms to: Setha's Seeds PO Box 60, Tutira 4181

    And a reminder that selections of our seeds are also available from our Retail Outlets around the country. 
     

    Happy gardening,

    Roddy, Setha, Rebecca and River Rose

  4. 🌱 Happy Mother's Day & Shallot and Tree Onion Seed Available! 🌱

    Posted on

    NZ heirloom shallots and onions at Sethas Seeds

     

    Henry's Flowering Shallot and Egyptian Tree Onion Seed Now Available!
    We wish all our mother gardeners out there a very Happy Mother's Day! We will be celebrating here with a picnic and maybe some play and enjoying of our beautiful garden!

    And on a very timely topic, our multiplying onion seeds are ready for sale! Limited stock, so get in quick. We apologise for the delay. But we are just in time for planting! This is great news for you, as when you get yours in the post, plant them straight away!

    We are doing something a bit different this year. We are sending out bulbils with each bulb pack! We are also selling the bulbils separately too, as you get so many of these beauties with the harvest, and they work just like a bulb for seed! We do recommend planting the bulbils first in trays and transplanting out for best results.

    So what is a bulbil!? Bulbils are the top setting seeds on both the Egyptian Tree Onion and Henry's Flowering Shallot. These top setting seeds are why these crops are sometimes referred to as "walking onions." If left in the ground the tops will fall over and the seeds will grow and give the appearance that the crop is walking across the garden! This also makes them a great food forest crop as they will multiply on their own without needing to be harvested and replanted. For those wanting to grow them in a small garden fear not! These really work well in any situation. 

    An easier choice than growing onions from seed. I find onions to be hit or miss when grown from seed, depending on the season. With multiplying onions, they seem to produce well with a lot less effort! When planted in a well fertilised bed and mulched, pretty much nothing can go wrong. And did I mention how sweet they taste! They are delicious raw or cooked. We hope you love them as much as we do! 
     
     
    Things to Sow in the Garden Now:

    Broccoli Raab Spring Rapini, Spinach Bloomsdale, Orach Red, Coriander, and Salad Burnet. We sow lettuces each month to keep in constant supply, now we focus on the cooler season varieties like Winter, Lollo Rossa, Tree, and Speckled. Now is also a good time to get Asian greens like Mizuna, and Tat Soi in, as well as Rocket and Wild Arugula to keep in supply. As the cabbage white butterfly has mostly dissappeared now, no need to worry about them! We have removed our frost cloth protection and starting eating the first leaves from our leafy plantings in late summer.

    Don’t forget about flowers for the winter garden! Calendulas, Poppies, Lupins and Sweet Peas are frost hardy and beautiful!


    We often follow the biodynamic calendar and their recommendation to sow seeds at Moon Opposition Saturn, for these dates, check our website.


    Our Website is the best place to find the most up to date information on what we have available at all times during the year.

    We encourage orders through this medium, but of course we will still accept orders via email from our Catalogue or via the post using our printed order form. And stay tuned as our new catalogue and updated website will be out in July!
     
    And here is our   Order Form PDF  or Order Form Excel
     
    Email orders from the catalogue to: sethasseeds@outlook.com 

    Or post order forms to: Setha's Seeds PO Box 60, Tutira 4181

    And a reminder that selections of our seeds are also available from our Retail Outlets around the country. 
     

    Happy gardening,

    Roddy, Setha, Rebecca and River Rose