Want ripe tomatoes by Christmas? Sow your seeds now to reap the rewards later

Chillis and capsicums are other seeds you might start thinking about sowing indoors around the end of August. Then not long after that, you can move onto eggplants and cucumbers and the whole summer-crop smorgasbord.

Most of these can be sown about five to eight weeks before being transplanted out. But there is one summer crop that has been preparing itself for the hot season on my kitchen bench for about three months now. I didn’t even have to sow seeds.

Chokos germinate from a seed housed inside the fruit, and I have five fruits – lying in the open air – that have been sprouting lanky green stems all winter.

Any day I am going to bury these fruits in potting mix but I will wait until the weather warms in spring before planting them outside, below a pergola where I am imagining this rampant tropical vine casting shade all summer.

Everyone you speak to seems to be germinating something – herbs, microgreens, sprouts – in their kitchens. But while there has been unprecedented run on seeds since the outbreak of coronavirus, there is nothing unprecedented about seed sowing and a new book puts our current fervor for the pursuit in context.

In The Age of Seeds: How Plants Hacked Time And Why Our Future Depends On It author Fiona McMillan-Webster describes how people have been coaxing plants from seeds for about 12,000 years.

First it was cereal grasses like wheat, barley and oats, then rice too and then more and more wild species until, by around 3000 years ago, most of the human population depended on agriculture.

McMillan-Webster’s sweeping book discussing both edible and non-edible plants and how some seeds have short life spans but others can last for millennia. She talks about how seeds have evolved over time and how they might change in the future and discusses everything from extinction rates to the role of storage banks to growing lettuce in outer space.

While this book won’t provide you with hands-on advice for getting a head start on your tomatoes, it does make you feel part of an exceedingly long line of seed-sowers. There’s comfort in that.