Simply Garden Autumn King Carrot Seeds: Six Came Up, Two Lost the Season
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Ten days to germinate for one buyer, not a single seedling for another. Simply Garden's Autumn King carrot packet has 106 ratings and just 8 written reviews, and those 8 split in a way the 4.4-star headline does not show.
- A Maincrop Variety Sold With Almost No Information
- Ten Days to Two Weeks: What the Six Positive Reviews Report
- Nothing Germinated, or Roots That Stopped at Stumps
- 4.4 Stars Versus 3.62: Which Number to Believe
- Sowing Autumn King on a UK Plot Without Wasting the Packet
- Our Score, the Working, and Who Should Sow It
A packet of Autumn King carrot seed is about as low-stakes as gardening purchases get, which is exactly why the reviews on this Simply Garden listing are worth a closer look than usual. The headline shows 4.4 stars from 106 ratings. Dig into the written reviews and only 8 UK buyers have left any words at all, and those 8 average 3.62 stars between them: four say the seed came up fine, one says it came up slowly, and two say the packet was a dead loss, either nothing germinated or the roots stopped at stumps. That is a very small pool of evidence to hang a verdict on, so this review will be upfront about what the numbers can and cannot tell you.
The listing itself is no help. One bullet point ("Grow your own vegetable seeds"), no description, no seed count, no sowing calendar, no packed-for date, and a single packet image. If you want to know how many seeds you get for your money, Amazon does not say and neither can we. What follows is built from the eight written reviews, the packet artwork, and what Autumn King is as a variety.
A Maincrop Variety Sold With Almost No Information
Autumn King is not a Simply Garden invention. It is a long-established maincrop carrot, the sort of name that turns up in most UK seed catalogues, grown for long, tapering orange roots that size up through late summer and can be left in the ground into autumn and early winter on well-drained soil. That is the variety's whole point: sow it later than the earlies, let it bulk up while the days are still long, then lift as needed rather than all at once. Gardeners on heavy clay tend to have a harder time with any long-rooted carrot, and Autumn King is no exception, because forked or stunted roots are usually a soil problem rather than a seed problem.
The packet in the listing image shows the Simply Garden brand strip down the left, the variety name at the top and a photograph of a bunch of long, uniform orange carrots with the tops still on. Nothing on the visible face of the packet gives a sowing window, spacing, seed count or a sow-by date, and the Amazon listing does not fill any of that in. The single bullet on the page reads "Grow your own vegetable seeds", and the description field is empty. So the position is that we know the variety, the brand and the picture, and not much else. Compare that with a supermarket or garden-centre packet, which will usually print sowing months, thinning distance and a rough seed count on the back, and this listing is a thin thing to buy from.
What Amazon does give us is a lifetime rating of 4.4 across 106 ratings. Roughly 100 of those buyers left a star score and walked away without typing a word, which is normal for a cheap seed packet. It is the 8 who did type something that this article is really about.
Ten Days to Two Weeks: What the Six Positive Reviews Report
Four of the eight written reviews are 5-star reports that the seed came up and is growing, and every one of them is short. Paul Merrell, writing in August 2026, gives the most useful figure in the whole set: "Germination about 10 days ." (sic). Ten days is a perfectly respectable time for carrot seed, which is notoriously slow and can sit for three weeks in cold spring soil. Tasha, in May 2026, reports "Had a great germination rate with thses" (sic). The other two 5-star reviews, from justlikecycling in June 2026 and Robert T. in October 2025, say "growing well" and "Growing well" respectively and nothing more.
Mr N Corbett's 3-star review from October 2025 sits in the middle and is more measured: "seems to be good quality, some are starting to grow after two weeks, which is good". Read that carefully. "Some" starting after two weeks is a slower and patchier start than Paul Merrell's ten days, and the 3-star score suggests the reviewer was not overwhelmed. gem's 4-star review from July 2025 says only "Great value for money great functionality", which tells you nothing about germination at all.
So the positive side of the ledger is 6 of 8 reviews at 3 stars or above, with two of them putting an actual timescale on germination: about 10 days in one garden, "some" after two weeks in another. That is consistent with normal carrot behaviour and nothing to complain about. What is missing is anyone reporting a harvest. Not one of the six positive reviews mentions lifting a carrot, how long the roots got, or how they tasted. Every positive report stops at "it came up".
Simply Garden Carrot Autumn King Seeds
A well-known maincrop carrot at pocket-money price. Six of eight written reviewers had it up within two weeks; two lost the sowing. Buy a packet, sow a test row, keep a backup.
Nothing Germinated, or Roots That Stopped at Stumps
Two of the eight written reviews are 1-star, and they are the two most specific pieces of writing on the listing. Stevie M, June 2025: "Not one seed germinated. And, yes, I had followed the instructions." Total failure to germinate is the one outcome nobody can argue with, and a June review means this was almost certainly a spring sowing in the main carrot window. There is no way to tell from the outside whether that packet was old stock, was stored badly somewhere in the supply chain, or simply went into cold wet ground and rotted, but the reviewer says the instructions were followed and we have no reason to doubt it.
