Daughter of the Soil

Pea: Luna Trick

2009-03-18T19:11:00.003Z

Last year's F2 plant which became the prototype for Luna Trick

I have at least three or four plant breeding projects which will be ready for naming in 2009.

This is the first ... a new mangetout (snow) pea called Luna Trick.

Named in honour of my friend and music collaborator Daniel Staniforth, a shining inspiration who plays cello for me along with a seemingly endless range of other instruments; Daniel releases his own alt-rock music under the name of Luna Trick, so this beautiful moon-like pea is for him.

Prototype, photographed 2008

Luna Trick was bred from a cross of Golden Sweet x Sugar Ann. It was one of the obvious stand-out phenotypes in the F2 generation in 2008, producing a beautiful and abundant plant, though its greatest asset is its outstanding flavour (which must be carefully selected for in future generations). This is what the variety should look like when it's stabilised:

Growing vigorously to 6ft, it has distinctive yellow-green stems, and bears single rounded moon-white flowers on pale yellow stems so curvy they sometimes turn right over and bloom upside-down. The calyx is cream when young but at maturity turns moon-white with green mottling. Pods are pale yellow, quite large and succulent. As they mature they take on a porcelain-like translucence and the small peas can be seen inside, 8 or 9 per pod. Being a mangetout type, Luna Trick is completely fibreless and the pods are edible at all stages. The absence of fibre helps give it its translucence but it also means that the pod cannot keep its flat shape at maturity ... the peas bulge through and the pod buckles and twists, taking on a crescent shape. The really special feature is the pod flavour, which is exquisitely sweet, and a major improvement on its yellow-podded parent. The flavour has a full and rounded character as well as being sweet, and the thickish pod walls are unusually juicy. Even at a large size they can be eaten straight off the plant with no trace of bitterness. The peas themselves are not huge but very abundant, and sweet enough to be worth eating in their own right, raising the possibility of this being a dual-purpose variety. The one fault the peas have is a tendency for the skins to split if watered too heavily or erratically (either by me or the English weather).

The absence of any fibre inside the pod makes it impossible for it to stay flat. It's a bit weird-looking, but I rather like it. The pods also turn porcelain-translucent as they mature, so you can see the peas inside.

Although this pea has got its name this year, that doesn't mean it's ready for general release ... it will probably need at least another year's work. The basic format of a breeding project goes like this: two varieties are crossed together to make an F1 hybrid. The F1 seeds are all mixed together and don't get a name or a number ... there's no point, as they all look pretty much the same. The only purpose of the F1 generation is to provide as much F2 seed as possible. The F2 generation is where the magic happens ... as all the genes in the lottery get re-shuffled randomly and create enormous differences between siblings. So I treat each F2 seed as a unique individual and give it its own identifying number. Once I've decided which of the resulting F2 phenotypes are worth pursuing, the number is then applied to all subsequent generations so I can keep track of its lineage. In this instance, the plant I wanted to keep was one called YSS 25 - quite simply plant number 25 in my Yellow Sugar Snap project (which so far has produced just about every imaginable phenotype except a yellow sugar snap, but never mind). So at the end of last season I collected all the seeds from YSS 25, and these are now F3 seeds. Although they will display a certain amount of variability they should mostly follow the blueprint set in the previous generation, so they don't get their own individual numbers ... they are collectively labelled YSS 25 F3, and are now the basis for a new variety. It needs to keep its number so I don't lose track of its pedigree, but you can see why I prefer to call it Luna Trick.

2009: new seedlings just starting to sprout. This is the F3 generation

It's still early days on this project, but I'm hopeful that Luna Trick will be among the first of the new pea varieties to be released. Why? Because most of its desirable traits are made by recessive genes. Recessives are the joy of a plant breeder's life because they are so easy to stabilise. For example, the yellow pods are made by a recessive gene called gp (golden pod). I can deduce that the Luna Trick prototype carried a perfect matched pair of gp genes ... because if it didn't it wouldn't be able to express yellow pods. If it had only one copy of gp it would default to green pods, with the yellows just showing up in a proportion of its offspring. The fact that it was yellow-podded means I can be fairly confident that all its offspring will be yellow-podded, because it has only gp genes to pass on. The same is true of many of its other traits ... it has matched pairs of recessive genes for fibreless pods (two genes), white flowers (one gene) and for sweet flavour (two or more genes), so I can expect it to have high levels of stability for all these traits. These characteristics are joyfully easy to predict.

Some of the variability is also predictable. Tallness is a dominant trait in peas, made by a gene called Le. The original Luna Trick plant was tall, but it was bred from a cross between a tall pea and a dwarf one so I don't yet know whether it has one copy of the Le gene or two. If it has inherited two, it will breed true for tallness. If it has only inherited one (which is statistically more likely) then I can expect to see the recessive dwarf gene show up in a quarter of the offspring, and I will have to keep selecting the tall ones for several generations until the dwarves stop showing up.

Fortunately with peas you can recognise tall and dwarf phenotypes very early on, while they're still young seedlings. This is because the difference between a tall pea and a short one is simply down to internode length ... the amount of stem it makes between each set of leaves ... which starts to show itself when the plants are only a few days old. Thus I should be able to "rogue out" any shorties before I even plant them in the garden. Though I will probably plant them separately from the others and keep some seed from them, just in case I ever want to create a short version of the variety. (My breeding work focuses on tall peas as they are wonderful and deserve a renaissance after being woefully neglected for the last 100 years, but some people do like dwarf peas so I'll keep the options open.)

You can also see from this picture that it has variability in the seed colour, and comes in cream or green. The colour of a pea seed is made by the cotyledons (seed leaves) hidden inside. The dominant cotyledon colour in peas is yellow/cream ... and clearly Luna Trick has inherited this ... but it has also inherited a recessive gene catchily called i, which produces green cotyledons. (Put into technical terms, it's heterozygous at the i locus.) I could select one colour or the other ... the green ones, being recessive, will breed true for greenness, while the dominant cream ones may be hiding recessives within them and will show some further variability. But I'm actually not fussed either way ... the seed colour is not especially relevant in this project, so I'm planting them all without selection. If I was a commercial plant breeder I would probably want to select more rigorously to get a uniform product ... but I'm not, so I'm more interested in maintaining a healthy bit of genetic diversity.

Having made all these predictions, "expect the unexpected" is the mantra of any gene-reshuffling endeavour. It's likely that I'll find some unforeseen variability in the twenty-five or so plants I'm growing in this generation. Some will be caused by hidden recessives making their presence felt, and some will be caused by pleiotropy (genes which have more than one function) and unexpected synergies between newly combined genes. But that's OK ... for me it's one of life's greatest joys to see these new plants emerge into the world, each one subtly unique, and see what gifts they have to offer.

More information about pea genetics can be found in the JIC Pisum Gene Database.

Rootrainers and bog roll tubes: some thoughts

2009-01-06T21:27:00.003Z

I don't often endorse commercial products, and even less often patented ones. It's even more unusual for me to spend sixty quid on plastic flowerpots (I'm still checking my pulse). But as a former cardboard-tubeholic sceptical of overpriced plastic I've been won over by the usefulness of the Rootrainers system. Although I was in denial about it for a couple of years (clinging to my bog rolls) there's no question that the crops I raise in Rootrainers do significantly and consistently better than the ones grown in anything else. Consequently I've decided to blow my Christmas money on a few extra trays of them for this year's pea extravaganza. I still save bog roll tubes through some obsessive compulsive disorder but I'm going to have to find some other use for them (overwinter nests for giant bees?)

There was a discussion on this blog a while back about whether the chemicals used in bog roll tube manufacture leach out into the soil and harm the plants. Since then I've been looking carefully at how well my bog roll grown peas have been getting on and although they usually do all right once they're planted out there certainly seems to be an issue with germination. I normally get close to 100% germination from my home-saved peas but when sown in a lavatorial cylinder, germination flushed down to 50-70% with very erratic emergence. Some didn't show themselves until about three weeks after sowing. Particularly badly affected was the breeding project from which the red-podded pea later emerged. More than half the F2 seed I sowed was lost to poor germination, and some of those might have been useful red phenotypes ... I can't afford to lose that many. Later in the year I sowed some more seeds from the same batch in Rootrainers, and got full germination in just a few days.

I know there are a few arguments against using Rootrainers. They are expensive. Patented products carry a premium and I'm often wary about what I'm actually paying for. But while I'm deeply opposed to the patenting of genes and plant varieties, when it comes to protecting genuinely useful (non-living) inventions that took a lot of work to design it's a bit different. If you look closely at the design of a Rootrainer 'book', how snugly it fits together and how the shape of every nook and cranny has been meticulously engineered to nurture the plant's roots and aerate them without letting the compost fall out, it's obvious that someone who knew what they were doing has put a lot of thought into it. They are a bit fiddly to clean and put together and (the big ones at least) seem to consume frightening amounts of compost, but what can I say? The plants they produce are among the best I've ever grown.

Rootrainers were developed in Canada for the tree propagation industry. Forestry is not so big in the UK but they are beloved here by sweet pea growers for the deep root runs they provide. I've never seen them specifically recommended for culinary peas, but as Pisum and Lathyrus grow in a similar way and have similar needs I thought it was worth a go. And it was.

I should point out that not everybody would benefit from growing peas this way. If you're growing seeds from a big packet you got at the garden centre you might as well save yourself the bother and direct-sow them in the ground, accepting that some will be eaten by birds or mice and can easily be replaced if necessary. Or use lengths of guttering, which also works well. But I grow a lot of stuff which isn't replaceable ... rare heirlooms and my own breeding projects. Very often I only have 10 or 20 seeds or less of any given type and can't risk direct sowing. For this kind of thing Rootrainers are invaluable.

Rootrainers are hinged plastic 'books' which fold in half to make very deep modules (up to five inches), and sit in a plastic frame all wedged together. It's the wedging-in that holds everything rigid, so if you take a couple out the rest will either fall over or spring open unless you wedge some other small object in there. But all the same it's useful to be able to slide out individual rows, which you can't do with a conventional module tray. And there's no sagging when you pick them up either. The sides of the books are grooved, which neatly trains the roots of seedlings down in a straight line. Each cell has an opening at the bottom which allows the roots (but miraculously not the compost) to emerge through the bottom and be 'air-pruned', which encourages the seedling to make more roots, which also grow downwards in perfect straight lines. At planting-out time the books can be lifted out of the frame and opened, and the rootball (or rootwedge, more like) will slide out with very little root disturbance. And more importantly, with very little top disturbance either. Peas have incredibly fragile stems which are easily broken when planting out (to compensate for this vulnerability they are exceedingly good at surviving injury, but it's much better to avoid damaging them) so it's good to use modules which you don't have to tip upside down or tap or squidge the bottoms of.

The aeration underneath makes a huge difference to the health of the plants and the drainage is really well balanced, so any watering from the top drains straight through and watering from the bottom (which I find works better) soaks up quickly. They retain moisture far longer than normal modules but because of the good aeration I hardly ever have any problems with mould or with seeds rotting in the soil - a very common problem with peas sown in bog roll tubes.

One thing about Rootrainers (and bog roll tubes for that matter) which I find useful is that there's no need for potting-on. The root run is so deep it keeps the plants surging away until they're big enough to plant out. With peas it is important to plant them out before they get too big, especially tall varieties. If you leave them too long their tendrils grab hold of their neighbours and it's a right sod to separate them. They also flop over and bend the stems so a bit of care is needed to get the best out of module-sown peas. All the same, the reliability of growing them this way is well worth it. When using full-sized Rootrainers (5" deep, 32 cells) I sow two peas in each module, so I get 64 plants per tray. I don't thin them, because peas are sociable plants and like climbing up one another. I plant the pairs out into the garden when they're a few inches tall and they grow away like rockets.

Since I'm stocking up on new Rootrainers this year I'm going to try the smaller-celled version, which is very slightly shallower, uses a lot less compost and has 50 small modules per tray instead of 32 big 'uns. I think these will be ideal for sowing peas individually, which is what I want to do with some of my breeding projects.

Last year I tried sowing sweetcorn and climbing beans in Rootrainers, and they all did extremely well too.

As I say, the advantages of Rootrainers are likely to be useful to some people and not others, depending on what you grow and how you like to do it. But so far for me they've proved themselves a good investment, and they do last for years. I've used them with coconut coir (very light and airy, good in every respect but the plugs tend to fall to bits when planting out), peat-free multipurpose compost, and a John Innes seed compost (makes a nice sturdy plug but it's very heavy and some of the sandy particles get washed out the bottom).

On the subject of giant bees, I was out in the garden on New Year's Day and I met with a huge bumble bee the size of a guinea pig. Well all right, it wasn't quite that big but it was pretty damned enormous. It was buzzing around listlessly in the frost looking confused. I don't know what's going on with bees at the moment.

Welcome home, little peas

2008-12-21T13:20:00.004Z

Twelve British peas which are either extinct or rarely seen outside gene banks in the UK, now here on my windowsill awaiting trial in 2009. You can already see the diversity in this little lot.

Christmas came early in the Soil household. This collection of peas was generously sent to me this week by Dave "American Gardener" Thompson at Worldwide Seed Trader. Dave is in the process of setting up a seed order business with the largest range of varieties offered by anyone, anywhere. An ambitious goal, you might think. But he's already well on the way to achieving it, because I can honestly say he has the largest collection of vegetable varieties I've ever seen. It's mind-boggling. He reckons he has "1000 varieties of peppers, 1000 of beans, and hundreds of everything else". Pop along to the Homegrown Goodness forum and have a look. Dave has been looking for volunteers to take seeds and grow them, and give him feedback and/or seed increases. You can even choose what you want to trial, if you don't pass out from lack of oxygen while reading the list.

I nearly had to reach for the smelling salts myself when I saw his pea list. Not just because there were so many of them, but because half-familiar names kept jumping out. Names of peas I'd read about in Victorian and early 20th century gardening books, but which have long since vanished without trace. May Queen, Battleship, Webb's Stourbridge Marrow.

I immediately picked out 17 or so varieties which I either knew to be of British origin or which I thought likely to be and which are difficult or impossible to obtain in the UK. I suspect there are many more, when I get a chance to research them. Some stood out because they include British placenames, while others preserve the names of well known nurseries and pea breeders of the 19th century. Veitch's of Devon, Carter's of Raynes Park, Sharpe's of Sleaford and Webb's of Stourbridge. Creations by Thomas Knight, Thomas Laxton, William Hurst and William Fairbeard.

