Heritage Seed Vault
Heirloom seed is grown out one batch at a time. Once a batch is packed out, there is no more until the following harvest has been germination-tested and packed.
What ships, and what it's held to.
Thirty-five hand-picked heirloom varieties tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, kale, basil, coriander, carrots, radishes, cucumbers, squash, beans and more. Each packet is labelled individually with the variety name, planting depth, spacing, sun requirement and days to harvest.
- 16,000+ seeds in total, across 35 varieties
- Every packet resealable and separately labelled
- A spread of vegetables, herbs and greens
- Chosen for home-garden yield and everyday cooking
Every seed comes from growers we know and is viability-tested before it is packed.
- 100% heirloom and open-pollinated
- Non-GMO - nothing genetically modified
- No hybrids: every seed reproduces true to type
- 94% average germination across all varieties
Pick your varieties around your climate zone and the space you have. Follow the planting guide printed on each packet. Sow into raised beds, containers, window boxes or straight into the back garden. Water on a routine, harvest when it's ready, and keep seed from your strongest plants to sow next season and every season after that.
The quick growers : lettuce, radishes, herbs break ground in 7–14 days. Tomatoes, peppers and squash usually take 2–4 weeks to make strong seedlings. First harvests start around week 5–8, depending on variety and growing conditions. Plenty of customers say their fullest harvests came in the second season, once they had learned their soil and saved seed off their best plants.
Everything is sealed into airtight, moisture-resistant pouches built for long storage. Keep it somewhere cool and dry for maximum viability.
- 10-year freshness guarantee when stored properly
- Sow it this spring or shelve it for years it will be ready
- Suited to emergency preparedness and long-term food planning
30 crops. 35 varieties. Named one by one.
Writing "35 heirloom varieties" costs nothing. Below is the actual roster, cultivar by cultivar. Four crops arrive as more than one variety : three lettuces, two tomatoes, two radishes, two beans which is how 30 crops fill 35 packets.
Harvest availability can force a substitution; anything substituted is an equivalent open-pollinated heirloom variety.
All four UK zones. What changes is what, and when.
This kit is the whole of what you need. A hardiness zone describes how cold the winter gets, which matters to trees and shrubs that have to survive it. Garden vegetables never face that they go in once the last frost has passed and come out before the first one returns. So your zone number isn't the deciding factor. The length of your frost-free window is.
Radishes at 25 days, lettuce at 30, then spinach, peas, kale and beans all of it finishing inside a 60-day season.
The entire kit in a single planting. Tomatoes, sweetcorn and squash all reach maturity with room to spare.
Everything, plus a second sowing of the quick crops for an autumn harvest.
Cool crops straight through the winter, heat-lovers in the shoulder seasons.
The Garden Planner sets out sowing and harvest dates for your own zone, so the calendar isn't guesswork.
First harvest lands in roughly a month.
There's no waiting a full season to learn whether it worked. The quickest crops reach the table inside 30 days and by the time the tomatoes arrive you'll have been eating out of the garden for two months.
Radish
25–30 days
Leaf lettuce
30 days
Spinach
40 days
Bush beans
55 days
Cucumber
60 days
Broccoli
75 days
Tomato
80–90 days
Winter squash
100 days
Days from sowing to first harvest in typical conditions. Varies with zone, soil, water and weather.
Four questions — ask them of this page too.
It's a crowded shelf and most of what's on it is decoration. Hobby packets holding fifteen seeds. Kits badged for emergencies that turn out to be the same hybrids in a grimmer box. Four questions settle it in about ninety seconds.
All 35 varieties are open-pollinated, non-hybrid and non-GMO. Keep seed off your harvest and sow it again indefinitely.
16,000+ seeds : a full family garden with seed still sitting in the box.
23 crops across 35 varieties: fruiting, root, legume and leaf. Every one of them named on this page.
Instructions on every packet, plus the manual and the Garden Planner with its seed-saving schedule.
Put those four to anything you're weighing up - this page included. If a seller won't answer all four in writing before you pay, walk.
Why your saved seed failed — and why it wasn't your fault.
Most seed on general sale is hybrid. That isn't a con it's genuine plant breeding, selected to give one strong, uniform first generation. In year one it delivers.
Save seed off that plant and sow it, though, and the traits held together in generation one pull apart in generation two. Plants come up stunted, uneven, misshapen. A fair share never comes up at all. Growers call it F2 breakdown trait segregation in the second filial generation. It is documented, expected genetics, which is exactly why hybrid seed carries an "F1" label.
Seed that returns makes a customer once. Seed that doesn't makes a customer annually.
No one needed to conspire; the incentives handled it. Every variety in this kit is open-pollinated, so what you save is what you sow.
Sown the same day. Left: open-pollinated seed, saved and resown. Right: seed saved off a hybrid.
Hybrid seed is real plant breeding and does its job well in the first generation. The claim isn't that hybrids are bad it's that they're the wrong tool for a household that wants to stop buying seed.
Not buying seed. Buying the last seed you buy.
Seed is a small purchase you keep making forever. Forty to a hundred and twenty pounds a year, every year, for as long as you garden — because hybrid seed can't be saved and put back in the ground.
Open-pollinated seed is bought once and maintained at zero. You pay the once and harvest your own resupply every autumn.