The older 1-star review is the one that carries the most weight on the listing, and Amazon's own readers agree: MollyMoon's October 2021 review has 10 helpful votes, more than every other review on the page combined. "We did everything right but these just refused to grow beyond 2 inches long. Little stumps. We have grown carrots for years and not had this result before. I will not buy this variety again". This is not a germination complaint. The seed came up. The roots then stalled at around 5 cm, on a variety that is bred to produce long roots, in a garden where the reviewer says carrots have grown normally for years. That is a harder result to explain away than a no-show, because it points at either the seed line itself or something specific to that batch.
Two failures out of eight is 25%. That is a small sample and it would be wrong to treat it as a hard failure rate. But it is also the only failure data there is, and both failures are the kind that cost you a whole season, not a week. If a packet of Autumn King fails to come up in May, you find out in June, and by then you are late for a maincrop resow.
4.4 Stars Versus 3.62: Which Number to Believe
Two numbers describe this packet and they disagree. Amazon's headline says 4.4 out of 5 from 106 ratings, which on its own would put this in the "buy without thinking" bracket for a seed packet. The 8 written reviews average 3.62, nearly 0.8 of a star lower, and a quarter of them describe a lost crop. Both numbers are real and they describe different groups of people.
The 106-rating headline is the broad picture: most buyers rated it well and moved on. Silent 5-star ratings on seed usually mean "arrived, sowed it, looked fine". The written reviews skew towards people with something to say, and people who lost a whole sowing have more to say than people whose carrots came up. So the written pool almost certainly overstates the failure rate compared with the full buyer base. Equally, the headline undercounts it, because a buyer who sowed in April and got nothing has often forgotten to go back and rate by July.
The fair reading is somewhere between the two. Most packets of this seed germinate normally in a couple of weeks; a minority do not, and at least one buyer with years of carrot-growing behind them got stunted roots from seed that did come up. Because the sample is so small we cannot say whether the failures are a 2021 problem that has since been fixed, or an ongoing lottery. It is worth noting that the three most recent written reviews, from May, June and August 2026, are all 5-star germination reports, and the last outright failure was reported in June 2025. That is a small encouraging trend, but three reviews do not make a track record.
Sowing Autumn King on a UK Plot Without Wasting the Packet
Whatever you decide about the seed, the way you sow it matters more than the brand on the packet, and it is the one thing you control. Carrot seed is small, slow and fussy about the seedbed. Sow into fine, stone-free soil that has been raked to a crumb, in shallow drills, and keep the row damp until the seedlings show. Cold, wet April soil is the commonest reason a row of carrots never appears, and it would produce exactly the "not one seed germinated" result Stevie M describes, regardless of whose name is on the packet. If you have clay, a raised bed or a deep container of sieved compost is the usual workaround for a long-rooted variety like Autumn King, because it removes the compaction that causes forking and stunting.
The reviewers who had success sowed in spring and early summer, going by the dates on their reports: Tasha's success came in a review dated mid-May, justlikecycling's in late June, and Paul Merrell's ten-day germination in early August. That spread is broadly in line with how a maincrop carrot is used, sown from spring into midsummer for lifting from late summer onwards. If you are sowing later in the year, keep expectations modest for root size, and remember that carrot fly is a bigger threat to a summer sowing than germination is.
One practical suggestion born of the reviews: sow a short test row first. If a 60 cm run of drill has come up in two to three weeks, sow the rest. If it has not, you have lost a metre of bed and a fortnight, not the season. With a packet this cheap the sensible hedge is a second packet from a different supplier alongside it, so that if one fails you still have carrots.
Our Score, the Working, and Who Should Sow It
Our score for this one is 3.5 out of 5, and it comes with a large asterisk labelled "thin evidence". Working the number out: the listing's lifetime average is 4.4 from 106 ratings; the 8 written reviews average 3.62; the largest failure cluster is 2 of 8, both crop-losing failures (nothing germinated, roots stalled at stumps). If those two failures were 2 in 100 this would be an easy 4.4 and a straightforward buy. If they were 25 in 100 it would be a "do not buy" and we would be pointing you elsewhere. With 8 reviews we do not know which world we are in, and a 3.5 reflects that uncertainty rather than any strong finding either way. It also marks the listing down for giving you nothing: no seed count, no sowing information, no description, one bullet.
Would we buy it? As a cheap gamble for a spare bit of bed, yes, and the last three written reviews are all people whose seed came up in 2026, which is the trend you want. As the only carrot seed you sow this year, no. Buy it alongside a packet from a supplier that at least tells you what is in the envelope, sow a test row, and let the soil tell you which one to trust. Autumn King itself is a fine variety for UK plots and stores well in the ground; the open question is whether this particular packet is a good example of it, and 8 written reviews are not enough to close that question.
If you already have good seed compost and a propagator, the germination lottery matters less because you can start a tray under cover and only commit seedlings that have shown. Our review of the EarlyGrow heated propagator covers a cheap way to do that, though carrots are usually best sown direct rather than transplanted, so a cold frame or a covered container is the more sensible cover for this crop.
Simply Garden Carrot Autumn King Seeds
A well-known maincrop carrot at pocket-money price. Six of eight written reviewers had it up within two weeks; two lost the sowing. Buy a packet, sow a test row, keep a backup.