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Cucumber seeds!,

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Duke Ellington:
I always grow small cucumbers. I picked up a packet of Thompson and Morgan Nimrod baby cucumber seeds £2.99. I opened the little envelope to find four seeds in the pack😱😱😱. I think i will go back to buying Lidl seeds!!😐

Duke

Paulh:
The T&M web site states four seeds in the packet. If they all grow and fruit well, you'll get some money's worth.

Beersmith:
Now that is expensive!!

New varieties, especially new F1 varieties have often been expensive for not many seeds.  But the challenge for allotment holders is working out if it is worth paying the extra.  I will readily admit to paying for F1 hybrid tomatoes where you might only get a dozen or half a dozen seeds for reasons of flavour (Sungold) or blight resistance (Mountain Magic).

At the other extreme, getting 2000 little gem lettuce seeds for 99 pence seems bizarre to me.  That would last me at least 20 years.  The seeds would no longer be viable long before I'd used half of them.

I find the real challenge is identifying good value for money. For outdoor cucumbers it is very difficult to imagine what could beat Marketmore which grows well, tastes great and you can get fifty seeds for a couple of quid.

What is annoying is not really the price itself for one individual purchase but that the learning curve is so long and in total so expensive. There are numerous varieties that I have considered trying but it is a risk if you have a regular favourite and you get a failure with your new test. After years of experience I have settled on a range of favoured varieties, many of which are inexpensive open types. For example, Boltardy beetroot are hard to beat and cheap as chips. But I also buy a range of mid priced varieties for beans, peas and some brassicas.

But for someone with less experience it must be a nightmare and a potentially very expensive one at that.  Most seasons I have a bit of a punt on some novelty or new variety.  If it turns out to be an expensive blunder I put it down to experience and move on.  Perhaps this forum should have a thread on our experiences with new varieties where we could pool our knowledge. We could make it a sticky thread and later this year you could report on your experiences with Nimrod.  Hmmmm!

Beersmith:

--- Quote from: Duke Ellington on April 14, 2022, 21:58:36 ---I always grow small cucumbers. I picked up a packet of Thompson and Morgan Nimrod baby cucumber seeds £2.99. I opened the little envelope to find four seeds in the pack😱😱😱. I think i will go back to buying Lidl seeds!!😐

Duke

--- End quote ---

Actually you could help everyone if you could find a nearby plot holder who would give you just a single Marketmore seed as a benchmark.  It would be a very generous thing for you to do but you could help everyone if you grew both and found Nimrod to be better in growth productivity and flavour, or perhaps no better at all. That would be illuminating!

Tiny Clanger:
I always used to grow Swing variety. 4 seeds is the norm there too. Don't know if bigger cucumbers give more seeds per pack. I purchased a packet of strawberry seeds early in the year. There were only 4 seeds there too.

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