From year two on, this is where the seed comes from.
Based on typical household spend on seed for a full garden. The kit figure assumes you save seed each season, which every variety here permits. Ranges reflect how much you plant.
Twice, the government posted families the seed.
This isn't a survivalist talking point. It is documented federal policy, run twice within one lifetime, because the alternative was families going without.
Farm labour enlisted and European farmland turned into battlefield. School children, housewives and ordinary citizens were pressed to reclaim public parks, school yards and private lots and plant them. By the end of that war the effort had a name: victory gardens.
The USDA put the 1943 figure at 42% of all produce. Seed went out with a booklet covering planting, harvesting and the part that counted how to save seed, so nothing needed posting the year after.
Both programmes ran on open-pollinated seed, and both sent a guide with it. Give a family seed once and teach them to keep it, and one distribution carries them for years. That is precisely what this kit is.
Sources: "Sowing the Seeds of Victory," Architect of the Capitol (aoc.gov) for the 1917–18 figures and the National War Garden Commission. The National WWII Museum, New Orleans, and the National Park Service for the WWII figures. The 42% figure is USDA data.
What customers report after season one.
Self-reported by Garden's Pulse customers in a post-purchase survey. Not a controlled trial. Germination, harvest timing and yield vary with climate, soil, water and care nothing here guarantees any specific outcome.
Real gardens, real second seasons.
“These are the seeds my grandmother grew.”
For years I tried to keep my grandmother's garden going on seed from the DIY shop. It never behaved the same way things grew differently, tasted different, and I could never save seed that actually came back. Then I found Home Harvest . First season, everything grew exactly as I remembered it from her garden. The tomatoes, the basil, the peppers, all of it. Second season I replanted entirely off my own saved seed and the results were every bit as strong. I got emotional the first time I harvested from seed I'd saved myself. This is what real gardening is meant to be. My grandmother would have loved this kit.
“Far better than anything I've bought at B&Q.”
I've thrown away more money than I'd care to admit on seed kits from the big DIY chains. Half the packets wouldn't germinate, the instructions were vague, and the varieties felt arbitrary as though whatever was cheapest got tipped into a bag. The Home Harvest is nothing like that. You can tell it was assembled by people who actually garden. The varieties make sense for everyday cooking, every packet is clearly labelled, and germination has been outstanding. I've already saved seed off my first tomato and cucumber harvest and I'm replanting this spring. This is the last seed kit I'll ever need to buy, and I mean that literally.
“We bought it for the whole family — then bought more.”
We run a smallholding in Devon and this kit has turned into a fixture of the operation. All the classics are in there : tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, kale, beans, squash plus herbs and extras we habitually forget to buy separately. Germination has been the best we've had out of any seed kit, no contest. What decided it for us was that every variety is open-pollinated. We saved seed off our healthiest plants last season and put it back in this year with no drop in quality at all. We've bought three more kits since one for my parents, one for my sister's family, one to keep sealed. This is how our grandparents did it, and it's how we're doing it now.
Put it to the test. Don't just keep it.
Most guarantees ask whether you're pleased. This one asks you to run a check — because that's how seed is genuinely judged, and because we'd rather you knew in week one than in year three.
Every pound returned, and both guides stay yours.
If the germination doesn't satisfy you — or the kit isn't what this page described — contact support within 90 days for a full refund. The manual and the Garden Planner are yours regardless.
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Open the boxPull three packets — any three.
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Sow a short test bedA metre of soil along a fence line is plenty.
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Count the rows on day eightYou'll know what you're holding before you commit the rest.
The questions people actually ask.
Most retail seed is hybrid, bred to give one strong uniform generation. Save seed off it and you meet F2 breakdown: traits segregate, plants come up uneven, and a good deal of it never comes up so you buy again next year. Every variety here is open-pollinated. Save it, sow it, it comes back true.
Yes. Hardiness zones measure winter cold, and these crops never meet winter — they go in after your last frost and come out before your first. What changes by zone is the length of the frost-free window, and the Garden Planner gives you sowing and harvest dates for yours.
It assumes you haven't. Planting instructions are printed on every packet, and both guides are written for someone starting at zero. In post-purchase surveys 90% said it was straightforward with no prior experience. Radishes and leaf lettuce are picking inside 30 days, so a result arrives quickly.
Sealed airtight and moisture-resistant with a 10-year freshness guarantee. Most people shelve it and put a few packets in meanwhile which is also the smarter route, because a small test bed is how you learn what you're holding.
It isn't difficult, but it is particular: some crops you take at eating stage, some you let run well past it, some dry on the plant, and a few want washing and a few days of fermenting. The Garden Planner sets out the schedule crop by crop. That guide is the reason one purchase becomes every year after it.
A seed line kept in one place isn't a seed line, it's a box. Roughly a third of orders are three kits for adult children living elsewhere in the country, for parents, for a sister's household, or simply to keep one sealed while another is in use.
It's the batch price. Seed is grown out, harvested, germination-tested and packed in dated batches, and each batch is priced to clear before the next grow-out lands. When this one is gone it's gone until the following harvest is tested and packed, and the price resets with it.
Every pound back. You have 90 days: open it, pull three packets, sow a short test bed and count the rows on day eight. If it doesn't satisfy you, contact support. You keep both guides either way.