More French beans than you can shake a stick at

A diversity of beans. I grew all these varieties in the garden last year. Top row, left to right: Coco Bicolour, Nun's Belly Button, Early Warwick.
Middle row: Purple Queen, Purple Prince, Mrs Fortune's.
Bottom row: Spagna Bianco, Vermont Cranberry, Caseknife.

Beans are a joyous thing to grow. They make such a big fanfare when they emerge from the ground. Huge fat fleshy cotyledons which don't look like leaves at all. And then a slightly prehistoric appearance as the true leaves unfold from inside. You can't miss 'em. And neither can the slugs, unfortunately.

I'm having serious problems with the slugs at the moment, as a lot of other Brits probably are. We've had a lot of alternating heavy rain and bright sunshine, which has brought the plants (and weeds) on a treat. Lots of fresh new growth = gastropod party time. After a drawn-out and very dry spring season, a dousing of rain has suddenly brought them all out of hibernation and they are hungry. All my breeding projects are under assault. Ulluco, razed at ground level every time a shoot emerges. I've lost my entire crop of onions, which included some rare and hard-to-get varieties, and it's too late to start again. Nurtured since January, wiped out in a single night.

Young bean plants are very vulnerable when first planted out. Some snails like to work their way up the stem stripping off the outer layer, and then pointlessly chomp through a leaf stalk so the whole leaf falls off. Other times the slimy little sods don't bother with all that and just shin up the bamboo cane to mangle the leaves directly.

I've been planting out loads of beans this week and I'm doing my best to keep them alive. I have had to sow a few replacements, but hopefully if we have a few days of dry weather the survivors will get properly established and the slugs will cease to bother them. I've collected rather more beans than I've got room to grow but I'm managing to find space for most of them, and the rest can wait till next year.

French beans in Rootrainers. The emerging seedling is Poletschka (thanks Celia) which grows from amazingly beautiful indigo-black glossy seeds ... and the pink stems beside it belong to Jo's Purple Podded, an ongoing breeding project distributed by the Irish Seed Savers Association.

Most of the varieties I'm growing are climbers. I don't grow very many dwarf beans because of the slug problem ... the low-slung pods are easy pickings for them. I also find the yields very poor for the amount of space they take up and they often give back barely a handful more beans than I sowed to start with. But there are some interesting varieties which don't have any equivalent among the climbing types, so I make an exception for those.

Two new dwarfs I'm trying this year are Black Valentine, a variety from the 1850s with small but pretty black kidney beans, and Comtesse de Chambord with even smaller shiny white beans. Indeed Comtesse de Chambord is something very different, as it's what's known as a rice bean ... the white beans are tiny enough and elongated enough to look a bit like rice grains (pudding rice, anyway). Actually they aren't quite that small but they're pretty tiny as beans go. They're reputed to have an excellent flavour but they're not grown commercially because their tiny size and delicate plants make them uneconomic. So if you want them you have to grow your own. I got my seeds from Association Kokopelli.

Newly emerged seedlings of Comtesse de Chambord, which look a bit like little bug-eyed monsters while they still have their yellow cotyledons. They grow into small, delicate plants of a very bright green and the pods can be used for green beans or left for shelling.

By way of contrast, these are the emerging seedlings of a supersize Australian climbing variety called Purple Giant. This one is mainly grown for its purple pods and the seeds are flat and fairly small. With the weather being so clement they've grown rapidly in the last few days but I can't plant them out yet because I don't have any tall enough poles. I can only buy bamboo canes of a maximum of 7ft because anything bigger than that won't fit in my car. I'm having to borrow some extra-long poles from my neighbour. He has a bigger car.

Purple Giant emerges. The one on the right is more strongly purple than all its siblings, though otherwise it looks true to type.

I'm always on the lookout for natural variations and mutations in beans, because breeding them the same way I do peas is not convenient ... the anatomy of the flowers makes them incredibly difficult to hand-pollinate. However, some of the most dramatic variations are no use for breeding because they're not genetic.