Fairbeard created the much esteemed Champion of England in 1843, and most of his other varieties I assumed were lost. Fairbeard's Nonpareil was one I'd heard of but didn't know it still existed. Laxton bred some of the best tasting peas (Alderman) and earliest (Alaska). The Heritage Seed Library and Irish Seed Savers Association are maintaining some of his varieties but Laxton's Omega is one I've never seen outside 1870s gardening manuals.

After making my list of peas for trial, I scuttled over to the Pisum database at the John Innes Centre and looked them up. And lo, only four of these 17 varieties are held in the JIC collection. If the JIC don't have it, not many other people will either. This is very, very rare and precious stuff indeed.

Should we be surprised that a whole bunch of heritage peas which are all but extinct in their country of origin should turn up in a private collection in the US? Probably not. There was a huge market for British pea varieties in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All the popular varieties favoured by gardeners and market growers over here were shipped out to the states and sold widely. Sometimes their names were changed for the US-market, such as the super-early pea (still popular in the US) known as Alaska which is a selection of Laxton's Earliest of All, introduced in the UK in 1881 and no longer available here. But most still carry their original names.

Over the years they've dropped out of the mainstream catalogues on both sides of the Atlantic and become scarce. Here in the UK, we were clobbered by the most dunderheaded EU legislation which not only failed to recognise the value of heritage varieties but made it illegal to distribute them. From the 1970s onward, our vegetable biodiversity has haemorrhaged. It's not surprising that so many of the varieties familiar to British gardeners a century ago have disappeared. In the US, however, the heirloom seed movement has always thrived. Marginalised by market forces, it chugs along beneath the radar of mainstream gardening but carries on its important work through small businesses and various formal and informal networks. All those old British peas, thoughtlessly discarded by the British ministries who didn't understand their cultural and genetic value, have been carefully maintained from year to year by gardeners in America.

I'm immensely grateful to Dave for sending me these peas for trial. And to all those people who cared enough to keep them from total extinction.

The first step is to grow them and evaluate them and find out exactly what they are. I will collect information and pictures to send back to Dave, which will help him in developing accurate and meaningful descriptions of them for his seed business. But a longer term benefit (once Dave has had a chance to distribute them through his seed company) will be the repatriation of some of Britain's long lost genetic heritage, because I'll take whatever steps I can to ensure their continued survival here.

The British stuff is just the tip of Dave's pea iceberg. He's sent me a number of other rare and special things, including some purple-podded breeding lines with unusual genetic traits to make use of in my own breeding projects. Look at the lovely seedcoat markings on this one, Musus. The markings suggest it's probably a field-pea but it supposedly has red-splashed pods. Just don't try googling for it because Google rather unhelpfully assumes that you meant to type "mucus" and comes up with all sorts of hits you really didn't want to see.

Another treasure I'm looking forward to growing next year is the umbellatum type, sometimes known as the Mummy pea on the basis of a common 19th century scam where gardeners paid a small fortune for seeds falsely claimed to have come from Egyptian tombs. (This claim is still doing the rounds and ironically the myth has survived more robustly than the "mummy vegetables" themselves.) This type of pea has a weird top-heavy shape, producing very wide thick stems and bearing all the flowers and pods in a crown-like clump at the top. At one time they were given their own species name, Pisum umbellatum. But this has now been dropped as it turns out that they are botanically the same as normal Pisum sativum peas, and their radically weird appearance is simply down to fasciation (broadening) of the stem, which is a recessive genetic trait. Umbellatum-type peas are now almost unknown outside gene banks, although I unwittingly picked one up from the Heritage Seed Library a couple of years ago (Salmon-Flowered) which whetted my appetite for them.

Two umbellatum types, Mummy White which I assume is white flowered, and Umbellata which I have no information about but from the speckling of the seedcoat it looks to have the genetic wherewithal to make purple colouring. Below those, Nigro-Umbilicatum whose name presumably refers to the fact that it has a black hilum, an unusual trait in peas.

Meanwhile, if you think you can help Dave with his seed increases or future trials, then hie thee to his blog at Worldwide Seed Trader.

Here from the Heritage Seed Library Catalogue 2009?

2008-12-15T16:47:00.007Z

Climbing beans from the HSL ... Poletschka (mauve beans in green pods) and Purple Giant (white beans in purple pods)

I just wanted to say hello and welcome to anyone who's arrived here after seeing me in the new Heritage Seed Library catalogue. This blog is about heritage vegetables and seed saving (which kind of go together anyway because most heritage veg seeds can't be bought commercially) biodiversity and breeding new vegetables using the rich heritage veg genepool ... not to make profit but to create new varieties for the public domain. And I have a companion website at www.daughterofthesoil.com which includes reviews of heritage vegetables and other useful information.

Like a lot of HSL members I'm concerned by the control big business has over the food chain and the resulting loss of biodiversity. But there is a lot that individual gardeners can do to help which make a real difference. You'll find information on the blog about saving seeds, and also about how to breed your own new vegetables, which you can do even in a small garden, with no specialist knowledge or experience.

First up, I'm not anybody special or an expert in anything. I'm just a gardener who enjoys growing things. I have no qualifications whatsoever as a plant breeder, I don't even have an O-level in biology. I learned everything I know from a book and from experimenting in the garden.

I started growing vegetables in 1998 and began keeping notes about my garden in 2004 purely for my own use. I never thought for a moment anybody else would be interested. Then in 2006 I bought some rare local apple trees from a specialist grower, and although he was very knowledgeable the grower wasn't able to tell me very much about the varieties I'd selected. Nobody else knew much about them either, he said, and that wouldn't change until somebody grew them and shared the information. That was the revelatory moment when I realised that even the most ordinary of gardeners can make a genuinely useful contribution to the available knowledge. Instead of sitting here waiting for the "experts" to tell us stuff, we can try things for ourselves and share the results. I set up Daughter of the Soil as a first step towards that.

Slice of Caro Rich tomato, which is very tasty and contains many times more pro-vitamin A than the average tomato

And the lack of available information was certainly a yawning gap. When I joined the Heritage Seed Library the first thing they did was send me a freebie packet of seeds. It was a bean called Kew Blue. I sowed the seeds and they grew into very pretty purple-flushed seedlings. I posted a picture of them on my blog. But I wanted to know more about them. Were they meant for eating as fresh beans, or for shelling out? How tall do they get? What do they taste like? What colour are the pods? I wanted to see pictures. So I did the obvious thing and googled it. To my astonishment, Google came up with only three hits, one of which was my own blog! None of the hits gave me the answers I wanted. And the photo on my blog was apparently the only photograph of Kew Blue on the whole of the internet!

Things are improving at a rapid rate with more and more people sharing info online, but it can still be frustrating. Sometimes there's no information at all. Other times it appears at first that there IS lots of information, but when you click on the link you find the descriptions on different websites are word-for-word identical. It's not independent information, it's cribbed from a sales catalogue. While that may be better than nothing, catalogue descriptions are of limited use because they just bang on about how great the variety is. They won't tell you the useful things you want to know like how it differs from other varieties or whether it will suit your own personal tastes or growing conditions. They won't tell you about any limitations or disadvantages it has. I found this information vacuum incredibly frustrating.

So that gave me the idea to write reviews of heritage vegetables. Every time I grew a variety I would take notes and photographs and write up a review with as much information and detail as possible. My reviews are not authoritative and they may not always agree with the experiences of others, but they are independent. I don't sell seeds and I'm not sponsored by anyone who does, so I can present a completely unbiased evaluation of each variety, describing its strengths and weaknesses with honesty. This, I hope, is far more useful than a regurgitated sales pitch.

In just a couple of years things have changed enormously. Many people (including many Heritage Seed Library members and members of other seed saving organisations around the world) are now blogging about their experiences with different varieties, and the amount of available USEFUL information is booming. Power to the bloggers! This is an important and very positive revolution in gardening.

I would encourage anyone to start up their own gardening blog. Don't be put off (as I was initially) by a modest assumption that nobody will be interested in what you have to say. Whatever you're growing and however you're growing it, somebody out there is interested. Even your failures are worth sharing. When my runner beans did very badly in 2006 I assumed I'd done something wrong, until I discovered from other blogs that people across the UK were having the same problems and it was just a bad year for runners. Blogging is easy too. All the major host sites such as Blogger and WordPress provide easy-to-use templates. So publishing your words and pictures on the internet doesn't require any knowledge of web design, and it doesn't cost anything.

The number of gardeners who now have blogs has grown steadily over the last couple of years, and a natural thing to evolve from this is a global online seed swap. With the support of Patrick in Amsterdam who hosts and maintains the website, the Blogger Seed Network is a fantastic source of seeds (and tubers) for just about anything, many of which are incredibly hard to find anywhere else. You don't have to have a blog to take part in trades ... it's open to everyone. This network is already proving to be special and important, hugely increasing the flow of seed material and diversity around the world. It supplements the work of the HSL and other seed saving organisations, bringing members into direct contact with each other.

One of my home-made pea hybrids with bicolour pink and white flowers

Heritage vegetables are only one side of what I do in my garden and write about on this blog. My other little crusade is to reinvigorate the lost art of amateur plant breeding.

100 years ago, pretty much every gardener did a bit of plant breeding ... even if it was only by selecting the best plants to save seed from each year. Our ancestors didn't have any understanding of genetics, but that didn't stop them achieving great things through trial and error and a bit of observation. The British nurseryman T.A. Knight is most likely the person we have to thank for our modern peas. Until the 1820s all peas were starchy and bitter. Knight spotted a single wrinkled seed among his crop of smooth, round seeds. He was curious about this oddity, and planted it. Knight noticed that the wrinkled peas tasted sweeter than smooth ones, and began selecting them as a basis for new varieties. He had no idea that sugars shrink more than starches do and that the wrinkliness is a result of a higher sugar content. There was also very little understanding in his day about the laws of inheritance, and it was well over a century before the discovery and naming of the two recessive genes responsible for wrinkly sweetness in peas. He was simply an observer whose sharp eye and enquiring mind helped change the course of culinary history.

Knight's story is an important illustration of why you don't actually need a degree in genetics to be a plant breeder. You can do it on any scale and it can be as simple as observing and selecting. It can be as simple as allowing an accidental cross to grow to maturity instead of roguing it out, or saving and sowing seed from a commercial F1 hybrid to get a galaxy of segregating variations, whose pedigree you may never know but they will still be lovely. Armed with a very basic understanding of genes, however, you can get stuck into more precise experiments. The notion that new varieties can only be developed by crop scientists and requires field-scale trials is nonsense. Anybody can do it.

Which leads to the question, why would you want to? Aren't there enough varieties already out there? Actually no. Despite the proliferation of new releases in the gardening catalogues each year, genetic diversity in food crops is dwindling at a scary rate. "New" varieties are often little more than marketing. And as most of the seed companies' business comes from commercial growers and not gardeners, the number of new varieties being developed for gardeners is close to zero. That's why gardeners are lumbered with nearly all dwarf peas (designed for ease of mechanical harvesting) when tall ones give much better yields, crops which ripen all at once when we'd prefer a steady supply over several weeks (again, for mechanical harvesting), and thick-skinned fruits (to withstand packing and transport). The rapid move towards F1 hybrids is another harmful trend, giving seed companies increasing control over what we grow. F1 seed is overpriced, overhyped, and doesn't come true from seed the following year ... so if you want to grow the same thing again you're obliged to go back and buy it again instead of saving your own seed. (Call the companies' bluff by sowing the seeds from hybrids and select the best plants each year to make an open-pollinated version.)

Add to that the problems caused in Europe by the short-sighted legislation in the 1960s, when in an attempt to thwart rogue traders the Common Catalogue was introduced across Europe to standardise vegetable seeds. It's illegal to sell seeds of varieties which are not listed in the Common Catalogue and inclusion on the list requires an outlay of hundreds of pounds for each variety. The result, over the last 40 years, has been a disastrous loss of biodiversity in every food crop across the entire continent. This is of course why the Heritage Seed Library exists (along with its many sister organisations across Europe) and why its work continues to be so important.

Purple and green sploshed and speckled peas, an unexpected result from a cross between a heritage pea and a modern one.

Back garden plant breeding is not just a rewarding hobby, it's an urgent imperative for the survival of our biodiversity. I hope that by sharing some of the basic information on how to do it, I might inspire others to give it a go. The varieties you order from the HSL each year make great candidates for home breeding projects, as they have a rich and varied genepool and often have traits which you'd never find in a modern commercial variety. Breeding from heritage varieties can produce spectacular results and it doesn't harm the variety in any way, as it's "as well as" not "instead of" maintaining the original strain as a pure variety.

Nature's way is abundance, she likes to mix things up, and there are plenty of genes to go around. Have some fun!

Jean Charles de Menezes: a carnival of perjury

2008-12-12T23:00:00.005Z

A gardening blog is not the place for a political commentary but I'm making this exception in the light of the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest which concluded today. I think the jury did their best to return the fairest verdict available to them, but the inquest, and the coroner who oversaw it, are a national disgrace.

I'm sickened and appalled by this corruption of justice and feel it's important to say so publicly.

I don't know how widely reported this incident has been outside the UK, so in case anyone doesn't know what it's about, it concerns a young Brazilian electrician in London who was shot in the head several times at point blank range by police officers who mistook him for a terror suspect.

Three years on, the coroner at his inquest barred the jury from returning a verdict of unlawful killing ... denying them their legal right to make their own minds up and effectively giving the police immunity from being held accountable.

What's more, the police appear to have told fibs to the court. All the civilian witnesses agreed that the police didn't give Jean any warning at all before executing him. But the officers saw fit to perjure themselves by claiming they did. The jury made it clear they didn't believe the police, but they were powerless to indict them for manslaughter.

So this poor man was killed by the state without so much as a by your leave and it's not manslaughter? Well I dunno what the hell else you call it. If the trigger had been pulled by anyone other than a serving police officer then they'd be on trial for murder. And you can't defend a murder charge by saying you meant to kill someone else.

I remember at the time of the shooting they initially justified their "mistake" by claiming that Jean vaulted over the barriers into the tube station and that he was wearing a bulky jacket which might have had a bomb under it - contrary to the accounts by other witnesses. Well, now that the CCTV images have been made public it's clear that neither of those things was true. The police have been lying about this case from day one.

The government have been whittling away at our rights and freedoms for years on the pretext of making us all safer, and somehow the anti-terror powers only seem to get used on the wrong people and for the wrong reasons (like the anti-war protesters here in Gloucestershire who had their collars felt under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act). You can now be arrested for making peaceful protests anywhere near the Houses of Parliament. Personally I believe the terrorism threat has been exaggerated as an excuse to pass bad laws, but that's another issue. I have nothing but contempt for the current British government and the illiberal intolerant ideology of Jacqui Smith, our po-faced hag of a home secretary.

