Large and tasty heads of green buds have made Green Globe Britain's most popular variety of Artichoke. This old heirloom variety is a great delicacy, steam or boil and serve with melted lemon butter or hollandaise sauce.

Mary Washington is one of the most popular of all heirloom asparagus varieties and is an excellent choice for the garden. The delicious spears are tender, thick, heavy and straight and are of a rich dark green colour with a purple tinge. Produces uniform spears and a heavy yield.

Black Beauty was introduced about 1910 and has long been popular with home gardeners. An excellent quality variety, early to mature it gives and abundant crop of tasty fruits that are clear of the ground. Sturdy plants produce high yields of glossy, purple-black, pear-shaped fruit.

Aquadulce is highly prolific and easy to grow, and remains one of the most delicious in terms of flavour and texture. It can be sown anytime from autumn until spring and is universally recognised as being best hardy broad bean for an autumn sowing. It establishes quickly and will produce a very early crop.

Blue Lake is a classic choice for early beans of highest quality eating. A wonderfully prolific climbing bean that does well even in adverse weather, the dark green pods remain stringless and fibreless at all stages of growth. They are tender and rich, and filled with white seeds that are of incomparable flavour.

Chioggia or Barabietola di Chioggia is a globe-shaped heirloom Italian variety. With a rosy orange-pink outer skin and a distinctive dartboard pattern when cut, it is sometimes known as Bull’s Eye Beet or Candy Stripe Beet. Bands of white flesh alternate with bands of pink or rosy red.

Easy and fast growing, ready in just 60 days, it can be useful as it comes ready when ordinary broccoli isn't available and is great as a very early spring crop in a polytunnel. But this isn't just a replacement for broccoli, it is a great vegetable in its own right!

Introduced to the seed trade between 1914-1918. This lovely, old fashioned Broccoli variety is a very disease resistant, very hardy and very prolific producer of large dark green heads. Italian Green Sprouting Broccoli will produce a number of good-size side shoots once the initial head is harvested.

Golden Acre is an excellent early summer variety ball head cabbage. With small to medium-sized green solid heads on compact plants. Ideal for confined areas, it can be grown at 30cm spacings. This Heritage variety gives excellent small heads of first rate quality and flavour.

January King, although a French heirloom, is also considered to be a traditional British cabbage and one of the best varieties for winter use. They are well adapted, withstanding frost and winter rain and remain crisp and crunchy with excellent colour.

Savoy cabbage ‘Ormskirk’ is a very old heritage variety, it gives a fine head of cabbage, solid in the centre with deep blue-green outer crinkly leaves and a pale green centre. It matures from November and can be harvested through to March and beyond.

Cabbage ‘Red Drumhead’ is a popular deep red heirloom variety which produces densely packed leafy heads with dark red, solid hearts in late summer through to Christmas. This old hardy variety from the 1860s is easy to grow, stores well and is remarkably tasty and sweet.