That includes the curious phenomenon of occasional bean colour reversal, or "day for night" to give it a more romantic name, where (for example) a batch of tan beans with purple markings has the occasional purple bean with tan markings. Many heirloom varieties seem to display this trait. Last year I picked out all the "day for night" beans from a batch of Mrs Fortune's and sowed them separately. The result was exactly the same as if I'd sown any normal Mrs Fortune's beans, i.e. the usual colour and a few with reversed colours. Afterwards I spoke to a couple of other bloggers who had had the same experience, picking out the reversed beans from other varieties only to find they grew into the same plants regardless. So something other than genes much be responsible for the colour reversal, but what? Moisture levels inside the pods and exposure to light and air during harvest might be factors, but in all honesty I've no idea.

More bean diversity. Top row, left to right: Jo's Purple Podded, Black Valentine, Lazy Housewife.
Middle row: Canadian Wonder, Dog Bean, Poletschka.
Bottom row: Pea Bean, Kew Blue, San Antonio.

iiiiit's ... PURPLE!

Oooh, this is getting exciting

Well, it is for me anyway.

Pictured above is the first flower bud on one of my F2 peas, in this instance Golden Sweet x Sugar Ann, my yellow sugarsnap project. The only other pea in the garden currently producing buds is Alaska, whose synonym is Earliest of All. So this one is very early. Both the original varieties in this cross are fast maturing, Sugar Ann particularly so, but it's likely I'll see a bit of variability in these F2s.

This project is a hybrid between a white flowered and a two-tone purple-flowered variety, so the F2 plants are likely to segregate into different flower colours (the F1 generation were all purple as that's the dominant gene). It's too early to tell what colour this flower will be, but so far it looks very, very like a Golden Sweet flower. It has a yellow penduncle and a creamy-yellow calyx, which are both Golden Sweet traits, as well as the obvious yellow tinge to the young leaves. I can see a tiny bit of pink colouration on the inner petals of the bud, so I think this one is going to go purple.

I have just today seen two other plants in this F2 batch producing tiny flower buds. Not like this one though, they both have a green calyx and look more like Sugar Ann flowers. The creamy-yellow calyx is a recessive trait so most of the plants will probably have the green ones.

Can't wait to see this flower open!

Garden gallery ... late April

Once again I'm posting some nice pictures while I'm too busy to write anything more considered. Yes I know there's a couple of greenfly on that orange tulip. But we are an organic garden and we are tolerant.

Lots of peas on the go at the moment. I have tall peas - Sugar Magnolia with its manic tendrils ...

... and short peas - Gravedigger ...

... and some new seedlings. The green ones are another breeding project in the making, an F1 from Magnum Bonum x Carruthers' Purple Podded. I don't know what I'm looking for or what I expect from the cross. It's just that they are in my opinion two of the best peas available, an outstanding heritage greenpodder and the best tasting and most beautiful purple podded. And they were both flowering in the garden at the same time last summer, so it made sense to cross them. To the right of the picture are some peachy-coloured seedlings of Spring Blush which is related to Sugar Magnolia and has the same alien-head hypertendrils.

The apple blossom on all the trees is lovely, and smells distinctive too. Tewkesbury Baron is quite strongly scented.

Many people grow and enjoy the heritage Crimson-Flowered Broad Bean, and rightly so, it's a superior variety. But the seeds I bought in 2005 from W. Robinson & Son showed a mixture of flower colours: pale pink, dusky pink, mauve, two-tone pink/charcoal black, as well as the expected red. I assume the seed stock had been accidentally crossed with a more common black-and-white flowered variety, and this was probably the F2. Not that I mind at all. They were absolutely beautiful, to be honest. It was quick and easy to eliminate the pinkness by saving seed from the best reds, so I'm assuming the red-flower gene is a good hearty dominant. But I like the pink ones too, so I saved some seed from those separately. And here's one of them just coming into bud. Isn't it lovely?