So the de Menezes family have not had closure or justice. I hope they'll find the strength to keep fighting for it.

For now, the message being sent out by this blighted coroner is that it's acceptable for the police to blow someone's head off in a public place on the off chance that they might be a terrorist.

Well it isn't.

Ancestor worship

2008-11-27T20:49:00.004Z

Door handle on Aldham church in Essex. This is the second of the ancestral churches I visited. I couldn't get too close to the first one at Marks Tey because at the time of my visit it was occupied by a grunting tramp with an inside-out Tesco bag on his head.

I've been visiting my parents in Essex these last few days and took the opportunity to go for a little tour of my ancestral heartlands. With my interests in history and genetics it's probably no surprise to anyone that I also have an interest in genealogy, and have been working on my family tree for just over ten years (all of it – not just the direct male line – because genetically the female lines are equally important, and so the whole thing becomes endless like a jigsaw puzzle without edges).

My dad is from north Essex and all his ancestors came from the same cluster of villages in the Colne Valley near Colchester. In the mid 19th century my great-great-great grandfather was living in this cottage:

This is the Three Horseshoes pub in Fordham. It was originally three separate cottages, and I think my ancestors lived in the small one on the far left. My g-g-g-gf was a shoemaker, but he (and his father before him) were also clerks of the parish, which was quite a prestigious position involving the keeping of parish records and shows that they must have been literate. In Fordham there was also a plot of agricultural land which came with the job but I don't know where that was located. It was probably here in this cottage that my great-great-great grandmother who went by the curious name of Mary Bugg died while giving birth to her twelfth child (my great-great-grandfather). How they got 12 kids into a cottage this size I can't imagine. The right hand cottage was a blacksmith's forge at that time. In the 1860s when agriculture was in serious decline and work scarce, the blacksmith took to brewing his own beer and converted the forge into a pub. Hence the Three Horseshoes.

Fordham is a very pretty place spread over a wide area with a real sense of being in the middle of nowhere (and lots of mud). It's now a strange mixture of modern housing estates and ancient timber-framed cottages but still has a distinctive character. I do feel quite a connection with the place, which surprised me a little bit, because when I visited my mother's ancestral village of Stogumber in Somerset I didn't feel I belonged there at all.

My dad's family lived in Fordham for about 100 years. We know that most of them were buried in the churchyard there. So I spent a freezing cold hour squelching through the mud and brambles looking at all the graves and found absolutely nothing. It didn't help that most of the 19th century gravestones were completely illegible. I have more experience than most at deciphering old tombstones, having had a lifelong passion for cemeteries, but some of them were so worn away I couldn't even tell which side the inscription was on. It's most likely though that my forebears couldn't afford headstones and that I was trampling on their graves as I waded over the swathes of brambly tussocks.

Trundling back into the 18th century, the pre-Fordham generation came from the nearby village of Little Horkesley. However, there isn't quite the same sense of unbroken history here. During World War 2 a passing German aeroplane on its way back from bombing somewhere else jettisoned a leftover bomb which floated down on a parachute and plonked itself in the belfry of Little Horkesley parish church. As it dropped down into the nave it went off and blew the whole thing to buggery. When you look at how rural the area is, miles and miles of open fields, you get a sense of what extraordinarily bad luck it was for the lovely medieval church to take a direct hit. But in one sense it was quite fortunate, because the immensely thick ancient walls contained the blast and probably saved the whole village from oblivion.

Remarkably, a set of 13th century carved wooden effigies in the church survived, albeit rather damaged. And yet the rest of the destruction was so complete there was nothing left standing above 3 feet in height and not a single shard of glass from any of the windows was found.

A treat you occasionally find if you hang out in old churchyards. The Reverend Charles Henry Brocklebank has his name writ in moss as nature traces over the inscription on his wooden cross. Little Horkesley churchyard.

A number of other old gravestones from the original churchyard still survive, but again there was no trace of my ancestors among them.

Anyway, none of this has anything to do with gardening. But there is a connection. This part of Essex has a long history in the seed industry and was a former centre of vegetable breeding. There's still an enormous number of nurseries around the area and acres of old-fashioned glasshouses along the roadsides. Close by is the small town of Kelvedon, which gives its name to several vegetable varieties. Kelvedon Wonder is still one of the most popular and widely available peas, found in pretty much every catalogue since its introduction in the 1920s. A sweetcorn called Kelvedon Glory is also still going strong. At least one of the old seed companies still survives, E.W. King, which will be familiar to many people who buy heritage seeds in the UK as they do great work in maintaining some of the important old varieties on the National List.

I would have liked to pay a visit to the farm where Kings Seeds are produced, but they seem to be solely mail order these days. My parents and I did, however, pay a nostalgic visit to another nursery a mile or so up the road in Coggeshall. This was the place where I remember buying my first packets of vegetable seeds (though I don't remember what they were) in the mid 1970s. It has changed and expanded quite a bit since then, and I was delighted to find they had a couple of racks of Kings Seeds, so I was able to get what I was looking for after all.

Garlic time

2008-11-25T19:19:00.005Z

Newly harvested Rose de Lautrec bulbs, photographed in August. The unattractive brownish specimen on the right is how it looks when it comes out of the ground, but scrape away the outer wrappers to reveal the candy pink underneath.

2008 was a pretty good year for garlic. There was no repeat of the extreme rust attack of 2007 which completely encrusted and killed the plant tops (although the bulbs underground survived and were remarkably little affected). This year there was barely a speck of rust all season. And it was the same planting stock, i.e. this year's healthy crops grew from the bulbs that had been totally rust-stricken the year before. A lesson to be learned there I think, that no matter how bad the rust gets, garlic is irrepressible.

The robustness of garlic is probably an effect of it having evolved over the centuries to reproduce asexually. Having decided it can't be bothered to make flowers or set seeds any more, it relies completely on vegetative propagation, and that gives it an incentive to sprout for all it's worth and to thrive in a huge range of conditions. Another funny thing about garlic and its mega-adaptability is that it can change its flavour and colour from one garden to another, and even in the same garden from year to year. So you can never be absolutely sure what you're going to get. That and its weird requirement to be planted in the cold damp soggy soils of autumn just as everything else is dying off show it to be a plant which likes to do everything arse-about-face.

As usual I grew a few rows of Music, which is still my favourite garlic, unsurpassed for flavour as far as I'm concerned, and a couple of rows of Persian Star and Solent Wight.

In place of flowers, garlic plants produce bulbils. Heads made up of lots of tiny cloves. Although they look superficially a bit like flowers, the most important difference is at the molecular level. A flower creates seeds by stripping DNA apart and reassembling it (meiosis), which is always going to allow some scope for mutation and change, even if both halves of the DNA came from the same parent. Bulbils, however, are reproduced by the simple cell division (mitosis) which is part of the plant's normal growth. The DNA is left intact, so it doesn't change. Bulbils are therefore genetically identical to the plant they grew on.

Unusually plump and purple bulbil cluster on a Music plant, photographed in the summer

Bulbils on Music are usually quite small, but this year one of my plants produced a very different "head" from its companions. Instead of lots of tiny bulbils it had a weird spiky cluster of much bigger ones, and they were rounded and a darker purple in colour. I allowed that one scape to mature and now I have the bulbils saved and ready to replant. I don't know whether these bulbils are any different from the usual ones or whether the plant just decided on a whim to do something eccentric. They should still be genetically identical to the parent, in theory.

The experimental crop for 2008 was Rose de Lautrec, which I blogged about in February. I bought a 12-bulb manouille last November at a French market in Brighton, sold as eating stock rather than for planting. I wasn't wildly impressed with it at the time; it had a beautiful rosy pink colour but the flavour was OK and not quite the gourmet delight it's cracked up to be.

The problem with growing it at home is the Protected Geographical Indication ... if it's grown outside the Lautrec region in France it's not Rose de Lautrec any more. But I was curious to find out what would happen. After all, a PGI is not a Cinderella spell, the cloves don't suddenly turn to ash if you plant them in the wrong country.

I'm very pleased with how it turned out. The plants were healthy, though they were a bit prone to making double sprouts. The bulbs didn't turn out quite as pink as the original stock, but they still had a nice rosy blush. But most importantly, the flavour was better!

Rose de Lautrec is a hot and spicy garlic but loses the heat when it's cooked. With the original bulbs I bought, the heat was quite coarse and intense and would easily overwhelm a dish. And then when cooked it became a bit bland and it was hard to taste it at all. There was quite an art to using just the right amount and cooking it just enough. None of those problems with my homegrown stock though. The hot and spicy trait is still very much there but it's much more rounded and flavoursome, and when cooked it keeps all the flavour and only loses the intensity of heat. So it's easy to cook with and tastes good in everything.

Presumably the stuff I bought in Brighton was not in its prime, and my fresh and lovingly homegrown version is the "real" Rose de Lautrec tasting just as it should ... but ironically it's not Rose de Lautrec at all because it was grown outside its native region. D'oh!

So, now we're in garlic planting season again, all the same varieties are going back in for a 2009 crop, including Rose de Cheltenham which has earned its place in the garden, and I have three new ones to try.

I'm quite excited about these. They are all hardneck types and I got them from the garlic king himself, Patrick of Bifurcated Carrots, when I met up with him in Oxford a couple of months ago.

Dominic's Rocambole is a very elegant and classy garlic. It has such perfect snow white outer wrappers it seems a shame to break it open. The wrapping is actually made up of multiple layers of very thin fine silky parchment. But underneath them all you find the natural colour of the clove skins (shown above) which are a dusky golden cream, lightly streaked with mid pink and the occasional dark pink fleck. The cloves are so silky you can buff them up to a shine. They're extremely large so you only get about four in the bulb. Rocambole garlic is one of the best flavoured types.

Purple Glazer has around six plump little cloves of varying size. It doesn't look anything special with the bulb wrappers on, as the skins are quite coarse and brittle, but if you peel them away the cloves do have a nice purple colour. The best colour is revealed when you break the bulb open, as the purple is dark and intense on the inner parts of the clove wrappers. It belongs to a family of garlics called Purple Stripe.

Cuban Purple is shaped a bit like a water lily in its bulb form. It's a Creole type, which is probably the most exotically beautiful and deeply coloured garlic type. Its adapted to hot climates and not ideally suited to a British garden, but what the hell. It will probably only produce small bulbs here, but I don't mind that. The clove wrappers are silky and a beautiful rich purple with gentle stripes and streaks. My bulb had nine cloves of varying size. They're thin, curved and wedge shaped, not plump like the other two, though that may be partly due to it being grown in northerly climes.

Sweetcorn 2008

2008-11-12T23:27:00.007Z

If I had to choose one thing which did better for me in 2008 than anything else, and which was a constant surprise and delight, the prize would have to go to an American sweetcorn called Red Miracle.

I got the seed from my very kind friend Graham in south Wales who shares my love of red vegetables and has a talent for sourcing very rare seeds. It's not a variety you're likely to find in the UK, unfortunately, and there was no guarantee it would even grow properly over here. It was bred by the legendary 'Mushroom' Kapuler in Oregon, USA.

The seeds were translucent ruby red and almost too beautiful to plant. I started them in Rootrainers in the greenhouse and they delighted me by producing pink roots! The Rootrainers have a clear plastic tray so I was able to watch them spreading. Even at the seedling stage the young plants were infused with red which got more and more intense as they grew, some going a dark crimson-black by the time they matured, with a few bright green leaves for contrast. They reached a height of about four feet.

As far as I'm aware, Red Miracle is an open-pollinated variety, which is something of a rarity these days as nearly all commercially available seeds are F1 hybrids. There's a general perception that F1 hybrid sweetcorn is more vigorous and better tasting than open pollinated varieties. Sweetcorn is an extreme outbreeder and is always happiest when it's crossing with something else. But there's no reason why an open-pollinated variety can't be as good as an F1 ... as long as you're prepared to put up with some variability. Diversity in the plants is a reassuring sign of a lively genepool. Variability is a no-no for commercial growers but a pleasure for me, as every Red Miracle was different and uniquely beautiful.

Some plants were green with red stripes, others a much deeper red. Some produced fairly normal looking white silks, others produced bright pink ones! One of them had deep pinky red silks which glowed in the sun. The colour of the corn itself also varied, with a couple of plants producing yellow cobs or two-tone yellow and white, while the rest were deep blood red. There wasn't actually a correlation between these things ... some red plants produced white silks and some green plants produced pink ones, with all combinations showing up. The blackest red plant produced the whitest cobs, and the deepest red cobs came from green plants. There were intermediates too, including a cob where all the kernals were pink with a dark red spot (pictured left) and one where the kernals were yellow and white each with a tiny infusion of pink. What I didn't get is mixed colours showing up on a single cob (apart from the yellow and whites). Whatever colour the cob had was consistent throughout.

Now you may be thinking "yeah, well it looks very pretty, but what does it taste like?" The flavour was another delightful surprise. I wondered if there might be a trade-off between beauty and flavour. How can something that looks this spectacular taste good as well? Well it does. It has a lovely sweet old-fashioned flavour. And the red cobs are packed with beneficial anthocyanins, so they're healthier than normal corn too. The red fades somewhat with cooking, and turns the cooking water deep red instead! Even the core in the middle is red, so it still looks beautiful even after you've eaten it.

Open pollinated sweetcorn loses its sweetness more rapidly than hybrid corn, so I'm informed. But when you grow it in the garden you can cook it within minutes of picking, so that's not an issue.

Red Miracle lived up to its name and produced the biggest and best sweetcorn crop I've ever had, despite this year's crappy weather. It far exceeded the Swift F1 crop which had been my previous best-ever (in a good season). Some plants produced two full sized cobs even as the grey English skies pelted rain on them for weeks on end.

And now I've got some exciting new sweetcorn to try out next year. Take a look at this beautiful multi-coloured seed I've just received from Alan Bishop in Indiana, USA. It's called Astronomy Domine, and it comes in every colour from red, yellow, white, black, purple, blue, pink and maroon to bicolour stripey and speckled ... even green kernals have been showing up in Alan's crop this year. It's not yet a stable variety, it's an ongoing breeding project which has branched out into a worldwide collaboration.

