Daughter of the Soil

Potato blessings

2011-05-22T17:06:00.000+01:00

Thank you to all who left comments about the fence issue, they lifted my spirits. The neighbours have now finished putting the fence up, though since I took this picture a couple of days ago they have added a trellis panel to the top as well.

Well here it is: the south side of the greenhouse, which was previously open to the sunlight. What unutterable tossers.

I did have to laugh at the comment by Dim Sum Gardener (thank you) whose elderly nosey neighbour climbs on a plastic table to spy over the fence. I have similar experiences with the bloke next door, who climbs up stepladders and peers into my garden on a regular basis. As I'm very quiet he usually doesn't realise I'm there, so I make a point of shouting a loud "HELLO!" hoping to make him topple off. It'll be interesting to see whether he continues to do this nosey parkering in future – I bet he will. When I first moved in it became flagrantly apparent that he liked to look at knickers on the washing line, and so I carefully calculated all the sightlines from the open lattice fence and made sure I hung my undies in the places which were out of his view. At least the solid fence has resolved that, and I have relative laundry freedom. He will have to get out the stepladder now if he wants to see a bra fluttering in the breeze, or make do with gawking at his wife's grandma pants. It's also put the kibosh on his unsolicited gardening advice, which was generally along the lines of (a) you planted that in the wrong place, (b) you shouldn't water that while the sun's out, or (c) it's no good washin' them greenfly orf, you've gotta kill 'em intcha? I can understand his lack of appreciation for organic methods, which is largely a generational thing, but it was made more irksome because he's one of those men who talks to women's breasts instead of their faces. During these conversations I kept wanting to say "um ... excuse me, I'm up here..." In some ways, it's a relief to be freed from the social obligations, and I no longer have to pretend to be interested while he witters on about some packet of seeds which was 2p cheaper in Aldi's than in Tesco's.

At the root of the fallout is the simple matter that we are just very different people with very different worldview and priorities. They like to keep their garden clean and tidy, with lawn like Astroturf and a Bug Gun at the ready to blast the living daylights out of any hapless insect which chances to venture onto their flowers. It must be distressing for them to have to live next door to a long-haired oik who wears clothes from charity shops and never mows the lawn. They hate cats, and I have two. They hate weeds, and I cherish a few patches of them for the bees and butterflies they attract. The missus next door is absolutely paranoid about dandelion seeds blowing through from my garden to contaminate hers. And the bloke has been telling me for years that home-grown vegetables are a waste of time because "they don't come to nuthin' anyway", presumably disappointed that his cabbages didn't grow with polythene shrinkwrapping like the ones in the shops. He thinks organic gardening is daft ... why put up with insects eating your stuff when you can just spray them? But then he wonders why there are more birds and butterflies in my garden than in his. My plant-breeding work is completely over their heads – I've tried many times to explain it but they are just baffled as to why I want to make new plants when you can pick up seeds so cheaply in the shops. All these differences mean that I can get a kind of revenge on them just by being me ... I can let my dandelions go to seed, and leave the lawn as a scrubby meadow, and it drives them nuts. I could experiment with further environmental practices ... perhaps install a compost toilet next to the fence where their garden bench is, or at least a wee-activated compost heap. Or I could indulge my artistic creativity and make a big papier mâché cat turd to stick in the middle of the lawn, or perhaps a giant inflatable dandelion floating up above fence level on guy ropes.

The reason I've been put off going to the council is that my past experience of trying to use "due process" just results in enormous waste of time and energy which I'd rather spend on positive and creative things. I have in the past had to deal with a bad neighbour who put the current ones well in the shade (pun intended) – an old bat with a personality disorder who victimised the entire neighbourhood, but despite having a petition signed by all the neighbours and the support of our MP we couldn't get anything done. The council said it was a matter for the police, and the police said it was a matter for the council, and back and forth it went for three years. Eventually the old bag really lost it during a row about bin-bags and beat her next-door neighbour around the head with a baseball bat. While it was fun to watch her being carted off in a paddy wagon, still yelling abuse at the police as they took her away, she ended up getting away with it because the Crown Prosecution Service forgot to request the medical evidence in time for the trial and decided to press for a conviction without it - which they didn't get. During the court hearing the woman's son sat directly behind me and the victim, whispering death threats to us the whole time. We reported it, but nothing was done. So if I'm a little cynical about the usefulness of pursuing official complaints, this is why. I would rather just draw a big arse on the fence and blow a few raspberries, and get on with something positive.

An unnamed/unidentified South American andigena potato. The carmine-red splodges in the leaf axils give a clue to the deep red tubers it will produce.