Why I love out-of-date seeds

The gardening question which never seems to have an answer is "how long do seeds keep?" The reason it has no answer is that there are so many variables ... how the seeds were harvested, processed and stored, what type of plant it is and probably also an element of luck. Tomato seeds keep longer than carrot seeds, for example, but there are no hard and fast rules. You just have to try them.

Take the little beauty in the picture above, photographed last month ... a very rare dark pink Estonian potato-leaf tomato called Siniy. This one came as a freebie from Association Kokopelli as part of their giveaway of out-of-date seeds. I've photographed the seed packet beside it so you can see the date on it: 1998. That's right, this healthy little tomato plant grew from seed which had been sitting in an envelope for 10 years.

Admittedly germination is no longer 100%. I sowed three seeds and only one germinated. But that's enough to give me a whole new generation of seeds if this plant survives to maturity. Tomatoes are naturally inbreeding, so saving seed from a single plant (although not ideal) is not a problem.

I'm not necessarily recommending out-of-date seeds as being better than, or even as good as, fresh seed. Old seed often has sporadic or very slow germination, and sometimes the plants which do grow are a bit weak and wobbly. But there are many good reasons to keep hold of those old packets.

There's not always much point going to the trouble of rescuing old seeds when you can just go out and buy new ones, but I often find myself needing to make the effort. Sometimes I get hold of old seeds of rare varieties which can't easily be replaced. Very often I get seeds in small quantities so I can't afford to waste any.

This is one of the very few areas where I disagree with Monty Don, who advocates throwing away any seed packets more than a year old and buying fresh ones. His reasoning is that fresh seed germinates quickly and grows rapidly ... which is true enough. Except that the whole idea of "new" seed being "fresh" is a bit of a myth.

Association Kokopelli have a policy of labelling their seeds with the year they were grown, but that's unusual. "Sow by" dates on commercial seed packets are sometimes arbitrary and meaningless. Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots wrote a very informative post about this a little while ago. When it says "packeted in year ended ..." that's exactly what it means – packeted. What year it was actually grown is another matter. As Patrick explains, the seed is likely to have been produced in a single batch in one year and sold as required. A germination test is done and if the seed passes the test then it gets packeted up and sold. The "sow by" date is based on the validity of the germination test and is not necessarily an accurate indication of the freshness or shelf-life of the seed.

And naturally seed companies are in no hurry to correct the common misconception that out-of-date seed is unviable, and that you need to go out and buy another lot.

In the UK and Europe, where dunderheaded legal restrictions govern the availability of vegetable seeds, readily available varieties often get dropped from the Common Catalogue and when that happens they can become very rare very quickly. The Heritage Seed Library keeps an eye on "deletions" and steps in to rescue them as necessary, but things can slip through the net. In other words, it's possible that the crumpled seed packet you've had languishing at the bottom of your seed tin for years may now be an endangered variety.

Another good point is raised by Soren of In The Toad's Garden. If you save your own seed, there is often a risk that a crop might accidentally cross-pollinate with another variety. Not that that's always a bad thing ... it's potentially the start of an exciting new variety. But if you're growing heritage varieties and need to keep the variety pure it can be a disaster. Soren keeps a few generations of seed for each variety, so when an accidental cross happens he can just go back to his seedbox and start again with seed from a couple of generations earlier, before the cross happened.

Tomato seeds are especially good to save long term, as they really do last for years. I'm still getting 100% germination from some seeds I scraped out of a Marks & Spencer's tomato onto a piece of kitchen roll in 2002. Back then I didn't know how to save tomato seeds properly so I didn't follow the usual recommended method and ferment them. But what the hell ... they still germinate.

Beyond the realm of vegetables, some seeds stay viable for very long periods. Last year, with a little expert care, some seeds from botanical specimens found tucked inside a book for 200 years were successfully germinated. And seeds of the common wild poppy are thought to remain viable for up to 100 years. The incredible display of poppies which bloomed on the First World War battlefields in the years immediately following the armistice was a mass germination of dormant seeds in the soil. Poppies are adapted as a cornfield weed and are sensitive to soil disturbance, so four years of pelting with mortar shells was just what they needed to trigger them off - generations of accumulated seed suddenly brought to life.