A couple of years ago Alan started Astronomy Domine off with a mass-cross of over twenty different sweetcorn cultivars, open-pollinated and hybrids all mixed up together. The second year he added more varieties into the mix, including some with variously coloured kernals. Now at the F3 stage, there are around 55 varieties in its genepool. The resulting genetic diversity is massive, and Astronomy Domine is segregating for just about every trait imaginable in sweetcorn. As the project gathers momentum he's sending the seeds out to others to do their own work with. The huge diversity in the seed stock means it should be possible for people all over the world to develop locally adapted new strains from it. And also to cross it with yet more different varieties and send some seed back to Alan, to add to the genepool. It's going to be exciting!

Alan describes himself as "just a farmer/gardener with a messageboard", but he's being modest. He's an independent plant breeder who understands the importance of keeping centuries of knowledge and genetic heritage in the public domain, because the long term future of our food supply relies on biodiversity and on plant breeders working for the common good, not the homogenised patented seed controlled by big corporations. And he's making a significant direct contribution to that cause by sharing his own creations freely with other gardeners and plant breeders and by running a forum which has become an international meeting ground for other like-minded people, sharing knowledge, advice, seeds and friendship around the globe.

Alan also founded the Hip-Gnosis Seed Development Project, "a continuing endeavor to re-introduce old Open Pollinated food and flower crops as well as all new unique cultivars and seed mixes to the gardening public. We continuously select (year round) for new adaptations, unique colors, and higher nutritional content as well as taste and performance in our seed crops. We openly encourage everyone to share these special seeds far and wide."

So there you go. If that sounds interesting I suggest you come over to the Homegrown Goodness forum and join in the fun.

Maize trial in St James' Park, 1849

2008-11-12T22:48:00.006Z

Funnily enough, just as I was writing up the results of this year's successful sweetcorn endeavours I was leafing through the 1849 volume of the Illustrated London News (as you do) and came across some discourse about maize corn in England. The growing of any kind of maize (let alone sweetcorn) in the UK was still a pretty novel idea at the time, with only a handful of people having experimented with it, mostly with a view to using it as cattle fodder or as a cheaper alternative to other grains. The general opinion at the time was that the UK climate was too cold for maize and it would fail to ripen.

In September 1849 the ILN reported that an experimental hybrid maize crop was being grown in St James' Park in London, to establish whether this crop really was possible to cultivate in England. The trial site was an unfavourable spot surrounded by trees and shrubs "in the heart of the metropolis" and no manure had been used. Two other varieties were also trialled with it, an American maize and one from 'The Barbadoes'.

The immediate result of the trial was a disagreement among the ILN's readers:

As it turned out, the experimental maize thrived. The 'Barbadoes' and American corns apparently failed to reach maturity, but the "hybrid maize" (pictured above) did well:

"On Wednesday, the Maize introduced into this country from the Pyrenees, and sown as an experiment in St. James's Park, by Mr Keene, was harvested. It has fully succeeded. The grain is perfectly formed, full and ripe: the cobs are much finer than those grown on the Continent; a result – peculiarly gratifying in a public point of view – of very high importance; because it sets at rest the doubts which, in the first instance, were entertained in some quarters, that the soil and climate of this country were not capable of the product."

Greenhouse story

2008-11-04T15:44:00.005Z

I became the owner of a greenhouse this year for the first time in my life. I should have blogged about it in April and never got round to it, but better late than never.

For me, much of the appeal of greenhouses is the smell. And the memories evoked by it. The aroma of warm tomato foliage takes me straight back to my grandparents' garden in Colchester, Essex, where my grandfather (left) had a magnificent greenhouse in the middle of the back garden, a real focal point and centrepiece. He was a passionate gardener who grew flowers and vegetables and was particularly skilled at growing tomatoes. The garden was laid out in the classic English suburban style with what Alan Titchmarsh calls a "centrifugal lawn" with straight flower borders all around it (edged with geometric precision) and vegetables grown in a separate out-of-the-way area at the bottom end. As conventional as the design may have been, it was entirely his garden. He created it when he bought the house as a new-build in 1928 and nurtured it for the next 50 years.

I was 10 when he died but I never really knew him because he didn't talk much. He was a shy person and communicating with kids was not his forte, so I never really had conversations with him. I mainly knew him through his garden. I remember him showing me how to water plants, and how unimpressed I was when he told me to water the soil around the plants rather than just chucking it all over the foliage, which was a lot more fun. His garden was larger than the one we had at home and provided pleasures I'd never experienced before, such as sticking my hands into a big pile of grass cuttings on the compost heap and marvelling at the warmth inside, and the smell of the shed where his tools were kept, immaculately cleaned, oiled, sharpened and cared for (I wish I'd inherited that gene).

But the most intense memory is the smell of that greenhouse. It was an old-fashioned wooden one on a brick base, and it smelled of warm oiled wood mingled with the tang of tomato plants. I love that smell.

And now through the generosity of my parents I have one of these wonderful things in my own garden.

The site I chose for it was a neglected patch at the bottom of the garden. When I moved here in 2004 the garden was full of overgrown fruit trees and bushes which hadn't been pruned for years. I rejuvenated them (mostly successfully) but didn't know what to do with the piles of dead twigs, so they got dumped in a corner. And there they stayed until I got round to clearing them out and bringing the ground back into cultivation.

Clearing the site ...

And here it is.

I dithered for ages over where to go to get a greenhouse. There are lots of big stores around but I don't like the big chains ... I don't want to encourage them in their vile march towards total market domination. I don't shop at B&Q any more since they built a huge superstore a couple of miles outside town. I'm pissed off at the way these big corporations selfishly feck up the greenbelt with their loathsome warehouses and it's now impossible to get there without a car (the previous store was on the edge of town and within modest walking distance). I also find it a truly hateful shopping experience. The new superstore is vast and daunting and it's really hard to find anything. The staff are mostly hapless shelf-stackers unable to offer much help. Fellow shoppers are stressed out and bad-tempered, and the vast line of checkouts is like being shoved through a cattle market. Or a rugby scrum, when it's busy. What's really ironic is that the range of stuff they sell is not much bigger than it was at the previous shop, it's just bigger stocks of the same stuff, piled up higher on the shelves where you can't reach it anyway. I invariably find myself fighting back tears from the horribleness of it all. So I don't go any more.

I turned to the internet, and found what I wanted. Europa Manor make a 10' x 6' greenhouse which had exactly the spec I wanted and very good value for money. Even better, Europa Manor is a division of Eden Greenhouses which happens to be based within 5 miles of where I live. Buying local didn't make the delivery any cheaper but it did mean I got it in 5 days instead of the usual 2-5 weeks. But the difficult part was finding someone to put it up. Nobody advertises themselves as a putter-upper of greenhouses. If you look in the Yellow Pages you find dozens of companies wanting to flog you a greenhouse and install it at extra cost, but nobody offering to put one up which you've bought elsewhere. We tried several garden maintenance firms but it took a while to find one who would take it on, and it was pretty expensive. But we got there in the end.

The first residents moved in ... mostly tomatoes and peppers, plus a few peas waiting to be planted out. Yes that is a watering can you can see in the background with a bit of hosepipe running down from the guttering. It works a treat when there's overnight rain, it's just nicely filled up by the morning.

So I now have an enormous learning curve ahead of me. I already discovered this year the issue of grey mould. Yuk. That was partly because of something else I was experimenting with, which was allowing the tomatoes to grow freely. I had read that unpruned tomatoes are stronger and less vulnerable to blight. The greenhouse was probably not the best place to try it out, because by the beginning of August they were growing out through the roof and I could no longer get into the greenhouse at all. It also didn't seem to make any difference to the blight. All the greenhouse tomatoes were blighted, but it did spread a lot more slowly. And because the indoor fruits were about a month ahead of the outdoor ones, I got a much bigger and better crop from them anyway.

The frustration I have now, of course, is that the greenhouse is not big enough for more than eight or ten tomato plants, so I have to be ruthlessly selective with whatever I grow in there. Not easy when I have a backlog of Lycopersicon goodies I've collected in the last few years and some of my own breeding projects too.

Last dregs of blighted October tomatoes. The big ones are Copia, a variety I ordered from the US which didn't ripen fully in the climate here but fortunately still looks and tastes excellent when it's slightly unripe. The small round ones are my Marks & Sparks escapee, Green Tiger, which tastes fabulous and also takes this year's prize for blight-free abundance.

It was also a great pleasure to try growing chillis for the first time. One of the highlights was the bright yellow and curiously gnarled Lemon Drop, which is supposed to be lemon-flavoured but to me tasted more like peaches. Hot spicy peaches! It was a treat sliced up in a cheese sandwich and I'll definitely grow that one again.

Ripening Lemon Drop chillis. Hot, but in a fruity and flavoursome way rather than just blowing your head off, and better than anything you can buy in the supermarkets.

Purple GM tomatoes? Yeah right

2008-10-27T14:48:00.006Z

I don't exactly make a secret of my opposition to genetically modified foods, so you wouldn't expect me to be impressed by a piece in today's Guardian trumpeting the wonders of a new GM tomato. But actually I was bloody boiling mad after reading the piece. Not because of the GM tomato itself (nobody is trying to force me to eat it) but because the report is a gross and cynical misrepresentation.

"Tomatoes that have been genetically modified to be rich in antioxidants can give protection against cancer, a team of British scientists has found.

Researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich created the crop of purple tomatoes by altering them with genes from snapdragon flowers. In tests, mice that were prone to cancer lived almost a third longer if their diet was supplemented by the modified tomatoes.

The findings, which appear in the journal Nature Biotechnology, pave the way for a new generation of "functional foods" that could potentially offer protection against serious diseases.

Derek Burke, former chair of the UK's regulatory committee on GM, said: "This is a truly positive outcome from genetic modification of plants, and a real help to people wanting to improve their diets." "

It's not that the health claims being made here are untrue. Purple fruits and veg are rich in anthocyanin which is already known to have health benefits and may indeed be useful in fighting cancer, which is why most of my pea-breeding projects focus on producing purple peas. These findings are not new, and I don't dispute them.

The suggestion, however, that this is a wonderful new breakthrough only made possible by genetic engineering is complete and utter bollocks.

To the general public who are used to seeing only red tomatoes in the shops, the idea of a purple tomato may seem quite novel (and for sure they have nice pictures of it and it looks very pretty). But for those who browse heirloom seedlists they're not exactly new. I seem to recall seeing a packet of exquisitely purple toms from the SSE floating around in Patrick's box at the Oxford seed swap. Admittedly I haven't seen any with the intensity of purple shown in the GM ones, but the point is that if tomatoes can naturally produce anthocyanin then they can be selectively bred to produce larger amounts of it. No gene splicing from the flower borders required.

So I really have to ask ... what the hell is the point? Normal red tomatoes are naturally rich in lycopene which is another nutritional wonder-pigment. Orange tomatoes are generally rich in beta-carotene which makes Vitamin A. You are already doing plenty of good to your health if you eat red and orange tomatoes.

More or less any fruit or veg with purple colouring is already packed with anthocyanin. Blackberries, blueberries, blackcurrants, jostaberries. Red cabbage. Aubergines (egg plants). Cherries. Purple sprouting broccoli. Red wine.

Which begs the question, why go to all that trouble to splice anthocyanin into tomatoes? It adds nothing to western diets. It uses an expensive patented technology which the consumer will ultimately have to pay for. And it's being presented to the public in a cynical haze of hype and spin.

Whatever the motivations of the team who developed this tomato, who may have had good reasons, I am disgusted with the way the report is being carried in the media. It looks to all intents and purposes like a propaganda campaign on behalf of the industry. GM technology getting the credit for something that nature is producing perfectly well by herself. A cynical attempt to sell the idea of GM foods to the general public on the basis that most people don't know much about the science of plant pigments and won't realise it's a marketing wheeze.

I find it quite scary that the former chair of the UK's regulatory committee on GM is trumpeting this tomato as a nutritional advance. I wonder what planet these people are on and whether they read anything other than Monsanto brochures.

Want to get the benefit of this amazing cancer-eradicating anthocyanin stuff? Then take my advice. Eat more blueberries.

EDIT: Here we go, it has already been done. Many thanks to Graham for pointing me to this excellent discussion about a purple-blue tomato bred by Oregon State University using conventional methods. It has an exceptionally high anthocyanin content (as well as the usual carotenoids) and is derived from crosses with wild tomato species. All in the public domain and being freely shared among breeders.

Daughter of the Soil - now with added dotcom

2008-10-17T23:02:00.005+01:00

I mentioned before that there was going to be a little change in the way I post my Heritage Vegetable Reviews this year. Instead of going on the blog, they'll be going on their own permanent pages on the Daughter of the Soil companion website (whooooo - swish eh?)

I've kept a bit quiet about this companion site because I needed some time to get it up and running properly, but I've been working on it behind the scenes over the summer ... very slowly because I'm still a bit of a dunce with the page layout software. Though actually the biggest trouble is that I keep thinking of more things I want to add to it, making loads more work for myself.

The companion website can be found (not entirely surprisingly) at www.daughterofthesoil.com. It's not a replacement for the blog, which carries on as normal, it's just attached to and interlinked with it. Where the blog is ever-changing (or it would be if I got my backside into gear), the website aims to organise some of the existing content of the blog into a stable and static form to make it easier to find things. Much as I value my regular readers, it's clear that a large proportion of visitors here are coming through Google looking for information about specific things. I want to have a centralised place for all my reviews and informative articles so people can browse them more easily. There's so much material on this blog now, even I haven't got a clue where to find half of it.

Over time, I will be adding goodies and resources to the website which are NOT on the blog.

One biggish project I've done so far (not yet complete but hopefully still useful) is a reference chart of heritage vegetable varieties briefly describing individual characteristics of a whole load of varieties I've grown in my garden. There are clickable links to pictures for each trait listed. So for example you can click on the description of a Ne Plus Ultra pea flower or a ripe Green Tiger tomato and see a picture of one. I'm hoping this will evolve into a really useful quick reference guide for anyone seeking heritage vegetable information.

I've put all my reviews on their own permanent pages, with a centralised index page. There are a few I haven't got round to posting yet, and I'm still making fancy new pages for some of the older reviews, but most of the links are up and running. These are the new Heritage Vegetable Reviews for 2008 that I've posted so far:

Climbing French Bean: Major Cook's - wonderful scrummy bean of WW1 vintage, soon to be available from the Heritage Seed Library.
Pea: Carouby de Mausanne - a very old French mangetout variety with very purty flowers.
Pea: Gravedigger - a gorgeously sweet and juicy mid-height pea, soon to be available from the Heritage Seed Library.
Pea: Irish Preans - a mega-tall one (also from HSL) with bicolour flowers and huge olive green seeds. Said to be a cross between a pea and a broad bean but I'm afraid it most certainly isn't.
Pea: Salmon-Flowered - a real oddity from the HSL which I believe to be a relic of the antique 'crown pea'.
Tomato: Green Tiger - already posted here on the blog as I try to draw attention to this lovely supermarket escapee.
Tomato: Orange Strawberry - see my Goddess Tomato post below for a taste of this oxheart beauty.

