Seed intelligence
Seeds don’t grow on packets.
They grow in places.
Seedhaus connects what a seed company sold with what happened when somebody grew it. Season by season that builds a picture of how each variety behaves in different places, and the advice a gardener gets can start to fit their own garden.
Variety
Leek ‘Musselburgh’
Allium porrum
The packet says “Sow March to April”
Place
Season
Packet
as printed
Solid, March and April, and the same everywhere.
Penzance
50.1°N
Outline, February to May.
Shrewsbury
52.7°N
Outline, March to May.
Thurso
58.6°N
Outline, April to June.
The packet
One sowing window has to do for everybody.
A packet might say sow March to April. That’s about right for a lot of gardens, and the company that printed it knows how rough a figure it is, because there has rarely been anything better to go on. A gardener in Penzance and a gardener in Thurso are the length of Britain apart, growing through very different springs, and the packet says the same thing to both.
Most of us keep the empty packet anyway, since the sowing dates are on the back and it’s still the handiest place to look them up. Latitude is only part of it, too. Altitude, shelter and how near you are to the sea pull the dates about as much, and a late frost inland can undo a fortnight’s head start. What happened after the seed went into the ground has traditionally been hard to collect, so the advice has stayed roughly where it was.
Thurso 58.6°N
8.5° of latitude, roughly the length of Britain
Penzance 50.1°N
How it works
The seed already knows what it is. We find out how it did.
A few weeks after an order goes out, at about the point the seed ought to be doing something, Seedhaus asks the person who bought it how it’s getting on. The answer is kept against the variety that was in the packet and the delivery it came from.
One answer on its own doesn’t tell you much. It might have been the weather, or slugs, or ground that was still too cold. As answers build up over a season, and then over several, differences start to show that no single garden could: a variety that came through a wet April better than the ones around it, or a delivery that disappointed a handful of people at about the same time.
Customers are asked already, and the answers come back.
Season
-
Season one
- Known seed
- Real garden
- Growing outcome
- Better understanding
- Better guidance
-
Season two
-
Season three
-
Season four
-
Season five
Variety, place and season
Why does the same seed behave so differently?
Three things account for a good deal of it.
Variety
Leek ‘Musselburgh’
Allium porrum. The packet says “Sow March to April”.
Place
Season
Packet
as printed
Solid, March and April, and the same everywhere.
Penzance
50.1°N
Outline, February to May.
Shrewsbury
52.7°N
Outline, March to May.
Thurso
58.6°N
Outline, April to June.
Your garden
Nothing drawn yet.
Variety matters
Two tomato varieties growing side by side can behave quite differently, and a packet has no way of showing it. Seedhaus keeps every answer against the variety that was sown, rather than filing it under tomato.
Place matters
Two plots on the same allotment site can be a fortnight apart in spring, depending on which way they face and where the frost sits. A variety that gets away quickly in one part of the country can sulk for weeks somewhere colder or wetter.
Seasons matter too
Sowing dates are written for an average year, and we all know there’s no such thing as a normal British spring. One year brings a dry May, the next a late frost and ground still wet in June. The years count as much as the places.
Where the data starts
It helps a great deal to know what was in the packet.
A lot of gardening records start with somebody typing in what they think they planted. Seedhaus comes at it from further back. A delivery arrives at a seed company, gets booked in, packed, labelled and sent out, so the variety is whatever was packed, from whichever delivery, and an answer can be traced back to it.
Seedhaus came out of a seed company. We pack our own seed on it, print our own passports on it and send our own customers the same question, and most of what’s on this page was worked out that way.
None of it asks anything extra of the packing bench. The record is made by packing the order, and the question goes out on its own.
- Deliveries and lots
- Batch traceability
- Packing and labelling
- Plant passports
- Stock and inventory
- Orders and dispatch
The record
Delivery booked in26-045-002
Packed and labelledfrom that delivery
BackwardsTraced to the delivery, because the rules ask for it.
Leek ‘Musselburgh’
“Sow March to April”
BATCH26-045-002
UK Plant Passport
- A
- Allium porrum
- B
- GB + your operator number
- C
- 26-045-002
- D
- Country of origin
GB RULES AND STANDARDS - SS
ForwardsThe same record, followed on to the garden.
Sown from26-045-002
How did it do?
For seed companies
The sale does not have to be the end of it.
You pack a variety, you post it, and that’s usually the last you hear of it. A poor delivery tends to surface late, as a review months afterwards or as next year’s orders quietly not arriving.
Hear about it while the season is on
Answers come back through the season, so a problem with one delivery has a chance of reaching you while there’s still something you can do about it.
Order on more than sales figures
Seed is often ordered for next year before this year’s customers have picked anything. What sold well and what grew well are different lists, and the second has been the harder one to see.
Give advice that fits the garden
As more people say how a variety did, the guidance you give a customer can reflect more about where they’re actually growing.
Run the operation in one place
Stock, packing, labels, passports and orders sit together, in software written for the way a seed company works.
Your records stay yours, and you can export them.
For the gardener
Was it me, or was it the seed?
Most of us have asked it, usually in May. For a lot of crops you get one proper go a year, so a row that does nothing in April can’t be run again in July to find out what went wrong. Seed sown into cold ground mostly doesn’t die, either. It sits there and comes up three weeks after you’d given up on it, often through the second row you sowed on top.
The sowing window on a packet is written for a whole country. As answers come in from people growing the same variety, the advice you get can start to reflect what has happened in gardens like yours. It won’t tell you what the weather is going to do this year. What it can get better at, season by season, is what has tended to happen where you are.
The varieties you have bought, in one place
Every variety you have ordered, with when to sow it and roughly when to expect a first picking. There’s nothing to sign up for; it comes with the order.
One question, at about the right time
It arrives when a packet should be doing something and takes about ten seconds. As more people answer, it gets easier to tell whether it was just you or the way the season went for everybody.
You decide where it goes
Seedhaus is being built so your seed list can go into a gardening app you already use, if that suits you. Your name, address and email stay where they are, and you can stop at any point.
Nothing here asks you to keep a diary. One honest answer a few times a year is plenty.
The longer view
Every season makes it better.
A variety might be sown in a few thousand gardens up and down the country in a single spring, and the more of those we hear about, the better the picture of that variety gets. It builds a season at a time, which is the only speed it can build at.
A variety is usually trialled on a handful of trial grounds and then sold into every kind of garden there is, which is a long way from where it was tested. Seed companies already keep the records to trace a packet back to its delivery, because the rules ask them to, and Seedhaus uses the same records to follow it forward.
Britain first. It is a small country with a great deal of weather in it, and there is plenty here to be getting on with.
Come and have a look.
If you sell seed, grow it, or would like to know what your varieties do once they leave you, we’d be glad to hear from you. It’s easier to show than to describe, so we’d rather walk you through it.
Leave a few details and we’ll get back to you. Nothing is passed on to anybody else.