So here's some positive stuff I've been getting on with. I've had some very generous potato donations from Rhizowen and Frank Van Keirsbilck, which I'm watching with great excitement as they grow. They include several colourful specimens of South American andigena (I think) types, a rare phureja variety, and some Maori (Taewa) potatoes which Frank grew from seed sent to him by a gardener in New Zealand. Being seed-grown they are "Frank originals" rather than named varieties, but I am happy with that. To me, a reshuffling of the genes of Maori potatoes is just as interesting as getting hold of existing heritage types, because it shows a lot of detail about the ancestry of these potatoes as the various parental traits segregate out. I'm very excited about them as they are very hard to get hold of outside New Zealand. It's a little difficult to tell what the spuds will look like, as all potatoes at this time of year look like brown wizened prunes regardless of what cheerful colours they might have had at harvest, so I will have to wait and see. But one seems to be a dusky ultra-purple and another a reddish bicolour. Among the South Americans there is a similar range of colour loveliness, including an unnamed pink and yellow bicolour and a black and tan bicolour called Puca Quitish. It's going to be a fun year for bizarre-coloured mash in the Rebsie household.

This is Pastusa Amarilla, a phureja-type potato from Owen. As the tubers were small I started them off in modules, where they grew like rockets, and this one had already begun to set some tiny tubers of its own by the time I planted them out.

I've not yet had time to blog about my TPS-grown potatoes from last year, and there's so much to say I don't know where to start. There were lots of fascinating colours and exquisite flavours, and some amazingly high yields considering the plants were seedlings and not grown from tubers. A great many tubers produced by last year's seedlings are now replanted and growing for the first time as tuber-grown plants. Some are HUGE ... in fact the biggest and most vigorous potato plants I've ever grown. This may be down to the fact that freshly created potato varieties are relatively virus-free. The more established varieties, unless you get planting stock which has been "cleaned" in a laboratory, will have become burdened with a collection of energy-sapping pathogens over the years. It could also be an effect of hybrid vigour, but that's probably less of a factor in potatoes than in other plants, because essentially all potatoes are hybrids. Their tetraploid (doubled chromosome) structure keeps their genes banging around like a pinball machine in every seed. Hybrid vigour is the norm in most potatoes, which is why they're such a successful food crop, and you should theoretically only see a drop in vigour if you inbreed them, i.e. grow seeds which have self-pollinated. But in an illustration of how nature likes to raise two green fingers to such predictions, the most rampant batch of triffid-aspiring monster spuds I currently have in the garden is an inbred line from self-pollinated berries of Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy. These little beauties deserve a whole post of their own as they are wonderful, colourful and precious.

One of the most interesting potatoes-from-seed I have on the go is from a cross of primitive stenotomum cultivars, Pirampo x Khuchi Akita. This is an F3 "novelty line" from Tom Wagner, a cross of two traditional Andean potatoes which are not adapted to temperate zones such as Europe but are still fun to experiment with. I have been erroneously describing them as Bolivian, when in fact only Khuchi Akita is from Bolivia, and Pirampo originates in Peru. Any road, this hybrid is diploid, so it lacks the chromosome doubling which gives cultivated potatoes their big tubers and high yields. It's also limited in its ability to set tubers in the British climate, so I couldn't be sure that the plants I grew from TPS would give me any potatoes at all. But they did give me one very big surprise. They were completely and quite astoundingly blight resistant.

Last September I watched as all the potato haulms in the garden turned brown and rotted, including the ones which I was trialling for possible blight resistance as they had been bred to contain the resistance genes. Fortunately the blight in 2010 was late enough that it didn't curtail tuber production, and I got a good harvest, and was able to simply stand back and watch to see how the blight affected different varieties at different speeds. I had twelve plants of Pirampo x Khuchi Akita, in various parts of the garden, and there was not a speck of blight on any of them. They just sat there defiantly while the plague raged all around them, and then, as a final "sod you" gesture to Phytophthora infestans they put on a second flush of flowers just as I was scraping up the blackened corpses of every other potato in the garden. They were still flowering in October when the first frosts came. Their flowers were beautiful too, have a look at these ...

Pirampo x Khuchi Akita potato blossom, 2010.

I was really surprised, because I wasn't expecting this hybrid to show any blight resistance at all. There are a few species of near-wild Andean potatoes which are blight resistant, but not these; these are technically the same species as normal cultivated potatoes, just a less developed form of it. I'm still not entirely convinced that the resistance is genetic, and will have to see what happens to them this year before I allow myself to get too excited. But it does at least illustrate why I'm keen to experiment with unusual varieties like this.

As it turned out, about half the plants managed to set tubers. This is a pretty good achievement for an Andean landrace type, because they are dependent on daylength, and the long daylength in Europe is completely wrong for them. Consequently they don't start to tuberise until the days shorten in the autumn, by which point they don't have time to do anything before the frosts hit them. What I'm looking for in these plants is the odd one or two which can tuberise successfully in our long summer days. It's one of those things which is self-selecting by default and doesn't require much intellectual input from a plant breeder – if it doesn't tuberise effectively then it can't survive to the following year. Extreme Darwin in action. Another self-selecting trait is the keeping quality, since a short shelf-life is common in Andean potatoes. It's often possible for farmers in South America to grow a continuous cycle of potato crops, perhaps two or three a year, so they don't need to be stored for any period of time. They are just replanted shortly after harvest and off they go again. Can't do that in England though, unless you want to grow a crop of frost-bitten stumps. So I can only regrow the ones which stay alive in storage for six to eight months. This weeded out several of my Pirampo x Khuchi Akita beauties, unfortunately.

