I actually got myself organised and sent off for seeds from the Alpine Garden Society this year. If you are interested in bulbs, alpines or herbaceous plants membership is a must and the quarterly journal is worth the membership alone. But another benefit is to get seeds of rarities at a tiny price. Most of these hardy plants probably need stratification, a period of chilling after sowing, and I sowed the seeds, left the trays outside for a month and then brought them into the cold greenhouse. It is early days yet but there are signs of growth. The first to appear were Primula florindae, sown on the surface but today I saw that two more have started to germinate; Wyethia, a stout, Californian, perennial sunflower, commonly called mules’ ears and syneilesis, a coarse perennial with fantastic leaves that is sometimes called the shredded umbrella plant. Hopefully each new day will mean some exciting new seedlings.

http://www.alpinegardensociety.net/

Chiltern seeds

If, like me, you have been a Chiltern Seeds customer, you may be interested in the following. Chiltern Seeds are a great addition to the bigger seed companies and offer a huge range of seeds, some not available elsewhere. I think it was in 1980 that I first bought seeds from them. Anyway, they had their website hacked and here is a statement from them which you may have already seen if you are a current customer:

As you may be aware, on 27th February we experienced a sophisticated cyber-attack on our website. This caused our website to crash and some customers have received unsolicited emails purporting to be from Chiltern Seeds.

Information including name, address, email and telephone number of some customers has been stolen. At this stage we are unsure where the information has come from as many of the recipients of the email are not on our current database. The attack has been reported to the police and we have been working all hours to try to resolve the situation. As we never store payment information, NO financial details have been taken.

At risk of repeating ourselves, if you have received an email purporting to be from us telling you that you have won a hamper, please IGNORE THIS AND DELETE THE EMAIL IMMEDIATELY – DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK CONTAINED IN THE EMAIL. This is a spam email and it is NOT from us, we would NEVER send emails asking you to click on any link other than to our own website. You can report the email at http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/ or on 0300 123 2040.

If you have clicked on the link and entered any card details, we would recommend that you contact your bank immediately and cancel the card you have used. We would also suggest you run a virus scan on your computer. All current database information IS secure, we would suggest however, that you reset the password of your Chiltern Seeds account if you have one.

Primula florindae, sowing hardy seeds, syneilesis, Wyethia