June

Beetroot 'Bona' is a mid to late season variety that produces fabulous smooth, round roots with a dark skin and intense red flesh. This top quality variety has a deliciously sweet flavour that can be enjoyed as mature roots or as tasty ‘baby beets’. Delicious whether they are eaten hot or cold, cooked or pickled.

Beetroot 'Boston' is an excellent improved Boltardy selection. The round roots have a smooth skin and good internal colour and texture. Slow bolting, it is ideal for early sowings, this maincrop variety can be sown from early March right through to late August.

Detroit 2 Crimson Globe or Rote Ruben is a popular improved Detroit globe beetroot. It is a classic, main-crop beetroot which produces excellent quality, smooth skinned beets with strong skin and ox-blood flesh colour. It is recommended as a good cultivar to use for succession sowings.

Golden Beetroots have a great mild taste and a slightly honeyed taste. They can be lifted young or left to mature. Sown March to July for harvesting June to December, they don’t dye other ingredients or stain the dishes, after all, at the end of a long work day, the last thing you want to do is get your hands dirty.

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.

“The old Egyptian turnip or flat-rooted beetroot has the best flavour but is scarce.” Bob Flowerdew. Beetroot 'Flat of Egypt’ is a very old heritage variety that produces smooth skinned roots, often heart-shaped, with a deep red, tender and flavoursome flesh.

Early Purple Sprouting Broccoli has been selected for its hardiness and flavour. Heavy cropping it has good quality spears that can be harvested over many weeks. It is one of the most flavoursome of vegetables, standing beside asparagus and globe artichokes. Sweet and delicate, it melts in the mouth.

Extra-Early Purple Sprouting 'Rudolph' is bred to perform well in the September to February period but is at its best from November to February. With medium to large, deep purple, succulent spears that have outstanding flavour, team with Cardinal for a longer harvest period.

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 is very easy to grow and will produce a number of good-size side shoots once the initial head is harvested.

If more people tasted home grown Purple Sprouting Broccoli they would surely cultivate it. You would see it on London balconies, in country herbaceous borders and standing proud in every kitchen garden in the land. Late Purple Sprouting Broccoli follows on from Early Sprouting.

Kailan is a fantastic vegetable chimera - the florets of broccoli, the stems of asparagus, and leaves like tender collard greens. 'Kichi' is a uniform variety with large blue green waxy leaves and excellent stem and bud eating quality. It has a mild flavour and, best of all can be harvested in only eight weeks.

Flourishing famously in Mediterranean and Chinese cultures, elsewhere Raab is still a bit of a curiosity. Easy and fast growing, it can be useful as it comes ready when ordinary broccoli isn't available, but this isn't just a replacement for broccoli, it is a great vegetable in its own right.

A vast improvement on the older varieties. Calabrese Ironman F1 possesses the usual advantages of a hybrid - vigorous habit with excellent uniformity and high yields of larger than normal heads. Producing excellent quality, uniform dense heads and a very good dome shape. Harvest late June to November.