The tubers I got from the plants were small, deep-eyed, immensely variable in size (but still small) and not very abundant. However they did come in some absolutely glorious colours and markings, mostly reds, purples and intense carmine pinks.

Alas, this beautiful purple bicolour was among the ones which didn't make it through the winter. I didn't even get a chance to taste it as it was so pitifully low yielding. But I feel blessed to have had it enter my life, however briefly.

This one was a lot more promising. It's a bright red one with yellow eyes, though it doesn't look its best in this shot because it's unwashed. (Washing potato tubers considerably reduces the chance of them keeping over winter.) This was by far the best yielding of the lot - a pretty respectable harvest for a diploid landrace type. Only the largest tubers succeeded in surviving over winter, but survive they did ...

And this is what they look like now, blossoming like mad already. Notice that the flowers are more of a mauve colour than the magenta-purple blossom shown above. The flower colours did vary somewhat between siblings in this hybrid, though they were all somewhere on the mauve to purple spectrum.

Taking a fence 2

2011-05-17T15:36:00.001+01:00

It is a nuisance to have to waste time and energy on neighbour disputes, and I know a lot of you have had all kinds of problems with selfish or thoughtless people encroaching on your property. In comparison to the things I've read on other people's blogs I know I'm dealing with a pretty small and insignificant dispute, but it's an annoyance nonetheless.

I've already blogged about my next-door neighbour's decision last year to put a solid six foot fence along the entire length of my vegetable garden, in place of an open latticework fence which allowed the sunlight through. The impact of this has been noticeable over the last season. The fence runs along the south side of my garden, so the vegetable plot now gets no direct sunlight at all during the spring and autumn months, and even in summer the strip of permanent shadow is two or three feet wide, reducing the amount of growing space I have. It would be annoying enough if it was their fence boundary, but it isn't - it's ours. But in the interests of maintaining neighbourly relations, I decided not to put in a formal complaint about it. The fence does bring me some benefit to compensate for the loss of growing space; being in shade all through the winter does reduce the weed growth, and at least the fence now gives me some privacy and prevents the bloke next door from dispensing unsolicited gardening advice, which he was wont to do with tedious regularity.

Last week, however, I went out into the garden and found the neighbour perched up on the fence nailing a trellis panel on top of it, raising the height of the fence by another 12-18 inches. "It's just decorative", he said when I challenged him about the further loss of light it would cause to my growing area. Thanks a bunch. He was obviously a bit self-conscious about doing the work while I was working out there, and stopped for the rest of the day. As I've always got on fine with them, I thought the best thing to do would be to make a conciliatory approach explaining my concerns. I wrote a polite and friendly letter asking them to reconsider their plan to put trellis panels along the whole length of the fence, explaining the impact their six foot fence has already had on my property and hoping they would understand how much my vegetable garden means to me.

I got no response, but the next morning I found that they had snuck out early in the morning before I was up and nailed the trellis panels up all the way along. As a concession, they had put them slightly lower than they were originally going to be, but they still add to the height of the fence. I was not happy, to say the least, and I told the neighbour so the next time he stuck his head up over the fence. His response was that he'd rung the council planning department and they'd told him that he could basically do what he liked (thank you council), and if I didn't like it I'd have to take out a civil action. We had a good shout at each other but the selfish old bastard knew there wasn't anything I could do once he'd got the panels up - which is probably why he did it while I wasn't around.

To be honest, it's not the further erosion of my vegetable plot that bothers me; it's the disappointment that after seven years of being decent neighbours to them, and asking them nicely not to do something which impacts on my garden, they deviously went ahead and did it while I wasn't looking, and rather than listen to my concerns just told me I'd have to take legal action to get it removed. I'm well within my rights to do so, but I've got better things to do with my time and money than lining solicitors' pockets. I'm just baffled as to why they are being such arseholes.

Maybe the arseholeness was there already and I'd chosen not to see it. I already knew that the woman next door bad-mouths the neighbours while being friendly and polite to their faces. The first inkling I had that I was on the receiving end of this was when they asked me to go round and be a witness on some legal paperwork they were trying to get signed. Their daughter, who is about the same age as me, was there and I smiled and said hello ... and she scowled at me as if I'd just been caught trying to burn down an orphanage. I can't ever remember being greeted with such contempt and disgust by someone I've never met, and I thought oh well, it says more about her than it does about me. But then it transpired that her mum doesn't have a good word to say about anyone and has probably given her the impression that all the neighbours around here are freaks and degenerates. It's also telling how often they have offered me things during their clear-outs which have turned out to be broken. Plant trays with splits down the side, baskets where the handles have come off. They make a show of being kind and neighbourly when they are simply dumping worthless junk.

