Cold winter evening?   Got all the catalogues spread in front of you, and drooling at the choice?   And wondering where to start?

Personally, I don't want to grow the vegetable varieties I can buy in the supermarket - it sort of defeats the point of it all!   I like my vegetables to look uneven, to be of different size and colour, and to mature at different times.   I like to get a picking of a few gloriously fresh peas - and know there'll be another picking in a couple of days, or next week.

Some of the positive clues I look for -

• older varieties of any vegetable in the catalogues - special favourite is Alderman peas; they grow to 6 foot high, like my dad's used to.
• varieties which offer good flavour;
• varieties which stand well in the plot (especially for brassicas).
• Organic seeds, or at least, untreated.

And some "warning signs" I tend to avoid; thank you, but I'm not jumping at the chance of growing seeds developed for commercial operations.

• "Good for home freezing" - suggests that all the crop will be mature at the same time, and I have hours of freezing ahead of me?
• "Dwarf habit" - a variety bred to suit the mechanical harvester rather than my table?
• Apart from sweetcorn, I also avoid F1 seeds.

Using up those old packets?

Useful information on seed storage and seed longevity.

A glossary!

• Organic seeds are from plants grown to recognised organic standards; also, they have received no chemical treatments after harvesting.
• Untreated seeds come from plants which are not grown organically, but likewise have received no chemical treatments after harvesting.
• If your catalogue does not specify that the seeds are "organic" or "untreated", they may have been treated with chemicals to control fungus, pests, or disease.
• Heritage varieties are simply older varieties - (easily available from some Seed Catalogues.
  
  Many heritage varieties are at risk of disappearing; commercial seed companies are unwilling to make the huge financial investment of getting them recognised by the EU, as the market for them is so small, so they cannot be included in catalogues for sale.   You can however join The Heritage Seed Library (run by the HDRA), to get your choice of heritage seeds, and so help preserve them.
  
  Heirloom varieties are a roughly equivalent interest - countries outside the EU do not have the same legal framework for maintaining a list of "acceptable" seeds; the focus is more on finding and preserving varieties which have developed in particular localities, or even by a single family.
• F1 varieties - a little complicated?   They are modified by adapting traditional plant-breeding techniques (so they're not GM, where foreign genes are artificially added to a plant's own gene pool!).
  
  Traditional breeders would select plants to strengthen a particular set of genes the plant already has - for height, size, harvest season, disease resistance, or whatever; basically they're just pushing the process of natural selection a little bit.   And they'd produce a variety, which maintained itself - so the peas of Alderman peas will give you Alderman peas when you sow them the next year.   (And the breeder loses a whole lot of sales the next year!)
  
  With F1 varieties, the breeder develops TWO varieties of peas; s/he cross-fertilises these, to get a hybrid crop - and sells the harvested seed as "Super-Dooper-Double-Plus Peas - F1".   But, because the new pea is a hybrid of two other varieties (which the breeder keeps to himself!), you cannot sow your crop the following year and be sure of what you will get from your saved seed; to grow Super-Dooper-Double-Plus Peas again, you have to go back to the seedsman and get another packet of seed!   One way of recouping the seed company's investment in developing a new variety.
  
  I rarely choose F1 seeds, they're usually developed for commercial farmers, who need to have a whole field of cabbages, of identical size and weight, ready on the same day, to make harvesting easy.   I cannot cope with 12 cabbages, all falling ready in the third week of August - I'd rather they fell ready over a period of weeks!