There have long been claims about peas found in Egyptian tombs still germinating after thousands of years - though personally I'm sceptical about that. It was a well publicised scam in Victorian times which seems to have kept resurfacing over the years.

Association Kokopelli sometimes give away packets of old seeds, and I have a lot of fun coaxing them into life. With such a large catalogue of varieties, they inevitably have a stock of unsold seeds which have passed their expected germination time. Rather than throw them away, they give them to gardeners to take pot luck with them. At the moment, for every five packets of seed you buy from their UK website you get a free packet of "old" seeds of the vegetable of your choice. Some don't germinate. But a lot of them do. The Siniy seeds shown above (and incidentally that seedling is now a fine healthy plant) was one of the packets I got free with Dominique Guillet's book a couple of years back. Other 8, 9 and 10-year-old tomato seeds I've had from Kokopelli are also germinating fine.

I also have a selection of old seeds from Association Kokopelli's pepper collection. Pepper seeds, in my experience, are not as long-lived as tomato seeds. Some of mine are five years old and not germinating. But the trouble with peppers is that they are very very slow to germinate, and need good warmth and moisture. It's not easy to keep them constantly warm and moist for a month or more, especially when moulds are likely to thrive in similar conditions. So here's what I've been doing to "resurrect" the slow-germinators.

An attempt to salvage some old seeds of Georgia Flame, a mildy hot pepper. The brown tint in the kitchen roll is tea! Using tea to assist pepper germination is a tip I picked up on the excellent Chileman website. (Sadly I haven't been able to germinate these.)

I cut a thin strip of kitchen roll (that's paper towels to American friends), fold it into a small square and wet it with warm water from a recently boiled kettle. A drop of tea is even better. Then I place the seeds within the folded square and put the whole thing inside a small sealable polythene seed bag. Making sure the seal is tight, I put it somewhere near a radiator and leave it for ages.

As you can see in the picture, the advantage of this method is that you don't have to keep opening the bag to see how the seeds are getting on. If you keep opening and resealing the bag, the contents will go mouldy in no time at all. But left sealed it should stay fresh for weeks. You check the seeds by holding the bag up to the light. Any sprouts emerging will be clearly visible. Once the sprouts emerge you will have to unseal the bag and plant them within a few days.

A Hungarian Semi-Hot pepper seed brought back from the dead after spending over a month on a bit of moist kitchen roll in a sealed bag. Nothing happened for a month, and then four germinated over the following couple of weeks. Not bad from what had appeared to be a packet of dead seeds.

Pea update: purple mangetouts

F2 plants from a cross of Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded. The colours are stunning when the sun shines on them.

Pictures speak louder than words with these, I think. These are for the Real Seeds purple mangetout project, F2 seedlings from two crosses: Golden Sweet x Desiree and Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded. Hopefully a majority of them will turn out purple podded, and from those I hope to find some which have the recessive mangetout pod type. Mangetout peas lack the gristly layer of fibre on the inside of the pod.

All the parent varieties used in this project have purple colouring in one form or another, so it's not surprising that all the F2 plants are showing purple colour. Theoretically they should all be genotype AADD. It is variable though. Some plants have a dark purple axil splodge, some have red edges or red flushes on the leaves, some have rosy stems and tendrils.

They're all beautiful.

Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded with non-serrated red leaf margins, pink stems and green tendrils

Deep rose blush on stems and tendrils on a Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded plant, and even on the back of the leaves. This one has serrated edges.

I suspect some of the strong purple colouring on these plants has been brought on by the intensely cold nights we've been having. They've been snowed on and endured two or three hard frosts. Tough little things.

Some of the plants have serrated leaf margins, similar to the yellow sugarsnap project. They also share the tendency for dwarf plants to have darker leaf colour ...

Pink stems on a Golden Sweet x Desiree plant. This one is going to have a dwarf habit, it's very low and bushy and you can see the slugs have already been at it. Notice the dark green leaves compared to the yellowy green of the one in the picture below.