And now, following my shouting match with the old bugger last week, they have decided to take things a stage further and are now about to put up a solid six foot fence along the length of my greenhouse, where the one remaining lattice panel had been letting some light through. Clearly the chance to cast a permanent shadow over my greenhouse and render one side of it useless for growing plants was too great a temptation to resist. You have to feel sorry for people who are that small-minded, because it's really a symptom of how unsatisfying their lives are. Again, I've got better things to do with my time than getting involved in legal action, but I did take a few moments out of my busy schedule to draw an unwieldy erect phallus on the side of my rainwater butt to give him something to look at while he's working. Does that make me mean-spirited as well? Perhaps, but it's more fun than a solicitor and if he's going to behave like a prick then he may as well have one to look at. Besides, "it's just decorative".

Tomatoes of past glory

2011-03-27T20:36:00.001+01:00

OSU Blue Fruit tomato. Not yet commercially available (to my knowledge), this is a breeding line of purple-black tomatoes developed at Oregon State University in the US. The fruits ripen to a deep coal black but are perhaps at their most beautiful during the ripening phase when they take on some magnificent purple tones. The flavour is decent enough, although work is still being done to improve it. And no, they are not genetically modified: the colour was achieved through traditional breeding methods by combining three genes found in South American wild tomatoes.

I have been rather quiet on the blogging front haven't I? The reason is that I'm now working full time for a small publishing company, and also writing a book about potato breeding which will be available in late summer or early September. The book will answer all your questions about growing from TPS and potato seed saving, and to the best of my knowledge will be the first book of its kind on the subject. It's all very exciting and enjoyable, but as you can imagine I am immensely and obscenely busy, and working some very long hours.

Today however, I'm closeted indoors as it's the first warm and sunny weekend of the year and that inevitably means the neighbours are having a barbecue. There's nothing like the stench of burning flesh to send me scuttling back into the house with all the windows shut; so here I am, and may as well do something useful like posting some of the tomato pictures I took last year and didn't get round to using for anything. All of these were grown in the greenhouse unless otherwise stated.

Darby Striped Pink/Yellow. This came from the Heritage Seed Library and is an absolute corker. It's actually an English-bred tomato, from the breeding work of Lewis Darby at the Glasshouse Crops Research Institute in Littlehampton in the 1950s and 60s. Dr Darby also produced the well-known striped variety Tigerella (a variety which I've seen described around the internet as a poor performer, which has not been my experience of it at all - it would seem that it grows better in the UK than in the US, which has led many American gardeners to be disappointed with it). Anyway, this Pink/Yellow line was never released as a commercial variety, which is a shame, because it is fantastic. The flavour is exquisitely rich and fruity, the texture is just right, the yields are very generous and the rounded fruits are a lovely deep pink-red with yellow stripes ripening to orange. It's definitely one I will grow again, and it has such a lot going for it.

Tangella. Another of Dr Lewis Darby's creations, this bright orange tomato was released commercially and enjoyed some popularity in its day, but was subsequently deleted from the National List and is now rare. Once again, it was the Heritage Seed Library which supplied me with seeds. I don't rate the flavour of this one as highly as the Pink/Yellow variety above; it's milder and mellower, although it does have a tang to it. It is very firm on the outside but has a very soft texture in the flesh, bordering on the mushy when fully ripe. But it is a nice variety, and the colour is absolutely gorgeous ... a vibrant deep orange all the way through and probably high in carotenes. The fruits come out at a variety of sizes and are a rounded apple-shape, and being bred in England, it is very happy with the UK climate.

Tomatito de Jalapa. Another one I'd recommend. This tiddly tiny cherry tomato was given to me by Patrick Wiebe at Bifurcated Carrots, but previously came from Frank Van Keirsbilck in Belgium. The thing that makes it special is that it's supposed to have blight resistance. Others who have tried it have had mixed results, some finding it blight-resistant and others not, with an additional observation that it needs to be deprived of any kind of feed or fertiliser in order to work its anti-fungal magic. My own experience was that it was blight tolerant rather than blight resistant as such. I grew it outdoors with full exposure to the elements, and gave it no fertiliser or special treatment. I also grew a normal non-resistant variety beside it as a 'control' ... not very scientific, but it gave me something to compare it with. Tomatito de Jalapa held off the blight better than the control plant did, and succumbed at a much slower rate, and although it did become infestans-infested, what was interesting was that the blight didn't get into the fruits, even when the stems they were growing on became blighted. Thus the plant was stricken with blight but I was still able to go on harvesting the fruits for some while - unlike the control plant, whose fruits rapidly became inedible. So this is definitely one to try if you want to grow outdoor tomatoes and be fairly confident of getting a crop. Having said that, the blight was a bit later in 2010 than it has been in previous years, so it remains to be seen how it will cope in a "bad" blight season. However, there's more to a variety than disease resistance, and Tomatito de Jalapa has a lot to recommend it. The small fruits are absolutely delicious - sharp and fruity - and borne on long trusses which ripen beautifully in the English outdoors. Productivity certainly didn't suffer much for the lack of fertiliser. So although the tomatoes are tiny, you get a constant supply over a long period, and overall yield is high. I'll certainly grow it again.