There will also eventually be a section about plant breeding, but all I've got on there at the moment is the data table for my Yellow Sugarsnap Project which is only really of interest to nerds like myself.

NB The blog URL is not changing. This is additional to, not instead of, the existing URL.

The joy of Mendelian segregation ... illustrated!

2008-10-16T23:26:00.005+01:00

Nature makes order from randomness.

The photo above shows one of the pods from my Yellow Sugarsnap Project with peas segregating for seed colour. The pod is from one of my F2 hybrid plants (the second generation after the original cross) so the peas inside are F3. As immaculate as this alternating pattern is, it's entirely random.

I've just spent three days typing up descriptions of all my little packets of F3 seed from the Yellow Sugarsnap Project into a nice tidy table, and even as I handled each of my sixty-two seed packets (each plant's seeds carefully saved separately) and stared at them hour after hour I didn't notice the pattern. I noticed that some of the packets of seed are very uniform while others show a bit of variability. I thought that factor might be significant, so for each one I wrote down how variable the seeds were, and which traits they varied for. Sometimes it was size or colour, but more often it was a case of a few wrinkly seeds showing up in a batch of smooth ones. I dutifully jotted all this down but I still didn't notice the pattern. D'uh!

And then I was asked to do a little recorded talk about Mendel and his peas for a University of Bath podcast, just a very brief grounding in the history of genetics for psychology undergraduates. Not trusting myself to not screw it up, I did some refresher-research on Mendel. And in doing so I thought very hard about his experiments, and how he'd been the first person to notice the recurrence of 3:1 ratios in inherited traits. And it was only then that I twigged that there was a pattern in the seeds I'd collected from my pea project. So I raked them all out of the box and sorted them into different groups, and ker-ching! There it was. A beautiful and very obvious ratio.

As like as two peas in a pod? These F3 seeds from my Yellow Sugarsnap Project vary from smooth to wrinkled in the same pod, as well as varying for colour.

As a romantic idle speculation, I wonder whether Mendel found the same thing in his peas and got the initial idea for dominant/recessive segregation from it. Peas have this wonderful advantage over pretty much all other vegetables, that certain traits show up visibly in the seeds. If Mendel had been experimenting with tomatoes or brassicas this wouldn't happen because the seeds all look very similar no matter how different their genes are. He would have to actually grow the plants to see the differences between them. But with peas being the way they are, he must have seen a pattern very similar to what I have here.

The pattern is this: a number of my seed packets from the F2 plants have perfectly uniform round peas, with no wrinkles. A similar number have all wrinkled peas, with not a single round one among 'em. But a larger number have got variability for wrinkliness. And in every one of these cases they have, roughly speaking, a quarter wrinkled and three-quarters round. There are no other ratios. None of the packets have mostly wrinkled with just a few round, or even half and half. They all have an approximate 3:1 ratio in favour of round peas. A Mendelian ratio in other words. In fact there are two Mendelian ratios at the same time. The packets of round or predominantly round seed outnumber the packets of wrinkled seed by about 3:1, while the ratio of round to wrinkled within each of the variable seed packets is also 3:1.

I sorted the seed packets into types. On the left are all the seeds which are completely round with no wrinklies. On the right are the ones with all wrinklies and no roundies. In the middle are the packets which show a mixture of types. There are roughly twice as many in this middle group, as you can see.

Wrinkliness is one of the traits Mendel experimented with, and he found it to be recessive to roundness. This is now known as the R locus. The round-seeded allele is R and its wrinkle-seeded alternative is r. My original cross was between Golden Sweet (RR) and Sugar Ann (rr), so the resulting F1 hybrid must have had a genotype of Rr. Recombining those Rr genotypes in the F2 generation can go any of four ways, with visible effects in the seeds, like this:

Genotypes in the F2 plants can clearly be assigned to their four respective groups.

Why does seed wrinkliness matter? Well, it's a very useful trait for pea breeders to look out for because it's a rule-of-thumb indicator of sweetness. Sugars shrink more than starches do within pea seeds, so the sweeter ones tend to end up more wrinkly. A high sugar content doesn't guarantee a good flavour (as I found in my taste tests with these) but it helps.

It's obviously very useful to be able to identify the seeds which are likely to produce plants with sweet-tasting peas before you've sown them. If I want to breed a sweet-tasting variety I can just pick out and sow the wrinkly seeds and not the round ones, which will greatly increase my chance of getting what I want. This is a really unusual situation, and only works because the desirable trait shows up in the seed itself in an obvious way, when most other traits don't – you have to grow the plants to find out what their genetic make-up is, and even then you can't always tell. It's only because wrinkliness is recessive that I can be confident it will breed true.

Let me explain from a practical point of view. Dominant traits are a pain in the backside for plant breeders to work with. Say I wanted to breed a new pea with purple flowers, based on a cross between a purple-flowered and a white-flowered variety. Purple flowers show straightforward dominance in peas, so I would get ALL purples in the F1 generation followed by an F2 generation which was three-quarters purple and a quarter white. So I would obviously proceed by saving seed from all the purple-flowered F2s and removing the whites. When I sow the seeds from the purple-flowered plants, will they simply produce more purple-flowered plants? No, only a third of them will be true-breeding for purple. The rest will still have the recessive white-flower allele lurking in their DNA, hidden by its dominant purple twin. Although they look like true purples on the outside, those plants will again produce a 3:1 ratio of purples to whites. Unfortunately there's no way to tell which are true-breeding and which aren't, other than by growing them and removing all the whites in each generation until they eventually stop showing up.

Recessive traits, by contrast, are a joy. They show up in smaller proportions of course, but once you have a plant with the requisite pair of recessive alleles it should breed true from then on without any further mucking about.

That's why the sweet-wrinkly seeds showing up in a Mendelian ratio is such a godsend. Laying all these peas out on my desk in their individual packets, I can see their exact genotype for the R gene at a glance. The round seeded ones are RR and will breed true for roundness. The wrinkled ones are rr and will breed true for wrinkliness. The ones that are mostly round with a few wrinklies are Rr or rR (which amount to the same thing) and will continue to show variability in their offspring.

This is incredibly handy. Not only can I identify the sweet ones without having to grow them all and taste them, I can see which of them are true-breeding for sweetness/wrinkliness. If I want to be sure of getting a full complement of wrinkliness in my plants for ever after, I can instantly pick out the ones with the fully recessive genotype and Bob will be my uncle.

The reason this is possible is because this segregation for seed type is showing up within different peas on the same plant. Compare that to the situation with flowers. If some of the plants were obliging enough to produce a load of purple flowers and a smattering of whites all on the same plant, that would be great. I would know those were not true-breeding for purple. But they don't. They produce all purple flowers and keep the whites hidden in their genome to pass on to their offspring unseen.

OK, so we've established that the plants which produce only smooth, rounded seeds must be RR, and because they have a matching pair of alleles their offspring will also be RR. The technical name for this is homozygous. Exactly the same is true of the plants which produced only wrinkled seed. They are also homozygous, because their genotype must be rr and so all their offspring will be rr too.

The plants which produced a mixture of round and wrinkled types have to be heterozygous. Instead of a matched pair of alleles they have one of each type. That means that when they make seeds they will randomly pass on the four possible combinations to their offspring: RR or rr (which are both homozygous and will breed true) or Rr or rR (which are heterozygous and won't). The heterozygous seeds will express their dominant allele and hide their recessive one, so they will look the same as the RR seeds, and so once again there will appear to be a ratio of 3 rounded to 1 wrinkly.

Note that it's the plants which produced these seeds which are heterozygous, not the seeds themselves. Half the seeds in the heterozygous batch will actually be homozygous, but the other half remain heterozygous and will produce variable offspring which are half homozygous and half heterozygous, and so on ...
These seed packets are all siblings from the Yellow Sugarsnap project ... I still can't get over the amazing diversity made by this one simple cross!

With the two quarters of homozygous seeds separating out like this, you can see that in each generation half the heterozygosity is lost. If continued for a few generations it will all but disappear. That's how new varieties are stabilised.

In practical terms, what does that mean for these packets of variable seeds from the heterozygous F2 plants? Well, I know that I have all four classes mixed up here in approximately equal amounts, and I can see which seeds are homozygous (true-breeding) for wrinkliness, because they're wrinkled. Unfortunately I can't see which ones are homozygous for round seeds, because they look exactly the same as the heterozygous ones. Hence this 3:1 ratio of round to wrinkled. If I were to sow all these seeds, I would find the same 3:1 ratio in the next generation too, and onward.

Finally, a little reminder that all I'm looking at here is the R locus, the gene controlling wrinkliness. That's just one of many thousands of genes in every pea. Segregation is taking place at every other locus at the same time! If I select identical-looking wrinkled peas, I can assume they will be true-breeding for wrinkliness but they may differ enormously in other traits.

Wow, my head feels weird now.

The joy of genes ... illustrated!

2008-09-30T15:26:00.004+01:00

Patient readers who have put up with me banging on about gene segregation and F2 hybrids ... here's a little photo sequence from one of my breeding projects to show the process in action. I hope this will be a lot more interesting and meaningful than my simply talking about it, since it shows what amazing and beautiful diversity is locked up within every seed. If it inspires you to have a go at some hybridisation yourself ... so much the better.

OK, so these are pictures of pea seeds from my Yellow Sugarsnap project. It matters not what the objective of the project is or how close I am to achieving it ... this is just an illustration of what happens when you cross two varieties.

In this case I started off with Golden Sweet, an old heirloom supplied by the Real Seed Catalogue, and Sugar Ann, a bog-standard commercial variety from a garden centre.

The original parent varieties. Golden Sweet (left) has dimpled tan or grey seeds with purple speckles, while Sugar Ann has pale grey-green or cream seeds which are more wrinkled and slightly bullet-shaped.

So I made a cross between these two varieties, thus creating an F1 hybrid, and this is what the seeds looked like:

F1 hybrid between Golden Sweet and Sugar Ann

Sorry this is a bit of a small sample, but I'd already planted most of my F1 seeds by the time I took the photo. Anyway, you may notice that the F1 hybrid seed looks exactly the same as the original Golden Sweet seed. There's a good reason for that. The embryo hidden deep within the seed has the hybrid DNA made by the cross-pollination, but the rest of the seed (including its outward shape and colour) is the product of the mother plant. Therefore it looks just like any other seed produced by the mother plant. If I'd done the cross the other way and used Sugar Ann as the mother plant, then all the F1 seeds would have looked like Sugar Ann.

The next step was to grow the F1 seeds and collect seed from them, giving me the F2 generation. I didn't make any further crosses ... as peas are self-pollinating, all I had to do to obtain the F2 seed was to grow the F1 plants and allow them to produce seed naturally. This is the result:

F2 hybrid between Golden Sweet and Sugar Ann (i.e. the seeds from the F1 plants)

Hey up, now we've got something happening. The F2 seeds no longer look exactly like the Golden Sweet parent. In fact if you look closely they're all different. The differences are quite subtle but they vary in colour, size and shape. Some are wrinkly while others are smooth or dimpled. Some have purple speckles, others are plain. They show a jumbled up mixture of traits from the original parent varieties, caused by the random segregation of genes from both parents.

This is the point where plant breeding becomes immensely fun. Because every one of these F2 seeds produces a plant that is unique. And once again I don't need to do any crosses, I just grow the F2 plants and let them set seed naturally to produce the F3 seeds. And I get THIS:

F3 hybrid between Golden Sweet and Sugar Ann (i.e. the seeds from the F2 plants)

This is actually just a random sample, the first nine plants to reach maturity. There were many many more variations, but these few are enough to show you what's happening. I've saved seed from each F2 plant individually, and you can see that there is some consistency in the seed type for each plant, but HUGE variability between plants. Plant 58 produced seeds the same shape as Sugar Ann but a much brighter green and with purple speckles. Plant 02 produced seeds the same shape as Golden Sweet but green instead of tan. Plant 25 produced exceptionally wrinkled seed with no speckles. Plant 09 produced large round smooth yellow seeds which are totally unlike either of the original parents. Plant 14 shows some variability within itself but again a spectacular diversion from the original parent varieties, because the whole seed coat is sploshed with solid purple with a few bright greens and pinks thrown in.

Same image, detail

Every one of these packets of F3 seed is a brand new, unique variety in its own right. I could give them all names and launch them on the world. There wouldn't be much point doing so, partly because their offspring would still show some variability and further segregation (so they need to be stabilised for a few more generations first) but also because they won't all be worth pursuing. At a glance I'd say that Plant 09 with its big smooth yellow seeds is probably not going to taste good. In fact I did eat some of its seeds while they were still fresh and they were hard, mealy and bitter. By contrast, the exceptionally wrinkled seeds of Plant 25 indicate an exceptional sweetness, confirmed by taste tests, and that one is probably worth pursuing. Plant 37 also looks useful, as it has the supersweet ultra-wrinkled seed combined with pretty purple, pink and green colouring. There's enough interesting material here to keep me occupied for years. All from a single cross!

Anyway, what I hope this illustrates is that all these seeds are different from the original parent varieties in ways I couldn't have imagined when I made the cross. There are some familiar traits showing up, but also a lot of brand new ones which weren't displayed by either parent. And some of those brand new traits are really quite exciting.

What these pictures show is segregation for seed-coat colour and seed shape. Because in peas those two traits are readily observable. Of course the same level of segregation is happening to ALL traits right across the genome, with potentially millions of different combinations. I hope this gives some idea of how much diversity and scope for new varieties is possible just from making one simple cross-pollination.

Goddess tomatoes and seasonal joys

2008-09-28T20:37:00.003+01:00

A plethora of newly harvested heritage beans

With all the crises I've been dealing with over the summer, the garden has been badly neglected this year. To the point where I'd be embarrassed to let anyone see it, even a non-gardener. I've managed to look after the crops OK, but I didn't keep on top of the weeds earlier in the season and they've got themselves well entrenched. And I had to steel myself to go out there and start dealing with them today, because I'm making a change to my gardening method this year.