A big dark smudgy axil ring on a Golden Sweet x Desiree plant, which also has some purple spots on its leaves.

Pea update: yellow sugarsnaps

Jeremy said the eyes of the world would be on my yellow sugarsnap seedlings. Well, here they are Jeremy, I hope you like them (and the rest of the world does too).

The F2 plants are all slightly different but the differences are subtle at the moment. Purple leaf axil splodges are now showing up on a lot of plants as expected, although it's been slow to develop. The splodges indicate the genotype A_D_ and its assorted variants. A is the gene for anthocyanin production and D is the gene for the purple splodge. They are both dominant. The size, shape and intensity of the splodge varies from plant to plant though, so there are probably other genes at work too. Some plants have a cream band inside the purple one, some don't, others just have a faint trace of it.

This one (below) has no purple splodge in the leaf axil and no other purple or red marking so is presumably the recessive genotype aa. Whether it has D_ or dd I've no idea because D can't express itself in the absence of A. Ah, the joy of genes!


Another thing I've noticed. The dwarf plants have darker, grey-green leaves compared to most (though not all) of the tall plants, which are more yellowy-green. I have no idea yet whether this is genetic or caused by something in the environment, or an interaction of the two. The F2s have separated into dwarf and tall types in a beautiful Mendelian ratio despite the small sample size, and I planted all the dwarfs along the front edge of the frame so they don't get swamped. It may be that they're getting more sunlight, or it may be that their short stature concentrates the chlorophyll in a smaller area and makes them go darker.

If it is genetic, why would there be a correlation between short height and darker leaf colour? One possible explanation is gene linkage. Genes are arranged in long sequences on chromosomes, which break up and rearrange whenever a seed is produced, to form a new genome for that individual seed. Peas have seven chromosomes. If the gene for dwarf height is on one chromosome and the gene for darker leaves is on another, those genes will be independent of each other and will usually recombine freely in the offspring. But if the two genes are close together on the same chromosome, it's much less likely that they can be inherited separately. The closer they are, the more they will stick together. In addition to this, it's very common for genes to interact with each other and even for a single gene to have more than one function (pleiotropy is the technical name for it). Any of these factors could be involved.

Another possible explanation, of course, is coincidence. Just because all my dwarf peas have darker leaves, it doesn't necessarily mean there's a reason for it. As I said, it's a small sample size and I can't draw too many conclusions from it at this stage.


Almost all the F2 plants have got serrated leaf edges, but again there's variability in how strong it is. Some have subtle little points and spikes along the leaf margins while others are boldly zigzagged and look like someone's cut round them with pinking shears. One of the parent varieties, Sugar Ann, has boldly serrated leaf margins while the other, Golden Sweet, shows some variability. Most Golden Sweet plants have smoothly rounded leaf margins but serration does sometimes show up too. I assume there's a dominant gene involved here, which is either not fully penetrant in Golden Sweet or is interacting with other genes. My other breeding project involving Golden Sweet hybrids is showing the same thing, a strong dominance of serrated edges.

Everything I've written here is just idle speculation, I must emphasise. I no more understand the genetic make-up of these plants than I know what colour knickers the Queen is wearing. It's all down to observation and guesswork. I will probably have to grow another couple of generations of plants before I can draw any firm conclusions.

Pea update: general

This year's acquisitions from the Heritage Seed Library

Honestly, I've got so many interesting peas on the go at the moment I'm really struggling to catch up with writing about them. I still have to do a post about my original Purple Pea Project, but in the mean time here's a brief update on the ones I've already blogged about.

I'm quite excited by Sugar Magnolia. It looks so different from anything else I've ever grown, and its height is already apparent in the way it's towered up above all the other seedlings in the tray. The stems are a lovely deep pink and the tendrils are mad - see below. I assume Alan Kapuler named it after a song (by the Grateful Dead). I'm trying to come up with a title for my next album and wondered about naming it after a vegetable.