Essex Wonder. Popular in the 1930s as a market garden variety developed especially for the glasshouse industry in Essex, this is another "deleted" variety rescued from near extinction by the Heritage Seed Library. This crop was grown outdoors, which wasn't really ideal for it, but it coped. I've had better results growing it in a greenhouse in the past. It's a classic tomatoey tomato; in other words it's almost perfectly spherical, bright red, and has a nice old-fashioned tomato flavour. The size varies considerably, as does the thickness of the flesh, and the gel around the seeds is distinctly green.

Anna Russian. An oxheart-type tomato. Oxhearts tend to be large, strawberry shaped and immensely fleshy, with few seeds. They also tend to be a bit on the bland side, and that's where Anna Russian is a glorious exception, being very rich and flavoursome. The fruits are a deep dark rosy pink with a mildly ribbed surface, and bright red inside. As they're so fleshy (and tasty) they work extremely well in slices and would probably be good in sandwiches. Yields are pretty respectable - higher than you'd think from the rather floppy plants - and early maturing. Despite the name I believe this variety comes from the US, though it may well have been taken there by Russian immigrants. My seeds came from Association Kokopelli in France. Sorry there's no bottle-top for scale in this picture, but the fruits are of quite variable size.

Pink Freud F4. One of my own little projects which I'm quite pleased with. Now in an F4, it produces masses of miniature shiny silky Roma-plum tomatoes on large trusses, dark pink before ripening to deep red. The flavour is fabulous, and they are equally good raw or stewed up into a luxurious sauce. They also have incredible keeping properties, and ripe fruits can be left in the kitchen (unrefrigerated) for weeks on end with no loss of quality. I've no idea who its parents were, it arose from saving and selecting seed from a punnet of F1 hybrid tomatoes I bought in Marks and Spencer's in 2002. A great example of why you should ignore the received wisdom that saving seeds from F1 hybrids is a waste of time. On the contrary, "doesn't come true from seed" is another way of saying "has lots of exciting diversity". So if you grow any F1 hybrid tomatoes, either from seed packets or supermarkets, do try saving their seeds and see what surprising and delightful goodies they throw up for you.

Pugliese Green. Perhaps this should be re-christened Pugliese Red. I was given the seeds by Jeremy Cherfas of Agricultural Biodiversity, who is living in Italy and bought the fruits at a local shop. They are thought to be a locally-developed variety from the Puglia region of Italy (the heel of the boot). I grew them in 2009, allowed them to ripen to a full vibrant red, and was absolutely knocked out by how good they tasted. Really one of the best-flavoured tomatoes I've ever tasted. But when I blogged about it last time, Jeremy informed me that this isn't how they are eaten in Italy. As I should have guessed from the fact that he called them Pugliese Green, they are supposed to be eaten while they're still a bit green. So this year I tried it. And yes, they are indeed very tasty while green-ish. But I still maintain that the really knockout flavour develops when they are fully ripe! It's also remarkable how rapidly they ripen. One minute they're sitting there with no more than a blush of red, and the next day when you go to check them they are bright as a post-box. The fruits are medium sized, firm to the touch, and take the form of slightly flattened globes. The photo shows a couple of fruits in the intermediate semi-green stage as well as the full red. Take your pick. The fact remains that this is a very fine tomato, whatever colour it is when you eat it. Thanks Jeremy.

Isis Candy. Popular in the US but pretty much unknown over here (I bought the seeds a few years ago from an American seed company), this is a little treasure, and actually originated in Eastern Europe. It's a small tomato, but not small enough to call a cherry; it's very rounded and elegantly symmetrical, globe-shaped but distinctly flattened. It's thin-skinned and very juicy, and has a really lovely sharp tangy flavour. It's also very beautiful, passing through many shades of orange, pink and red, sometimes in marbled combination. A regular favourite.

Green Zebra. A green-when-ripe stripey tomato bred by Tom Wagner in the US and released in the 1980s through his TaterMater seed company. It can now be found in catalogues worldwide, and is widely grown and well loved. Fruits are a decent size and exquisitely striped, with more of a mottled pattern underneath. People often ask how you know when it's ripe, and the answer is that the lighter stripes change to a golden colour, which is quite distinctive when you see it. You can also give the fruits a little squeeze if in doubt. It does taste slightly different from a red tomato, and has quite a sharp, acidic tang.

