Top seeds and wild cards

Now’s your chance, and you will enjoy a bit of a laugh at the same time. And let’s face it, a little bit of humour never goes astray, especially in the sometimes sedate world of the garden.

So a belated happy new year and a large thank-you to Ulverston’s Chiltern Seeds for their latest vegetable catalogue – The Veg Book 2012.

It’s packed with all the usual veg, from broad beans to tomatoes, but it also includes a host of the more unusual (including the three mentioned earlier) – and plenty of funny cartoons to help raise a smile as well as a plant.

Papalo, in case you want to know, is a herb from California where it’s used in the same way as coriander, although it has a hint of lime about it. And mamang could just as easily be grown for its lovely white or purple flowers as for its leaves, which are used for flavouring soups and stews.

For the really unusual (and slightly quirky) for £2.03 you can get a packet of Hungarian blue breadseed poppy seed. The plant has lovely lilac flowers, but it’s the seeds which make the difference. Let the pods dry out and then sprinkle the seeds on top of bread buns and loaves.

Or grow some perilla, the red form of which has ornamental leaves a bit like those of a coleus. They taste of cinnamon and can be used to flavour raw fish (very popular in Japan and among upperwardly mobile young Brits) and pickles.

This is the sixth year that Chiltern Seeds have published a catalogue devoted solely to vegetables and herbs. The cartoons, by Jacqueline Sinclair, make it as entertaining as it is informative, and as the majority of vegetable seeds don’t need to be sown for several weeks, there’s plenty of time to get hold of a copy.

Chiltern Seeds, 01229 581137. www.chiltern seeds.co.uk are based at Bortree Stile, Ulverston, Cumbria LA12 7PB.