Normally I allow the garden to biodegrade gracefully in its own time over the winter. It's partly laziness and partly hippy idealism. My reasoning is that by leaving a tangle of last year's decaying crops on the land over winter I'm providing shelter for overwintering insects, seeds for birds to eat, and ground cover to protect the soil, and by January it's all nicely broken down and easy to dig in ... a nice bit of organic matter to enrich the soil. But in the last couple of years it hasn't worked out so well because it also provides the perfect overwintering conditions for slugs and snails, whose numbers have erupted out of control over the course of two wet summers. So I'm afraid this year I'm clearing it all and the wildlife will have to find somewhere else to shelter. I'm hoping the birds and frogs will quickly gobble up the snails, or else they'll bugger off into next door's garden (where he doesn't actually grow anything so they won't bother him).

But I do have quite a task on my hands. It's a case of: Hmmm, I'm sure there are some gooseberry bushes somewhere over here under these swathes of long grass. I'll just carefully insert a gloved hand and OOOOOOOWWWWWW FUUUUUUUUUCK! Oh yes, there's one.

One thing that will directly benefit the wildlife (birds, mice and slow worms anyway) is the continued incapacitation of the Ginger Peril. We had another crisis recently when his bandage slipped and reopened his operation wound, which had to be stitched up again. And of course it had to happen on a Sunday, requiring a trip to the emergency out-of-hours vet, who charged £113 for a temporary bandage to last him until the morning. It also meant an extra two weeks in the cage, bringing his confinement time to 6 weeks. But he does look cute in his little plastic bonnet.

Most of the harvest is safely gathered in now. The last of the bean crops are now drying indoors, as seen below. The dark curvy ones on the left (and shelled out in the bowl) are Major Cook's Bean, which I'm growing for the Heritage Seed Library as part of their Seed Guardians scheme, and which has been so spectacularly prolific it's going to cost a small fortune to post it back to them. Look out for it in next year's catalogue, it's a corker. I've posted a full review of it here. In the middle are the dried out pods of the similarly abundant Poletschka (thanks Celia) and to the right some green-yellow San Antonio from the Heritage Seed Library, which also did well for me.

The area you see here spread with beans is the bed in the spare room. Needless to say we don't have many guests to stay at this time of year.

You will notice that I harvest bean pods for seed-saving as soon as they're mature, and dry them indoors rather than leaving them outside to dry on the plants, as is often recommended. The reason for that is the unpredictable weather, which can ruin an otherwise excellent crop if the rains decide to come down heavy in September. This year they haven't, and September has turned out to be better than August, but I wasn't taking any chances. It does no harm to harvest them at this earlier stage, as the plants have already given them as much nourishment as they're going to get. It is important though to keep them well ventilated, ideally by spreading them out so they aren't touching, and turning them regularly. If you don't, they can easily go mouldy.

And no harvest would be complete without a parade of weirdness. And so I proudly present my Threefold Goddess Tomato. She's taken her time to ripen, but here she is.

The bottle-top is for scale (gave me an excuse to crack open a beer anyway)

She is the Divine Feminine expressed in fruit. She is essentially three tomatoes fused together in harmonious symmetry, born out of one flower with an unusually wide stigma, and endowed with various crevices and hollows which look a bit ... erm ...

Anyway, she was the first fruit produced by an exotic variety called Orange Strawberry which I grew in my greenhouse. It's an oxheart type, which means it's large, heart-shaped (normally it is, honest) and exceptionally fleshy inside with very few seeds. It's really a cooking tomato, and has a wonderful flavour when cooked as well as this glorious bright orange colour. See here for a full review. Not one you'll find in garden centres ... I got my seeds from Association Kokopelli.

Heritage vegetable review Tomato: Green Tiger

2008-09-26T19:22:00.007+01:00

Age: don't know ... information is scarce
Background: a supermarket tomato which has made an impact with resourceful gardeners
My supplier: Marks & Spencer
Pros: beautiful, prolific, tasty, holds up fairly well against blight
Cons: none

OK, so Green Tiger isn't really a heritage variety at all. At least I don't think it is. Reliable information about it is extremely scarce, so I don't really know where it comes from. Marks & Spencer have been selling punnets of this fruit in their UK supermarkets claiming that the variety is exclusive to them, and you certainly can't buy the seeds anywhere. But I was quite impressed with it, so I saved seeds from it to grow myself. As I googled around for more information (unsuccessfully) I came across a lot of other gardeners who have saved seed from it and are growing it for themselves. So it is, in a sense, a "folk tomato" ... introduced for non-gardening commercial use and spontaneously taken over by the people.

I first saw it in my local branch of Marks & Spencer's in 2006 and was attracted to its unusual appearance. It stood out a mile among the boring red homogenised tomatoes ... a deep red rounded fruit with a glossy skin and dark olive green stripes. I do commend M&S for their commitment to trying out new and unusual things, and this is undoubtedly the most interesting tomato I've ever seen on a supermarket shelf. I couldn't resist buying a punnet of them, and they tasted pretty good. Not the best I've ever had, but good enough that I wanted to try growing it. Commercially grown fruit is never in its prime, as it's usually picked prematurely and chilled to within an inch of its life. So if a supermarket tomato tastes good, it should taste better when home grown. The shop-bought fruit had been grown in Kent, so obviously could cope with the British climate.

Of course the down side of saving seed from supermarket fruit is that you don't have any idea whether or not it's an F1 hybrid. If it is, it won't come true from seed. Not that that's necessarily a problem. Last time I took a fancy to a "Marks & Spencer's exclusive" tomato, Pink Jester, it did turn out to be an F1 hybrid and there was a lot of variability in the seeds I saved. Some were very like the original though, and others were slightly different in shape but had an even better flavour. So I've been happily growing out the F3 lines ever since, and I'm glad I saved seed from it when I did because it soon vanished from the shops. I expected much the same situation with Green Tiger ... hoping it might be an open-pollinated variety which would breed true, but prepared for the likelihood that I'd get a weird mish-mash of types and would have to select the ones I liked.

The first attempt to grow it in 2007 was a failure, because the blight struck incredibly early and destroyed all of my outdoor tomato crops before they'd even set their first fruits. In 2008 however, armed with a newly erected greenhouse, I got a superb crop. Two more plants grown outdoors did less well, producing lots of fruit but struggling to ripen them, so I'd suggest this variety is better suited to greenhouse culture. But the important thing is, all three plants were essentially the same as the original and each other. Green Tiger is a proper open-pollinated variety! Yay!

Green Tiger plants have broad leaves of a very dark green, and the leaves have rounded edges. It's quite an elegant plant compared to yer average tomato. Growth is indeterminate, but not exactly rampant. It took all of the season to reach the roof of the greenhouse, and one I grew in a pot on the patio remained quite bushy and compact.

Flowers are small and star-shaped with a slight dark blush on the petals. They grow in short trusses with chunky peduncles bent at rightangles. The calyx is a dark green star, broad and chunky.

Young fruits are a bright emerald green, shiny and spherical. The stripes don't start to develop until they're close to reaching full size. The earliest fruits are about the size of a golf ball, but later ones are more cherry tomato sized. As they near ripeness the green stripes darken, and the rest of the fruit takes on an orangey-brown hue, eventually ripening to a deep dark burgundy red with a more bright and intense red at the top of the fruit (hidden under the calyx, so you only see it after picking). The green stripes stay green, and are kind of mottled. It's an unusually dark green, like a very dark olive.

The surface of the skin is very shiny and attractive. Like most commercial varieties, it has quite a thick skin and stays very firm even at full ripeness. This is what commercial growers want, to enable it to withstand packing and handling. The advantage it has to gardeners is that the fruits are fairly resistant to splitting.

Cut open, the flesh is thick and the fruits hold their shape well ... not at all squashy even when fully ripe. The colour is a deep dark red, darker than most tomatoes, and presumably this means it has high levels of beneficial lycopene. There are two locular cavities with plenty of seeds and the gel is a dark green infused with red.

Flavour is good ... just what you want for an eating tomato. It has a rich and full flavour with a nice balance of sweet and sharp.

In my greenhouse, Green Tiger was the variety that held out best against blight. That's not to say it's blight resistant ... it isn't ... more blight tolerant. The leaves succumb in the usual way but the fruits seem to keep going without any problems. Consequently I got a very good yield from it and was able to keep picking fruits over a long period, even as other varieties keeled over around it.

I'm still curious about where this tomato comes from. It was apparently introduced by Bernard Sparkes, a farmer in West Lancashire, but it's not clear whether he bred it himself or brought it in from elsewhere. Marks & Spencer's are marketing it as their own "exclusive" variety, but I wonder what that actually means. Did they commission it? Or does "exclusive" simply mean that they're the only store currently selling it? Is Green Tiger its real name, or just for marketing purposes? I'm a little sceptical about the names and claims made by supermarkets. But certainly this variety doesn't seem to be available in garden centres or seed catalogues. If it really is an exclusive it may well have Plant Breeder's Rights on it, in which case tough shit because it's already doing the rounds at informal seed swaps across the UK.

I'd definitely recommend this. Whether you pick it up through a seed swap or scrape some seeds out of a supermarket fruit (not sure if they're still selling it, and if they are it's only a limited season) it's well worth giving it a go.

I'm changing the way I post Heritage Vegetable Reviews ... they will soon be available all together on their own website. Watch this space!

Saving seed from tomatoes

2008-09-22T17:53:00.004+01:00

Tomato seeds for future generations, in pulps of all colours. Banana Legs (left), Black Prince (top), Douce de Picardie (right), and Caro Rich (bottom).

Bugger the credit crunch ... you need never pay for a packet of tomato seeds again if you adopt the age-old practice of saving your own. Even a single fruit will yield enough seeds to last you for years (or to share with your friends) and they can quite easily stay viable for 10 years or more, so it's really well worth doing. As tomatoes are naturally inbreeding and self-pollinating, you can get away with growing a small number of plants and saving just a small number of fruits. Seed saving doesn't work with F1 hybrids, but frankly most F1 hybrids are a rip-off anyway.

There are basically two ways of saving seed from tomatoes. The recommended way is to ferment them in their own gel, which works very well but is a little fiddly and icky. And then there's the quick bodge-job method, which is often frowned upon but works perfectly well in my experience. Personally I use both ... the proper method for larger amounts (saving seed from two fruits or more) especially if I intend to give them away to others, and the bodge-up method for small amounts (one to two fruits).

Either way, the ideal thing is to use tomatoes that are over-ripe ... past the point where you'd want to eat them. I often compromise by using only slightly over-ripe fruits, cutting off any bits which have gone manky and stewing up the remainder in a pan with olive oil to make a lovely sauce. That way nothing gets wasted. You CAN save seed from tomatoes which are still green, but the less mature they are the more risk there is that the seeds are immature, in which case they may not germinate.

If possible, avoid saving seed from plants suffering from blight. I say "if possible" because frankly the blight problems have become so bad in the UK it's almost impossible to grow a totally blight-free crop these days. If you have a plant you really want to save seed from and it has blight, save seed as early in the season as you can (even if the fruits are not fully ripe) and choose the least affected fruits.

Even with the more elaborate method, saving tomato seeds is very easy. Just try not to use the unladylike language I did this morning when I dropped a load of partially dried Caro Rich seeds all over the carpet (it had to be a beige carpet, didn't it?)

The fermentation (recommended) method
Slice open your chosen fruit(s) and spoon out the seeds, complete with their surrounding gel, into a small jar or container. Clear glass is ideal so that you can see what's going on in there during fermentation, but any container will do ... a jam-jar or a plastic yoghurt tub. The little glass dishes you get with overpriced puddings from Waitrose are ideal. Whatever you use, it needs to be narrow enough to create a bit of depth when you put the seeds and gel into it. Most people add a small amount of water. It doesn't make a lot of difference either way, but a bit of water seems to help things along. Use a separate dish for each variety you're saving seed from (that should be obvious but I'd better say it anyway).

Cover the jar with a scrap of foil and leave it somewhere like a windowsill for about two to four days.

After a day or two you should notice some changes happening in the jar. Bubbles, for one thing. They may not be active fizzy bubbles, but there should at least be some bubbles hanging around in there. The other thing you'll get is a hideous crust of mould over the surface. This is entirely normal and should be left undisturbed.

I'm fascinated by the diversity of mould that appears on tomato pulp. Sometimes it's a pale waxy yeast-like gunge over the surface, and sometimes it's more bluey patches, or little white hairs. Occasionally you get the whole jar filled up with soft dry fluffy stuff like grey candy floss, which flexes to the touch like a delicate sponge.

Ewwwwww!

After a few days you can tip the yukky stuff out and retrieve your seeds. It's difficult to give a time scale for when to do it, it's not a precise science. Allow the mould to grow right over the surface, and it should be ready shortly after that. The main thing is not to leave the seeds fermenting too long, or they will start to germinate and be ruined. Fermentation happens much faster in warm conditions, and can be ready in as little as 24-48 hours in a hot climate. More usually though (in European countries) 3, 4 or 5 days is about right.

When you're ready to decant the slop, the first step is to gently peel back the mould layer with a teaspoon. Sometimes it just peels back as easy as anything like custard skin, other times it's more irksome. Either way, there will probably be some seeds sticking to the underside of it. You have two options at this point. You can go "uuuuuuuuurrrrrrgh!" and lob the whole lot straight in the bin. Or you can carefully hold the mould disc aloft and scrape the seeds off with a teaspoon. It all depends on how precious the seeds are and how squeamish you are about mould.

Once it's denuded of its mould layer, slop out the contents into a fine-meshed sieve or a tea-strainer, and gently wash it under a slow-running tap. It can take a bit of rubbing to get rid of all the fleshy pulp, but eventually you should be left with a strainer full of nice clean wet seeds. I usually leave them to dry in the tea-strainer, but you can dump them out on a plate. It's not a good idea to put them onto kitchen roll or paper because they may stick to it, though it's OK to put the strainer down on top of some kitchen roll. Either way, the seeds will clump together as they dry and it's a good idea to give them an occasional rub to separate them.

Within a few days you'll be left with the familiar cute fluffy little seeds ready for packeting up.

If you're saving more than one variety, take care not to muddle them up. Most are impossible to tell apart. Make sure there aren't any seeds from a previous batch clinging to the sieve or teaspoon.

Why go to all this bother, you may ask? Well, the gel around the tomato seeds contains a chemical to inhibit germination (very useful to prevent the seeds germinating within the fruit as it ripens). The fermentation method mimics nature's processing of the seed by breaking down the chemicals in the gel, making use of the naturally occurring Oospora lactis which is responsible for the rapid rotting of fruit, and enabling the seeds to germinate freely. In the process it rids the seeds of many bacterial diseases.

The Quickie Bodge-Up Method
Just scrape the seeds out of the tomato straight onto a piece of kitchen roll (paper towels in the US). Spread them out as thinly as you can, and leave the sheet somewhere well ventilated for a few days to dry. Write the variety name on there, fold it up and store it in a seed envelope.