Banana Legs x Green Tiger F1. Another of my own breeding projects, this time from a cross I made between one of Tom Wagner's creations, Banana Legs, and a Marks & Spencer's commercial variety, Green Tiger (not to be confused with Green Zebra above). Banana Legs is a light yellow elongated tomato with silvery stripes and a distinct nipple on the end, while Green Tiger is a perfectly spherical, smooth and shiny tomato with deep burgundy red flesh and dark olive-green stripes over its red skin. What I find fascinating about this F1 hybrid is that it's in almost every way an exact intermediary between the two parent types. It's got silvery-green stripes (not very clear in this photo as they stand out more when unripe), and the shape is an extended globe with a small nipple. This half-way blend fascinates me because it's not something that happens in my pea-breeding projects. With peas, the dominant genes assert themselves completely in the F1 hybrid, with recessive traits completely hidden until they start segregating out of the F2. I'm not a tomato breeder, I only have an occasional casual dabble, so it intrigues me to see how differently the genes express themselves in tomatoes. It's results like this which illustrate why it took so many thousands of years for humans to understand the processes of genetic inheritance, assuming wrongly that it was a simple "blending" process, and it also perhaps shows why it was with peas that the great breakthrough of understanding was made. Anyway, I could go on about how beautiful and high yielding this hybrid was, and that the flavour was pretty decent - but it doesn't really matter what traits it has, because I cannot preserve it in this form. Every seed is an F2 with a different genetic shake-up, so presumably when I sow them I will start getting segregation for the various parental traits rather than this half-way mix. But we shall see.

Something else interesting about my 2010 tomato crop which I will only talk about briefly as I need to do some more experimentation before I conclude anything. I took the slightly strange decision not to feed any of my tomato plants, but just to grow them au naturel, as it were. The inspiration for this was an incident in the 2009 season when I became so busy I had to abandon some tomato plants in the greenhouse - only to find months later that they were fruiting beautifully despite having no water or fertiliser, and also in immaculate blight-free health, even though blight was rampaging through the garden outside. This experience set me thinking, and then when Patrick gave me the Tomatito de Jalapa seeds with the instruction not to feed the plants as their blight-resistance only works if they aren't fed, something went ker-chinggg in my head.

So in 2010 I grew my greenhouse tomatoes without any fertiliser whatsoever, and I only watered them when they were really desperate. The results really astonished me. The plants didn't grow anywhere near as big as they would do with a "normal" feeding and watering routine, and so I suppose they produced fewer fruits too, but in terms of the number of fruits which were edible ... the yields were the highest I've ever had. This is because all the fruits were perfect - immaculate, healthy and blemish free. I had no blossom-end rot, I had no splitting (except very late in the season), I had no mouldering and squishing, and most remarkably I HAD NO BLIGHT. There was plenty of blight outside, it killed all the potatoes and the outdoor tomatoes. But the greenhouse tomatoes had none at all. It may be that they were just lucky, or sufficiently sheltered, but I don't think so ... I think they were so happy and healthy they managed to fight off all nasties. It's as if the lack of feeding enabled them to fulfil their natural potential instead of being forcibly plumped up into oversized bloaters. Another possibly significant factor: because the plants only grew to about 6ft and didn't sprawl like triffids all the way up to the ceiling and out the roof, it wasn't necessary to do much pruning at all. I just nipped out a couple of sidebuds when the plants were young and then left them to it. I'm wondering if the non-pruning also helped to keep them healthy, because this is exactly what the great Dominique Guillet asserts in his book The Seeds of Kokopelli. He reckons pruning is nothing short of tomato-abuse, and believes very firmly that the lack of pruning in his tomato crops is what keeps them blight-free.

Lots of food for thought and further experimentation here. If anyone else has any experience with growing tomatoes without fertiliser, or is perhaps brave enough to experiment with it in 2011, I'd love to hear about it.

Shetland tattie dreams

2010-08-30T01:32:00.000+01:00

Shetland Black

A few years ago I bought some Shetland Black potatoes from Waitrose and they were very tasty. They were intriguing looking things … small, elongated and a muted shiny black with pale corky spots on the skin and a 'netted' surface. Inside they had a distinctive purple ring set into the pale yellow flesh. I saved a few and planted them. They grew pretty well, so I wrote a review of them.

A short while after writing the review, I had a message from Jon who lives in Shetland. Did I know, he asked, that the Shetland Black sold in Waitrose is not the same as the Shetland Black grown by the crofters on the islands? Well no, I didn't. And when he kindly offered to send me a sample of the "real thing" it was not something I was going to turn down.

A box duly arrived with a generous stash of "real" Shetland Black tubers, and I saw what he meant. They are certainly similar to the commercial ones, in that they are black-skinned and yellow-fleshed with a trace of purple inside. But they are rounder in shape, with deeper eyes. The flesh is a stronger yellow, and instead of having a simple purple vascular ring, the purple is more diffuse and spreads into the flesh, although it still has about the same amount of purple overall. The skin is a softer charcoal black, with a slight coarseness and a few pale speckles but none of the distinctive 'corky spots' or netting of the commercial type. When the tubers sprout, the sprouts are purple rather than the glossy black of the commercial version. It is, as Jon put it, "subtly yet profoundly different".

The Shetland Black potatoes from Shetland, as grown by Jon.

And while I find the commercial Shetland Black very well flavoured, the flavour of the local version is really outstanding. It has an exceptionally rich, strong, old-fashioned flavour with no bitterness in the skin, and the flesh is dense and smooth. The flavour is excellent when boiled and the potato holds together well without breaking up … if the outer skin is undamaged it keeps its purple colour. It also makes nice roasties, albeit rather dense ones with a thick skin. But then I guess that isn't an issue if you peel them … it's just one of my personal funny little ways that I never, ever peel potatoes.