There's a carrot named after Hendrix's Purple Haze but I'm not sure carrots were the plant substance Jimi had in mind when he wrote the song. Though I suppose it looks carrot-shaped when it's rolled up.

Graham, who very kindly sent me the pea seeds, has sent me some more seeds of both Sugar Magnolia and Opal Creek, along with a third Kapuler pea Spring Blush. I think Spring Blush may have been a sideline which sprang up from the breeding work on Sugar Magnolia. It has the same hypertendrils, apparently, and similar height ... but instead of purple pods it has green pods with a purple stripe. Another great curiosity to look forward to, thanks Graham! If all goes well I will be able to share seeds of these varieties next year.

Hypertendrils. This is what they look like:


Many of my peas are now planted out in the garden and coping very well with the unseasonably chilly weather. At least the snails are not as big a problem as they usually are ... the very dry spring and the drawn-out cold have inhibited their activities considerably, so their numbers are pretty low at the moment. What I am having problems with though is keel slugs. They're those very small ones, often pale or pinky coloured, that live in the soil and come out at night to wreak unspeakable havoc among seedlings. They are far more destructive than those big ugly slithery jobbies you see on the garden path in the wet.

Oregon Trail has been the most severely damaged by the slugs and is a great example of why I generally avoid growing dwarf peas. Some of the plants are completely skeletonised, and none of them are looking good. The plants are so short the apical tip doesn't have a hope in hell of growing out of the slugs' reach. It's like a fast-food restaurant for gastropods.

Carouby de Mausanne is also being savaged, but as it's a tall pea I have every hope it will thrive. The apical tips are already well above ground level so the slugs are mostly just shredding the lower leaves.

I still have lots of F1 seeds from last year's hand-pollinations which need sowing and growing, and I'm also planning out what new crosses I can make this year. I was very impressed with Taiwan Sugar, a rare pale-pink-flowered pea kindly sent to me by Patrick: it's a mangetout (snow) type with a wonderful flavour and no string. But it's a very short dwarf variety and I've already explained what happens to dwarf peas in my slug-addled garden. So I'm wondering what would happen if I crossed it with a good tall mangetout, such as the voluptuous (white) flowered and gorgeous flavoured French heirloom Corne de Belier. A tall mangetout with pale shell-pink flowers and delicious sweet flavour would be a lovely thing to have ...

Tewkesbury Baron

I posted about my Gloucestershire apple trees in the very early days of this blog but as I hardly had any readers back then I don't expect anyone to remember. So this is the story of my Tewkesbury Baron apple.

At one time Gloucestershire was one of England's primary apple-growing areas (not surprisingly, as it's joined to Somerset at one end and Worcestershire and Herefordshire at the other) but three quarters of the county's orchards have been lost since the 1950s. Fortunately the hard working Gloucestershire Orchard Group have identified, saved and propagated a large number of the survivors and are helping people to reestablish orchards in the area. They have a beautiful database of local heritage varieties which revel in such names as Black Tanker, Foxwhelp and Hen's Turds. I'm sure Bastard Underleaf would have a welcome home in my garden if I had more space, but sadly it's believed to be extinct. Fortunately though many of these trees are now available to buy, albeit from only one or two specialist suppliers such as the one I got mine from, Lodge Farm Trees near Berkeley, Gloucestershire.

A couple of years back I decided to get three heritage apple trees, and to choose the three that were most local to me. Ashmead's Kernal is the localest, originating 300 years ago in the garden of a Dr Ashmead only 7 miles away in Gloucester. The next most local is Tewkesbury Baron, which takes its name from the town of Tewkesbury (pronounced "chucks'bry" around here, not "tyooksburry") about 12 miles away. We used to live there when I was a kid. It used to flood all the time back then too.

A knobbly green cider/cooking apple Taynton Codlin makes up the trio.

Tewkesbury Baron is of uncertain origin but was certainly in existence by 1883. It doesn't get a lot of good press. Its qualities are summed up by the experts at the Brogdale National Collection as (and I quote) "Little flavour." Their online database elaborates on this slightly: "Fruits have a little coarse, dry, white flesh with an insipid flavour." There's not much other info available apart from that, and nobody has anything good to say about it.

