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 8^th 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 7^th in the afternoon, or Sunday the 8^th 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

At long last, our seed garlic and potato onions are ready for sale! We apologise for the delay and for the fact that our shallots are still curing, so watch this space, they will come available soon, we just need to get them a bit drier before we send them out. We will probably announce their sale with our seed potatoes.
 
As so many folks have experienced add on effects from COVID-19, we have felt it most acutely this season with a lack of help in the seed gardens! Our intern from Italy who had pre-booked, was of course unable to get in the country. We were able to make it through spring with some lovely wwoofers, but this channel seems to be going dry as the travellers slowly head home when their visas expire. And to top it off, my beautiful Ma, who comes each summer to live with us is stuck in the USA in her singular bubble. I am sure our story is not unique. Just letting everyone know that we are down the best babysitter we got and with no interns or wwoofers our labour force is paired back. Please do get in touch if you, or someone you know may be interested in an internship or part -time work.
 
This lack of help in the garden has had a positive side. We have hired our first ever employee, our amazing Administrative Assistant Rebecca Perez. I am not sure how we would have been able to get through this season without all of her help! I hope you have all found it okay to be receiving emails from someone other than me. Rebecca, Roddy and I are always in close communication, she is a lifesaver! I am certainly enjoying this new freedom and have more time in the garden then I have had since our daughter was born. I am making more connections and finding better ways to do things here, on this land. And I am remembering, I really like gardening, and I am actually rather good at it 😊
 
We know many of you have been waiting for our seed garlic to come available on our website, and the moment is now. We are able to offer for sale our early varieties and the elephant garlic. We successfully grew and have gotten a crop of all our main crop cultivars, although the amount we grew is still too small for commercial sale. We hope to have Rocambole, Henry’s Soft Top and Takahue available again in the future, but the Early Pearl and Early Purple specifically are holding their own better with the rust. We had a good year with garlic in general, and we feel confident the strategies we have put in place to produce a crop in the presence of rust are effective. To see what we have been doing check out our newsletter from last year. We have learned a lot along the way, and want to share this knowledge so everyone may still be able to succeed with their garlic crop!

Our Early Pearl 1st grade is available by the bulb.

We are offering a 2nd grade Early Pearl 3 pack this year.

Our Early Purple 1st grade is still offered by the bulb.

We also have an Early Purple 2nd grade 3 pack available.