Here's one I prepared earlier

The seeds will be stuck glue-like to the sheet and may not ever want to come off, but that's OK, you can just tear round them at planting time and sow them with the paper still attached.

This has got to be one of the easiest seed saving methods around. It has two potential disadvantages. One, it doesn't kill off any bacterial diseases that may be lurking around the seeds, and two, it doesn't remove the chemical that inhibits germination. But in practice it isn't usually a problem. I've never had any germination problems with seed saved in this way, and they stay viable for years. Maybe the chemical does break down on the kitchen roll by the time you're ready to sow the seeds. The threat of seed-borne disease is small if you select fruits from healthy plants. So if this is really the only way you'd want to save tomato seeds, go for it I say.

Oxford - the bloggers' big day out

2008-09-21T21:43:00.007+01:00

What finer setting could you want for a real-world get together of garden-allotment bloggers than Oxford University's beautiful Botanic Garden? The tower looks like it's rising up out of that building but it's actually the Magdalen College tower on the other side of the road.

Apart from me there were: Bifurcated Carrots - Veg Plotting - Spadework - The Plot Thickens - Fluffius Muppetus - Soilman - Manor Stables Vegetable Plot - Mustard Plaster - Hills and Plains Seedsavers - The Real Seed Catalogue

And here we all are, assembled in the corner of this beautiful historic garden.

Guest speaker Ben from Real Seeds 'urns' the respect of the assembled bloggers as he shows the various points where crops were domesticated along the agricultural blue nylon timeline. Seen stretched out like this, it really brings it home to you how much history and how many centuries of work and care have gone into every seed we have today.

And he continued to enthral everyone with his knowledge and enthusiasm as we enjoyed lunch on the lawn, replete with multi-coloured tomatoes, apple pie and exploding cucumbers. In fact, Oxford University's vegetable collection wasn't half as diverse and exciting as the contents of Patrick and Steph's home grown tomato bowl.

Emma (Fluffius Muppetus) photographs Michelle (Veg Plotting) and Kate (Hills and Plains).

There's never any shortage of things to look at in the Botanic Garden ... like this incredible lily pond.

Or this rather nice banana leaf.

The greenhouses were somewhat bigger than mine ...

And the flower borders somewhat tidier...

And neither is my greenhouse overlooked by dreaming spires, but you can't have everything.

I still think we could teach 'em a thing or two about vegetable diversity.

Many thanks to Patrick for all the work he put into making this meeting a success and a pleasure.

Aaaargh, what a summer

2008-09-13T16:06:00.006+01:00

Tomato diversity ... these beauties were mostly grown in my newly-acquired greenhouse, which has given them some temporary respite from the blight

My apologies to regular readers for an unplanned two month hiatus from blogging. We've been having a horrible couple of months, and it's taken its toll on my health to the extent that I haven't been able to keep up with things. I have a huge stack of unanswered emails and comments and queries, for which I apologise. I seem to be exhausted all the time at the moment and having trouble just getting through the day, so everything else has had to go by the wayside.

The garden has also been neglected and is an overgrown muddle beyond redemption (I may as well leave it to its own devices now and dig it in over winter). I have been taking some notes and photographs where possible, so until I'm ready to resume normal service I'll be posting up a few photo galleries. I'll also try to get stuck into the Heritage Vegetable Reviews as soon as I can.

The main event, as you can see below, is that the ginger peril has broken his leg.

We don't know what happened. The vet thinks he probably got hit by a car and the wheel went over his leg. He was missing for a week and we thought we'd lost him. Then I found him at the bottom of the garden, in a pretty dire state. The X-rays showed his leg was too badly damaged for our local vet to deal with, so we had to take him to Bristol University's animal hospital in Somerset, where a specialist surgeon put it all back together with screws and wires. Since then he's been confined to a small cage, which he's not too pleased about. As you can imagine, all this specialist care has not been cheap ... two thousand pounds and counting. (And no, we're not insured.)

There's also no guarantee that the surgery will have fixed the problem. He's walking quite happily on the leg with a splinted bandage on it, but we're anxiously waiting for him to heal enough for the bandage to be taken off, so that we can find out if he can walk without it.

On top of that I found myself the focus of a hate campaign by an internet troll. Nothing to do with gardening, it was on one of the music sites I use. A woman from Manchester with a personality disorder and nothing better to do. I tried not to take it personally because she was clearly completely off her trolley, but it was still pretty stressful to deal with. Fortunately it seems to be resolved now, although she's since been making trouble for others on another site. *Sigh.*

So gardening has taken a back seat over the summer, but it wouldn't have been much fun anyway with the non-stop pelting rain. I feel most sorry for the farmers who face losing their crops for the second year running ... at least in a garden there's enough diversity that some things will always thrive whatever the weather. Tomato blight is the most depressing of the failures, and for the second year running I've lost 100% of my outdoor tomato crop ... not a single fruit managed to reach maturity. Last year the blight hit very early - in June - and nothing stood a chance. This year it came quite a few weeks later, and things might have been all right if it hadn't been for the soaking wet weather. Blight spreads so rapidly in warm moist conditions, and it very quickly took hold. A lack of sunlight slowed the ripening of the tomatoes, with devastating consequences.

All is not lost though, because I have a greenhouse for the first time this year. The greenhouse tomatoes have been struck by blight too, but it has spread more slowly, and as the fruits matured much quicker than the outdoor ones I've been able to salvage enough to make them worth growing. I also managed to get a couple of unblighted fruits off plants in pots on the patio.

Raspberries have done exceptionally well, using the extreme wet to swell their fruits to a larger size than I've ever seen them. But the most surprising success story for this year is the Red Miracle non-hybrid sweetcorn kindly sent to me by Graham in South Wales. It's an American variety bred by Dr Alan Kapuler, and I wasn't even sure it would cope with the climate here in a good year, let alone a miserable wet summer with no sunlight. But it's been fantastic. Two cobs on each plant, exquisitely sweet and tasty, and a beautiful, beautiful deep red colour with pink silks!

And one positive thing that's changed since I last blogged ... I've often complained that Blogger treats Mac users as second-rate citizens and many of its functions don't work properly in Safari. Well, I upgraded to a newer version of Safari and now some of them do work. So now, for the first time, I can put things in bold or italic by clicking a button instead of typing all the HTML codes in manually. Wowsa! Whatever miraculous innovation will they unleash next?

Red-podded pea update

2008-07-05T11:05:00.006+01:00

All together now ... oooooooooooh!!

The red-podded peas have now completed their life cycle, and in fact have started a new one, because I've already sown a batch of their F3 offspring.

Red-podded peas were an unexpected gift from my Purple Mangetout Project, which I'm doing on behalf of The Real Seed Catalogue. I really have to thank Ben of Real Seeds for making it happen. He sent me the Golden Sweet seeds to experiment with and I don't think I would have thought of crossing Golden Sweet with a purple podded pea if he hadn't suggested it. It was a good choice ... I think there's a distinct lack of genetic diversity in peas generally, and as I'm discovering in this and other projects, Golden Sweet is something really different and brings a heck of a lot of useful genetic material into the mix.

Among my F2 plants there is just one, known as GSC15, which has pure deep red pods. GSC stands for "Golden Sweet x Carruthers", followed by a number. It's just my own little code for identifying individual plants.

Here's what GSC15 looked like at various stages.

Ooooooh ....

Aaaaaah ...

Yeah ...

This plant always looked special and highly coloured, and in fact I posted a couple of photographs of it when it was just a seedling, because it was the most beautiful of the seedlings. It's turned into an amazingly beautiful mature plant. It has a whole range of candy colours as well as the spectacular crimson pods, even producing two-tone pink and yellow tendrils. It's an improvement on Golden Sweet, the parent it inherited its colours from. It grew vigorously and elegantly, and also had the grace to produce two pods per node. It really is a winner. There has to be something imperfect about it though, and I think that might be in the pods themselves. It's clearly not a true mangetout because it has some fibre and leatheriness in the pods. But I'm not sure it's cut out to be a sheller either ... the one pea I ate was a little bit starchy. It would be a shame if you couldn't eat the red pods anyway, so I'm looking to develop a fibre-free version.

This is not really a problem. The next generation is likely to show more segregation for hidden recessive traits and there's a good chance, I think, that I'll get something with the same strong colour but a true mangetout, or sweeter peas.

GSC15: the young leaves have a yellow tint to them, and a deep pink blotch in every leaf axil. The flowers are bicolour maroon and mauve, a trait inherited from both parents.

Even the tendrils are beautiful. The stems are peachy pink and the tendrils bright yellow. It's a difficult thing to photograph and this really doesn't do justice to it but you can see the contrast here as it clings to the ordinary green tendril of one of its siblings.

Yellow-podded peas always show a lot of yellow in the young leaves as the plant reaches the flowering stage, and of course red-podded peas ARE yellow-podded, with an extra layer of purple over the top to create the red. So GSC15 shows all the colours you'd expect in a yellow pea, with some additional pinky colours. The calyx (pixie hat) on the flower buds are pale cream but show quite a lot of pink streaking, which is something I haven't seen in any other plants ... but it is a natural enough combination of parental traits ... Golden Sweet is the source of the cream calyx while Carruthers' Purple Podded provides the pink streaks.

GSC15 plant top ... yellow leaves with a very bold, bright pink splodge in the leaf axil and also some strong pink markings on the flower buds.

Although GSC15 is the clear champion of this batch of plants, there were other red-podded peas which were mostly red but maintained some of the underlying yellow. Some more than others. GSC09 is quite promising ... it's a true mangetout, and the one pod I tasted was very nice. The red colour is quite patchy in places though, with only a few showing a dominance of red. The photo at the top of this post shows a GSC09 pod, one of the less yellowy patchy ones. Again, I'm hoping some further segregation in the F3 generation will give me more mangetouts like this but with a stronger colour.

Initially the red podders were all from my Golden Sweet x Carruthers cross, but later a couple showed up in the Golden Sweet x Desiree cross as well. The GSD plants were both dwarf phenotypes with mostly yellow pods and only a spraying of red. They don't look as promising as the GSC ones but it's interesting that this happened at all ... it suggests that any cross between a purple and a yellow podded pea could potentially produce red pods, and it's not an exclusive feature of the Golden Sweet x Carruthers cross.

Flowers on a red-podded Golden Sweet x Desiree hybrid. Again it's a beautiful highly coloured plant with two flowers per node, although it only grows to a foot or two in height.

Depending on what traits show up in future generations, I may develop the semi-red peas into a new variety in their own right. They have a charm of their own, and although they're not as spectacular as the true reds, they are still a unique colour break. Some of them are yellow with just a bit of red edging, others are lightly "sprayed" with red all over, giving a peachy effect.

Bicolour yellow and red pods, one of the Golden Sweet x Desiree plants.

The next stage is to grow the seeds from all the red-podders. Normally in a breeding project you have to cross the F2 plants with each other to produce the F3. As peas are self-pollinating, however, all you have to do is leave them to produce seed naturally. There's still time for me to get another generation grown in 2008 as long as I start them off pretty promptly, so I've been harvesting the pods as soon as they reach maturity and drying them in trays indoors. I judge "maturity" as the time when the calyx starts to dry out and the top of the pod (where it joins on to the plant) starts to look a bit sunken and leathery. I save the seeds from each plant separately, which is a lot of work but enables me to keep track of everything in future generations, and learn from it.

In addition to starting off a batch of F3s, I've sown another lot of F2s as I still had plenty of F2 seeds left. I'm hoping there will be some more red-podders among them which will give me more material to work with and hopefully more genetic combinations.

The first few GSC15 pods drying indoors. The pods go purple as they dry out, and the peas stay green but shrivel to a tiny size. YSS10 is one of the beautiful bicolour-flowered types from my yellow sugarsnap project. I alternate them so they don't get muddled up.

Contaminated manure alert

2008-06-29T23:46:00.009+01:00

Potato haulms showing typical symptoms of aminopyralid poisoning. Growth is stunted and the edges of the leaves curl upwards in a strange spoon-like pattern. Photo © Green Lane Allotments.

If you're not yet acquainted with the news that gardens and allotments across Britain are being contaminated with a toxic herbicide residue, you can read the full story in today's Observer. There's also a very detailed article (with more pictures of contaminated plants) from some of the growers affected at Green Lane Allotments, who kindly provided the photo.

The gist of it is this. Gardeners have been finding their plants growing a distorted mess of curled up leaves with an almost fernlike appearance. The leaves curl upward tightly in a spoon shape, and the plants are stunted and don't grow properly. The curled leaves get worse near the top of the plant. It's known to affect tomatoes, potatoes, peas, beans, carrots and salad vegetables, but possibly not courgettes. Fruits and tubers either don't form at all or are distorted and sometimes rotten. The symptoms are those of hormone weedkiller poisoning, and it's showing up in organic gardens.

The poisoning has been traced to manure, which most of us use abundantly on our gardens. Specifically to manure evacuated from the backsides of animals fed on hay or silage made from grass which had been sprayed with aminopyralid, a hormone herbicide made by Dow AgroScience.

Thus the buck stops with Dow AgroScience, but I think we can expect them to squirm every which way to avoid being held accountable. They'll most certainly try to blame it on the farmers. There is a reason it's called AggroScience.

Aminopyralid is used on grassland to kill off meadow weeds. It's a new product, introduced in the UK in 2006 and is not licensed for use on food crops. Treated grass is fed to livestock, and the toxin stays in the grass matter as it passes through the animals' system and lingers in the manure even after lengthy periods of stacking. Then the following season gardeners spread it on their plots. As the manure breaks down in the soil the aminopyralid is released and poisons the crops. Nobody (not even Dow) knows whether the poisoned crops are safe to eat or not, because the stuff has never been tested on food crops.

I certainly add my voice to those calling for an immediate withdrawal of aminopyralid products and for some chain of accountability.

If you think you've got aminopyralid poisoning in your garden, I suggest you get in touch with one of the campaign groups like the one at Green Lane Allotments or refer to their blogs for the latest advice on how to deal with it. The RHS also has an information page about it. There may be some chance of making Dow face up to their responsibilities if confronted with enough evidence from enough people.

If you don't yet have a problem, I suggest being extremely careful about sourcing manure, including bagged compost products that may contain it ... or avoid manure altogether for the moment. If you buy hay to feed to animals whose manure you then spread on the garden, be very cautious even if your hay comes from a trusted supplier. The problem has been reported across the whole of the British Isles but I'm not sure what the situation is in other countries. It's also important not to panic if you see poor growth or distorted leaves in your vegetable plants ... the symptoms of aminopyralid poisoning are very specific. If your plants don't look like the photo above, you haven't got it.