I must admit I did wonder if I was a bit mad as I hurtled up the M5 with a tangle of tree branches curled around the inside of the car windscreen ("Whatchoo looking at? Haven't you ever seen a VW Polo with a tree wrapped round its windows before?") A fruit tree is a long-term commitment, it takes up space and its roots will steal nutrients from my vegetable plots. It's important to choose the right one. So why was I being so daft as to give up my precious garden space to a flavourless apple?

My decision was partly sentimental because I used to live in Tewkesbury, and because I wanted to have the most local varieties. But the real clincher was that Tewkesbury Baron is critically endangered. By the criteria of the Gloucestershire Orchard Group that means its population has dwindled to "two sites or fewer". I felt morally obliged to take it on.

I was impressed and inspired by my visit to Lodge Farm Trees. Its proprietor Rob is a great bloke and he's completely passionate about his trees. He loaded them into the car for me and spent a good ten minutes explaining how to prune them and care for them. I also have him to thank for galvanising me into starting this blog. He knows more about apples than I ever will, but when I asked about the flavours and flowering habits of the trees I was buying he shrugged and said "Some of these trees are so rare nobody's grown them for years. So we won't know what they're like until somebody grows them and shares the information." I was really astonished by that because it had never occurred to me before that ordinary gardeners like me can make a really significant contribution to the available knowledge. Instead of being a passive consumer of other people's expertise we can all grow, observe, note, photograph and share information, especially now, in the internet age. I was inspired and set up Daughter of the Soil that very same week.


So, that was over two years ago and I can now share some information about Tewkesbury Baron. My tree was certainly keen to produce fruit. I'd read that apple trees can take seven years to start fruiting properly, but my one-year-old tree produced an abundance of flowers within a few weeks of planting and managed to set 12 fruits. For the sake of the tree I picked off 11 of them and just let it produce one, for tasting purposes. The fruits are a deep rosy red where the sun gets to them, green where it doesn't, and lightly speckled. They have a very waxy shiny skin which feels quite distinctive and silky to touch. The wax is so intense it rubs off on your fingers.

But here's the surprise. I gathered the one specimen fruit when it was ripe, and ate it. And I can say, hand on heart, it was absolutely the most gorgeously exquisite apple I've ever tasted. The texture was slightly grainy, but not in a bad way, it was bursting with juice, and the flavour was beautifully poised between sweetness and sharpness. It was equally sweet and sharp at the same time, so tangy it was almost fizzy ... a really rich and complex flavour. The fruit itself also had a beautiful, beautiful scent even before I bit into it. I left it on my desk for a few hours before eating it and it filled the whole room with an exquisite apple aroma.

How this apple ever got labelled as having "little flavour" is totally beyond me. I'm in no position to argue with the pomologists at Brogdale, but I can only assume they based their assessment on some duff fruit. There could be any number of reasons why the specimens they had weren't up to scratch, but anyway I can vouch that in my garden Tewkesbury Baron is wonderful, an absolute treasure and delight.

The blossoms, as you can see from these pictures taken yesterday, are a deep pink and grow in little posies right the way up the trunk of the tree. I'm training mine into a festoon, hence the bits of string in the top photo. When the flowers open they'll be pale pink.


Hurrah for Lodge Farm Trees, rescuing and distributing these endangered varieties. And if you would expect a specialist nursery with lovingly nurtured heritage varieties and personal service from a genuine expert to be more expensive than a garden centre flogging the bog-standard commercial varieties, well it wasn't. The trees were £12 each, which is several quid less than in most garden centres. They were also well developed for their age and in fabulous condition. They'd really responded well to being grown with loving care rather than churned out by a production nursery. For those with less space to spare the nursery was also offering "family trees" where several heritage varieties had been budded onto a single rootstock, producing a tree with different fruit on every branch.

The moral of the story? Don't let anything you read put you off trying stuff.