Why Half the Seeds Your Mum Buys Never Come Up (and Why It Was Never Her Fault)

"Bad spring," my mother said. She was standing at the end of her vegetable bed, looking at a row with nothing in it. She'd done everything right. I just didn't know yet that it wasn't the weather.

That's how Diane Carter's letter to me began. Diane is 54, lives in London, and sees her mother in Shropshire about eight times a year. In over thirty years of growing and writing about vegetables, I've heard "bad spring" more times than I can count. I've said it myself.

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Two hours at the rack, and half a garden

Diane had gone with her mother to the garden centre that March. She stood behind her with the trolley while her mother read the back of packet after packet, pushed her glasses up, put most of them back. Diane counted, out of boredom. Forty packets read. Thirty put back. Ten in the trolley. One hour and fifty-five minutes.

In June, half the beds were bare. The carrot row was soil and a label. Three tomato plants out of twenty. Her mother didn't mention it until Diane did.

That night Diane took one of the empty carrot packets from her mother's kitchen drawer and read the back the way her mother had. It said: "Sow in spring." A picture of a carrot. "Packed for 2025." Nothing else.

What the packet doesn't tell her

Pick up any seed packet on a garden centre rack and turn it over. It will tell you what year it was packed for. That is usually all.

A packet can sit in a warehouse and then on a shelf for up to two years before it reaches her hand. She pays £2.50, reads the back, puts it down, picks up another. And when half of it never comes up, she thinks it's her.

For the rack, this isn't a mistake. It's how the rack works. The more separate guesses she has to make, the more packets it sells, every year, from scratch. And it's never one trip. She goes back in April when the first sowings fail, and again in May to fill the gaps. Two hours each time, for forty years. That is close to three hundred hours of a life spent standing at a seed rack.

We compared rack seed with seed that's tested every batch

I wanted to know whether the problem was the gardener or the seed. So I spoke to GardenPack, a family seed business that tests every batch it produces and prints the results on every packet.

Their team had already done the comparison I was going to ask for. They bought packets off ordinary garden centre racks and ran them through the same tests they run on their own seed. The results were so poor they ran the tests twice to be sure. Then they showed me what their own batches score.

GardenPack batch test results. Germination is how many seeds come up; germination energy is how many come up quickly and evenly; purity means no dust, chaff or weed seed; varietal purity means the carrot you sow is the carrot on the packet. Every batch is tested after it's produced.

A London banker, his parents' seed business, and one simple change

GardenPack was his parents' business. Their son was living in London, studying and then working in a bank, when he started to see what he would do differently.

Six years ago he bought the business from the family and rebuilt it the way he'd imagined. They still produce their own seed in their own factory, not a wholesaler's seed repackaged under someone else's logo.

And he changed one thing that matters more than anything else: nothing is packed in advance. The seed goes from the factory into the packet on the day the order comes in, not two years earlier. It usually arrives in three days, and never takes more than five.

Last Christmas, 40,000 boxes went out to families. They sold out two weeks before Christmas, and the next ones weren't ready until January. The seed is packed to order, but the boxes are made in small batches, and when they're gone, they're gone until the new year.

What's on the back of every GardenPack packet

• The harvest year, so she knows the seed is fresh.
• The date it was germination tested.
• The percentage that came up in that test.
• The lot number, traceable to the batch.
• The date it was packed, which is the day the order came in.

Every packet is named: the variety and where it's from, not just "Carrot". Nothing to choose, nothing to guess.

The Grand Kit Diane gave her mother

The Grand Kit is everything she needs to start, in one gift box. Nothing left to choose, nothing to guess.

• 30 vegetable and herb varieties, over 15,000 seeds, from basil and broccoli to sweet corn, peppers and pumpkin
• Grown in the Netherlands, hand-packed in the UK and double-checked in a germination lab
• 6 biodegradable pots and 6 bamboo plant markers, so she can start seedlings on the windowsill
• Gardening gloves with removable claws, so she can start digging the day it arrives
• 2 extra seed packets as a gift
• A QR code on every packet for Growli, which tells her when to sow each one for where she lives

Thirty packets off a garden centre rack would cost around £75. The Grand Kit is £22.99, with the pots, markers and gloves included.

And an app that tells her when

Every box comes with a QR code for Growli, GardenPack's own free app. She enters where she lives, and Growli tells her when to sow each variety for her area, when to water, and what to plant where.

• Everything explained in plain words
• A reminder when it's time to water
• Send a photo of a plant and get advice back

"At Christmas she didn't put it down all day. After lunch she had me scan the QR code for her and sat with the app on her lap, scrolling through what to sow when. Every so often she'd look up and say, 'Oh, this is good. This is really good.'" Diane Carter, London

What gardeners say

The Grand Kit holds 4.6 out of 5 stars from more than 2,100 reviews on Amazon UK. A few that stood out to me:

Why haven't you heard of this before?

Because you won't find it on the rack. The rack makes its money from separate guesses, bought again every spring. A box of tested seed that tells her exactly when to sow each one means fewer trips, fewer packets and fewer failed rows. That's good for her and bad for the rack.

GardenPack sells direct, packs to order, and prints the test results where anyone can read them.

The present she'll ask for again

Diane gave her mother the box that Christmas. In March, her mother rang her, which she never does, to say the app said the carrots go in this weekend. In July, a photo arrived of the carrot row. Full.

"Last Sunday she rang to ask what I was getting her for Christmas. She's never asked in her life. Then, before I could answer: 'The box again, love. If you can.'" Diane Carter

Most presents are over by Boxing Day. This one runs from the first sowing in February to the last harvest in September.

Questions readers asked me

This is an advertisement and not a news article, blog or consumer protection update. The story of Diane Carter is a representative customer story; names have been changed. Margaret Hale is a pen name. Test figures refer to GardenPack's own batch testing. Individual results vary with growing conditions.