Interestingly, Alan Romans mentions in his Potato Book that the version of Shetland Black conserved in the National Collection is considered by many Shetlanders not to be "right", and the authentic local version is described as larger and rounder with deeper eyes - exactly what I have here. Jon tells me that even within Shetland there are several more variants, some with a paler skin colour.

Naturally I was intrigued to see how the plants compared to the ones I'd already reviewed.

Standard Shetland Black on the left, "real" Shetland Black on the right.

Darker skin, yellower flesh, rounder tubers. The flowers do look fairly similar, but the difference not visible in this picture is that the one on the left is a rarity! This is the only decent specimen I've ever seen on the standard Shetland Black, it's usually a saggy specimen with wonky anthers or none at all. Whereas the one on the right flowers profusely.

"Real" Shetland Black produced very large voluptuous plants with big, dark green leaves, again quite different from the standard Shetland Black which tends towards the straggly end of the spectrum. To my delight, its flowering habits are also very different. It produces masses of blooms, large, elegant and mauve-petalled, borne over a long season. The real delight for me though is that it is a natural berry setter, loading itself up with large purple and green mottled fruits. In fact it's a potato breeder's dream. It has fertile pollen which can be used to pollinate other varieties and make hybrids. It will also accept pollen from other potato varieties to make more hybrids. And it is self-fertile, so I can also use it to pollinate its own flowers and reshuffle the contents of its own genepool without crossing it with anything else. To put this in perspective, the number of cultivated potato varieties which are fully male/female fertile is thought to be around 4 or 5%. Among the 95% of others which have compromised fertility is the commercial Shetland Black, which rarely flowers at all, and when it does its rather half-arsed mauve and white blossoms quickly drop off without producing any berries.

So I have been using "real" Shetland Black as both a male and female parent in my breeding programme this year. This is a good thing for me, because it brings interest and diversity. But it's also a good thing for Shetland Black, because one of the surest ways to conserve heritage vegetables is to pass their genes forward into new recombinations. Next year I will be able to sample such joys as Shetland Black x Salad Blue, Shetland Black x [Mandel x John Tom Kaighin], Highland Burgundy Red x Shetland Black, Marfona x Shetland Black, Congo x Shetland Black and possibly others. Plus of course the self-pollinated Shetland Black x Shetland Black, which will be interesting in itself. Potatoes can show a trace of inbreeding depression from self-pollination because nature really made them to be an outbreeder and they're not supposed to be self-fertile (the mechanism for preventing it got screwed up when they acquired their doubled genome). But in practice, self-pollinated seeds often produce really sturdy plants, just as vigorous as a hybrid would be. There's enough genetic diversity in the potato's tetraploid makeup to allow for a healthy bit of internal reshuffling.

My guess, and I must emphasise that it is only a guess, is that the commercially available Shetland Black could be derived from this local version, as the high fertility makes it very easy to save and share seed from it, either self-pollinated (in which case it's a simple reshuffling of the same genetic material) or a cross with something else. The reason I think the local one is probably the older of the two is because of its deep eyes. Shallow-eyed potatoes are a relatively modern innovation, prized for ease of peeling, and although the deep eyes of the local variety are not proof of antiquity, the shallow eyes of the commercial version certainly suggest a more modern origin. And also, the commercial Shetland Black has such low fertility it would be extremely difficult to breed anything from it.

The crop of Shetland Black I grew this year produced tubers somewhat smaller than the ones Jon originally sent me, but made up for it by producing absolutely masses of them … the yield overall was high. My guess is that they will adapt within a year or two and start producing the full size ones. On the whole, the plants seem to be very happy growing down here.

Part of what I wanted to find out was how well the Shetland tatties would adapt to being grown this far south. To any Americans and Australians reading this, the British Isles probably seem very small, and relatively speaking they are, but all the same there's a huge difference between the clement lush greenery of south-west England and the rocky windblustered Shetlands so many miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, far beyond the northernmost tip of Scotland. Shetland potatoes are adapted to thin peaty soil overlaid on solid rock, which is naturally acidic and supports a very different range of plants from the deep sandy loam of Cheltenham, which is naturally infused with limestone.

At one time Shetland had quite a range of unique local potatoes, bred for the particular needs of the soil and climate and maintained through many generations, helped no doubt by the extreme remoteness of this group of islands. Potatoes are known to have arrived in Shetland in the 18th century and formed a very major part of the islanders' diet. In the past, whaling boats from Shetland travelled as far as South America, where potatoes are native, and it's just possible that they picked up some spuds on their travels which differed from those already doing the rounds in England and mainland Scotland. Unfortunately many of these unique local varieties are now lost. Jon says that many older people on the island remember a red potato called Marrister Red which appears to have vanished, and also one called Yell Blue. He was, however, able to send me a sample of a rare and precious survivor among traditional Shetland tatties, which hails from the really tiny island of Foula.

