At Inspirations Vegetable Seeds, we specialise in sourcing top quality, high germination vegetable seeds for the cool climate regions for the home gardener.

We work closely with professional seedsmen in the vegetable seeds industry and are situated in Tasmania in a region called the Tamar Valley.

Tasmania has a latitude of 42º south. We are a small business which means that we are able to devote time and energy to sourcing top quality seeds for you, the home gardener.

We select and sell varieties that we know will grow well and consistently in a cool maritime climate such as Tasmania. These varieties will work in any similar climates.

If you are unsure about whether our varieties will perform in your area, please contact us and we can advise you based on our broad experience of growing trials.

Some regions are too small to be of commercial significance for a wide range of vegetable varieties. The research and development costs would not be economically viable.

We want to make a wide range of vegetable varieties available to the home gardener which will perform well in this region.

To do this we trial and grow all varieties and sow at many times of the year for assessment.

Eventually after some failures and some successes we find the right variety for the region, this has genetic information which is programmed to perform well; the same way every time provided it is sown at our suggested sowing dates.

We source early varieties because Tasmania has late springs, but short summers and cool winters. There will be some climatic variations i.e. in the north Tamar Valley they will be earlier than the midland by maybe three weeks and a few degrees.

Our work takes time and energy but we believe that it is important work so the home gardener experiences success.

We have been researching and trialling many more selections for you, and we can now offer some of these this year that we believe are success stories for the home gardener, amateur or professional.

Most of these are early varieties, which we are interested in because they grow, flower and fruit early. There are three advantages of this:

1. Flowers and then high yields before the onset of adverse weather conditions;
2. Fast growth before some weeds get established, and;
3. For cooler short growing seasons where other later varieties may fail to thrive.

They will also work in warmer regions.

In addition to new early bean varieties, we are also offering a list of new tomatoes that mature later than our existing varieties, for our mainland customers or those of us in slightly warmer regions.

These are known as mid-season and late season varieties in horticulture. They will perform better for the home gardener in warmer regions with a longer growing season, or near coastal areas or warmer micro-climates.

In horticulture these varieties have days to maturity next to them, for example 90 days. This means that they will set ripe fruit in approximately 3 months from a small plant, not from sowing which could be more like 110 days. So from mid Spring sowing when soil warms and night temperatures increase, they will produce a decent crop over a long growing season, but not before.

Generally these are larger tomatoes, because they have longer to mature, but not always. They will perform like this every year because that is their genetic make-up.

In the industry these tomato varieties were well-known years ago – some still are – and we feel it is important to introduce them to the home garden because they all have individual histories recorded on many other sites and are true to type, for example the Heinz variety.

They have all come from a few seeds stored in ideal conditions, sometimes for several years, in professional research stations within Australia. They are all open pollinated. All our seeds have been tested for germination and are above 80% germination.

Enjoy our selections and enjoy your garden harvest.