Tomato flower diversity (there is some, honest)

2008-06-28T23:39:00.003+01:00

Black Prince is a Siberian heirloom variety given to me by Patrick of Bifurcated Carrots and has good old-fashioned classic tomato flowers, on curiously hairy stalks. The fruits should turn out to be a deep dark dusky red.

Was anyone else as disgusted as I was by the debate about welfare standards in chicken farming on Newsnight last night? Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was referring to chickens as "birds" while the representative from the poultry industry kept calling them an "assured product". That in itself sums up what's fundamentally wrong with industrial farming.

Anyway, back to vegetables. I grow a lot of different varieties and it's always interesting to compare them, so I thought I'd post up a few pictures of the diversity you can get in different varieties of the same vegetable. Starting off with tomatoes.

I'm sure there aren't many people who grow tomatoes for the beauty of their flowers ... they only come in shades of yellow and there are much more aesthetic florescences to be found on other vegetables. But in their gawky yellow cone-ness there is a definite charm. I also love the way the flowering branches unfurl in a spiral pattern.

Another reason tomato flowers often go unnoticed is that they face downwards, and don't raise their faces to the sun as so many plants do. There's a good reason for that. It's because they self-pollinate, and rely on gravity rather than bees to get the pollen in the right place. The cone part of the flower is actually a set of anthers (pollen sacs) all fused together, and the receptive female part is on the end of a little stalk hidden inside the cone. Pollen is shed on the inside and drops down into the tip of the cone, where the stigma gets smothered in it. A bit like dipping a stick of liquorice into a Sherbert Fountain, if you remember those.

Tomatoes are quite efficient at self-pollinating but if you have problems with the fruit not setting the solution is to give the plant or the flower truss a gentle wiggle. They don't need bees, and generally bees aren't attracted to them.

Another tomato Patrick gave me is Yellow Taxi which I believe is an American heirloom. I rather like its flowers, they have a rounded cone so they're kind of chunky and the petals are pleasantly ruffled. The fruits, when they appear, will be bright yellow globes.

Yellow Taxi

The most extravagant-flowered tomato I grow is undoubtedly Copia. An American variety, I ordered it from a supplier in the US in 2006 but planted it too late to get any fruits off it, and then in 2007 I lost my entire tomato crop to blight. So I haven't yet had the pleasure to see or taste its fruits (which are supposed to be a spectacular marbled red and yellow bicolour with a pink inner flush). But I have enjoyed its flowers instead.

The flowers are very large and double, so they have a lot of petals, and the anthers are too numerous to form themselves into a cone. The female stigma is also "double", so there's a right old cluster of flower parts all crammed together in sun-like glory. It's important to be aware though that when the stigma is as exposed as this, the risk of cross-pollination with other tomatoes is high. Normally tomatoes don't cross much, but that's because the stigma is hidden away. Here, as you can see (the green blobby bits in the middle), it's waving itself in full exposure.

Although I had to go to some lengths to get hold of my Copia seeds, I see a few other European bloggers are growing it so it may be more "available" than I thought.

Copia

By way of contrast, these are the tiny tiddly flowers of Green Tiger, a fraction of the size of Copia and sporting a dark flush on the petals. This variety is a bit of an experiment, because the seeds are not available for gardeners to buy ... I saved them from a punnet of fruit I bought in Marks & Spencer's and they claim the variety is exclusive to them. The original fruits were very distinctive, deep burgundy red inside with a dark green stripey skin, and tasted pretty good for a commercially grown variety. I've no idea whether or not it's an F1 hybrid, so it may not come true from seed. But the plants I have do look very uniform so far, so here's hoping.

Green Tiger

Everyone has heard of Brandywine, the classic "beefsteak" tomato with an acclaimed flavour. It has a huge number of variants and sub-strains. I got Apricot Brandywine in a seed swap (thanks Pam). It's a potato-leaved variety and the flowers, like the fruits, are pretty big. It's another one with an exposed stigma, so the risk of cross-pollination is high.

Apricot Brandywine

At the other end of the size and shape spectrum is the delightfully named Banana Legs. It's called that because the fruits are banana coloured and shaped a bit like a leg. Obviously. This unique variety was selected by John Swenson from a tomato seed mixture called Mixed Long Toms developed in the 1980s by Tom Wagner of Tater Mater Seeds. Tom is a truly great tomato breeder but I feel a bit sorry for him because many of his creations are now being sold without him even getting any credit for them let alone any cash. Green Zebra is one of his, as is the Green Sausage recently offered in the UK by T&M. He still does his breeding work though and also runs a fascinating forum for people interested in tomato and potato breeding. Banana Legs is fairly easy to find in the US, but less so in Europe ... I got mine from Association Kokopelli.

Banana Legs

Going even further into the realms of strange coloured tomatoes, I'm trying a white-fruited variety for the first time this year. When I say white, it's probably more of a pale yellow. I'm not sure white tomatoes taste that great ... most catalogue descriptions tend to say "mild flavour", which is generally a euphemism for "bland". But worth a try out of curiosity. I'm growing Douce de Picardie, a rare French heirloom from Association Kokopelli. The plants are monstrously large and a bit weird-smelling. Flowers are a pale whitish yellow. The photo shows a flower which has just shed its petals and has a tiny fruit in the middle. Notice the long thin sepals (the green sticky-outy bits).

Douce de Picardie

Also from Association Kokopelli (I buy most of my tomatoes from them because their range is phenomenal) we have the bright-orange fruited Caro Rich. I suspect it's related to the British heirloom Tangella which it greatly resembles, but it's specifically been bred for its nutritional value ... it has around 10 times as much beta-carotene as most other tomatoes. The sepals of the flowers have a tendency to fuse together, so it has three wide sepals instead of the usual five or seven thin ones.

Caro Rich

Another one I imported from America because I don't know of anywhere you can get it over here, although it supposedly originates in Eastern Europe, a cherry-sized yellow and red marbled tomato called Isis Candy. The flower in the picture is very decorative, but I should point out it's a slight abberation. The normal flower type is more like the one in the lower right of the picture. Tomatoes often produce these spontaneous double or composite flowers.

Isis Candy

And last but not least, the lovely Peacevine Cherry with its broad-petalled star-shaped flowers. This variety is an open-pollinated version of the popular F1 hybrid variety Sweet 100, with the additional advantage of having a very high vitamin C content. It was bred by Alan Kapuler, who has for many years been de-hybridising commercial hybrids to bring them into the public domain. I grew this one last year and it was one of only two varieties which resisted the blight long enough to produce a few fruits (the other being a San Marzano from Franchi). Peacevine Cherry is available from Association Kokopelli.

Peacevine Cherry

Yellow Sugarsnap Project: all podded out

2008-06-27T21:34:00.005+01:00

Outtakes from my yellow sugarsnap pea breeding project.

Now that the yellow sugarsnap project F2 generation has reached full maturity I'm having to decide which lines I want to keep seed from. 63 plants to choose from, each one unique. I could just keep seed from all of them, but that's a lot of work and cataloguing for seeds I will probably never use. So I'm just keeping the most interesting looking phenotypes. The yellow sugarsnap, obviously, and the ones with pink and white flowers. And a few others which had really good flavours or other interesting traits.

I have to be careful though, because they will all have hidden recessives which might turn out to be useful in future generations. When I choose not to save seed from an F2 plant, its unique genotype is gone forever. It's a bit daunting to make these choices because it feels like I'm playing God, or playing Darwin at least. But it's gotta be done, and the inevitable manifestation of evolution is that the weakest get eaten.

Yummy.

Eating F2 hybrid vegetables is a curious experience. F2 plants show a lot of diversity, and that includes flavour, texture and cooking qualities. They look weird on the plate: big ones and small ones, greyish or bright green or dark green, compactly wrinkled or smooth and fat. If you're used to homogenised supermarket peas it's really difficult to imagine what it's like to have a mouthful of diverse peas. It's a sensory overload, like your brain doesn't know which sensation to register first.

Green and yellow sugarsnaps side by side

A yellow mangetout with bulging peas and curly pods (this seems to happen when the pod wall is porcelain-thin)

I did taste tests on as many of the plants as possible and collected the data. The first plant to flower, whose photo I triumphantly posted a few weeks ago, was beautiful to look at but when its peas matured they were hard, mealy, starchy and bitter. By contrast there were some sugarsnaps with ambrosial sweetness.

There was a lot of diversity in the pods too. As the top photo shows, I picked and ate a lot of the green mangetouts, along with some green sugarsnaps and yellow mangetouts, as they were surplus to requirements. Most of them were pleasantly enjoyable, except for one of the yellow mangetouts which turned out to have an inedible inner lining of fibre. So inedible, in fact, it required to be spat out on the side of the plate. I hadn't been expecting that. Diversity is one thing, but both the original parent varieties were mangetout types, so how does an inedible-podded variant suddenly show up in the cross? Well it's a longish story.

Normal peas have a fibrous membrane on the inner surface of the pod, and it is not a nice thing to chew on. What makes a mangetout a mangetout is that they don't have this membrane. Or if they do, it's thin and soft enough to be edible while the pod is young. The mangetout trait is recessive, and just to make it complicated it's controlled by two different genes which function independently.

On an individual basis, gene p on chromosome 6 and gene v on chromosome 4 both seem to fulfil pretty much the same function: reducing the fibre content, to produce mangetouts which are edible-podded when young but may get fibrous later. When you get both these genes together they combine forces in a harmonious way, and fully edible fibreless pods result.

When I selected the mangetout varieties to use as parents, I had no idea which of these two genes were present and in what combination. A mangetout variety could be ppVV (expressing the recessive p gene) or PPvv (expressing the recessive v gene). Or it might have the ideal mangetout genotype ppvv (expressing both recessive genes).

IF one parent is ppVV and the other PPvv, crossing those two varieties will produce offspring with fibrous inedible pods. That's because they create F1 offspring which is PpVv. The two recessive mangetout genes are still there, but overshadowed by two dominant non-mangetout genes. Only in the next (F2) generation can the mangetout trait reassert itself, and only as part of a diverse mixture of mangetouts, semi-mangetouts and inedible fibrous pods.

Or, if you want to look at it in terms of possible gene combinations:
ppVV + P_vv + P_V_ + ppv_

To be honest I didn't think to check whether my F1 plants were mangetouts or not. I saved all of them for seed and didn't notice what sort of pods they had. In the F2 generation though, I have a large number of inedible pods. Especially among the sugarsnap types. If I'd done my homework properly I should have anticipated this, but I didn't. So I have a lot of sweet juicy pods and sweet juicy peas separated by a layer of chewy gristle.

And the bad news ... this includes my coveted and one and only yellow sugarsnap. It has a gristly fibre layer. Can I just say: arse!

All is not lost though. Depending on its exact genotype, I may be able to get some pure yellow sugarsnaps from its offspring. If the recessive mangetout genes are still in there, they will express themselves next time round. I sowed the seeds this morning and will have to wait and see. If not though, I will have to grow out another crop of F2 seeds in the hope of finding another yellow sugarsnap with a more promising genotype.

Ah well, it's all part of the fun. I can't be getting instant exciting results like the red-podder on every project.

Beautiful sunlit colours and a mix of yellow and green pods

Of the six plants which had beautiful pinky-white flowers, five are gristly sugarsnaps but one has perfect edible pods. I will save and sow seeds from all of them, for the reasons outlined above ... some will most likely produce fibre-free offspring. Meanwhile they're showing some beautiful colours as the seeds dry out, as they've all inherited a gene from Golden Sweet which produces dark purple speckles on the seed coat.

A setback

2008-06-23T23:13:00.004+01:00

I thought maybe it's time I explained why my pace of blogging has slowed recently, and why I've got so behind with commenting on other blogs, and responding to emails and everything else. There's been a bit of a setback with the music which has distracted my attention away from the garden.

The small independent record label who released my album Mind The Gap has gone tits-up, and I haven't been paid for my sales. The most immediate impact of this is that my album no longer exists as a going concern, at least until I can get it re-issued. I'm not impressed, because CD sales are one of my few sources of income, and the album (which only came out last August) represents two years' work.

It's not just me either. I've spoken to a number of artists from the same label and it seems none of us have been paid, nor even told our sales figures. As if it isn't difficult enough for musicians to earn an honest crust without having somebody else pocket our hard-earned cash. For some of the artists the sales figures matter more than the money ... how can they make a decision about whether it's worth re-issuing their albums when they've no idea how many they've sold? We've all been treated very shoddily.

I must admit my first instinct was to curl up under the table with my thumb in my mouth, but after a few weeks of being very depressed I'm ready to get on and sort things out. One thing I have in my favour is that my album has been getting good reviews - really brilliant reviews in fact - so I know I have something worth pushing. It's just a case of what to do with it next. Rather than throw myself on the mercy of another indie label, I'm planning to set up my own tiny label and release the album myself. It will mean scraping together a few hundred pounds upfront to get the CD pressed and printed, and a lot of work promoting it, but at least I'll be in control of things and will have a sporting chance of hanging on to any future income.

Midsummer gallery

2008-06-22T23:52:00.005+01:00

Merry is the summertime when you're a pea. This is Sugar Magnolia strutting its stuff with industrial-strength tendrils.

All the pea breeding projects are a delight at the moment, and this is just one of the attractive new phenotypes. It's an F2 from a cross between Mr Bethell's Purple Podded and Alderman. In all my purple pod experiments, the offspring separate out into pure purples, pure greens, and mixed up semi-purples like this. The purple flash is different on either side of the pod, which gives a very alluring glow when the sun shines through it.

The new camera has made a good impression so far. It focused perfectly on this bee grappling with an Allium christophii flower in all its fluffy stripey guinea-pig shaped detail.

I can't take any credit for this lovely clematis, it belongs to my next-door-neighbour and grows along our adjoining fence.

I'm lucky to have this rare Red Miracle sweetcorn to try out this year (thanks Graham), an open-pollinated variety bred in the US by Alan Kapuler and sporting beautiful deep red kernels when it's mature. Fingers crossed that it won't take offence at the British climate.

A rare appearance from our agoraphobic Norwegian Forest Cat, bravely venturing as far as the edge of the patio. Yes she does always have that facial expression.

Last month we had a red damselfly, but the turquoisey ones are now out and about. This one has a nice smiley face as well as beautiful colour.

Round the other side of the colour wheel, you can't beat California poppies.

A moth takes a breather on one of the pea leaves