Foula Red

Foula is a fascinating place with a beautiful landscape - the islanders have a truly lovely website devoted to its heritage. It measures only three and a half miles by two and a half miles - you could probably walk its entire length in an hour, if it wasn't for the spectacularly steep slopes - and a population of around thirty people. It has the highest sheer sea cliffs in Britain, plunging straight down more than 1000ft. It has prehistoric stone rings and scattered shipwrecks. And remarkably for such a tiny and sparsely populated island, it has its own sheep and its own potato.

It's difficult to explain just how rugged this potato has to be in order to survive as a viable food crop in Foula. Shetland weather can be very extreme. When in 1936 the island became the setting for a film starring John Laurie (later of Dad's Army fame), the camera crew were astounded by the sight of water in a mill loch being blown 300ft into the air by the force of the wind. But when they tried to film this spectacle they found the wind so strong neither they nor the camera could stand up in it, and they ended up having to crawl back to base on their hands and knees. Magical and inspiring the landscape may be, but this is not a good environment for growing vegetables. The traditional solution to this problem is to grow them in plantie crubs - small circular enclosures made of stones and turf, where the walls are high enough to prevent the plants from being blasted away and a decent layer of soil can be maintained to supplement the thin squishy peat which constitutes the island's natural topsoil.

The Foula Red potato is rounded, sometimes slightly kidney-shaped, with very shallow eyes and a pink-red skin, having a slightly rough matt surface. The flesh inside is a pale yellow, and it doesn't have internal colouring like its Black counterpart. The sprouts are pale pink and the plants grow into fairly large sprawling specimens with unusually large and flat leaves, dark green and with a rosy blush on the leaf stems.

It does have one major drawback though. It is almost laughably low yielding. The spuds are a decent size, but four or five tubers per plant is as much as they can offer. They look so promising as you grub around the base of the plant and unearth the first voluptuous brick-red tuber, since the largest one is usually at the top. And so you eagerly scrabble through the earth to find the rest of them and … er … there aren't any.

The crofter who gave Jon the tubers said that it's traditionally a low-yielding variety and it's quite normal to get such a miniscule crop. The reason it was worth cultivating was that it showed better blight resistance than other varieties grown on the islands, and therefore ensured at least some harvest during bad blight years … an important consideration in a community traditionally dependent on its own food production.

Foula Red is a natural survivor. This plant had its stem damaged by snails, and responded by making stem-borne tubers.

Well, when I grew my Foula Reds for the first time in 2009 they came up happily enough and made fine plants, but were almost immediately struck down by blight! Really complete, devastating blight which killed them in a couple of days. What was most strange was that they were the only plants in the garden to succumb … all my other potatoes were fine. This doesn't mean, however, that Foula Red has been wrongly labelled as blight resistant. The fact is, blight is an incredibly fast-mutating fungal disease and even the most resilient potatoes become vulnerable over time. Since the arrival in Europe of two mating types of blight which quickly got loved up, the version of the disease we are currently blighted with is a new supersonic strain which raises merry hell and simply didn't exist here before the late 1970s. Foula Red may well have had good blight resistance, but the goalposts have moved.

So anyway, fearing I'd lost this precious rare potato, I searched the soil and found a few tiny baby tubers that had just started to form. They were barely bigger than peas. But I kept them safe over winter, and in spring they sprouted, and remarkably, have given me six fine healthy plants in 2010. And this time, they have survived long enough to give me their proud harvest of a couple of tubers each.

My English-grown Foula Reds made it to full size, and are as big as the ones Jon originally sent me. The one thing that is different though is the skin texture. As you can see, the big one in the photo has got the same smooth roughness of the originals but many of the others have a crazed surface where the outer skin is sloughing off, very rough to the touch. I assume this is down to soil differences, though I'm not expert enough in potato behaviour to know what causes it.

And having sampled the taste of them for the first time, I found the flavour really excellent. It's quite similar to Shetland Black in old-fashioned richness, but it's milder and sweeter. The texture is lovely, dense but refined. Worth growing as a delicacy.

It might seem a bit odd to want to keep growing a variety which is both low-yielding and blight susceptible, especially as it's also quite slow maturing which makes the blight more of an issue. But I think something has been lost in the modern culture of wanting to maximise everything. Potato breeding focuses primarily towards larger yields, which is great, but there is still a kind of magic in only having enough to make an occasional treat. If the Foula Reds only produce enough potatoes for a couple of meals, fine - those meals are a special event. And there's also the fact that it's a rare type with no commercial potential and very limited distribution, which creates more of an imperative to take care of it. Local, heritage and landrace varieties shouldn't be judged by the same criteria as modern commercial ones. Foula Red may not win any accolades for its bounty or disease resistance, but it survives on an island with boggy soil and 100mph gales. Who knows when those genes for climate resilience might come in useful, or how important they might one day be for our future food security?

Something else I noticed, unless it's just the shock of adapting to a new climate: Foula Red is a late bloomer. Most potatoes start to flower around the time they set tubers, and Foula Red duly produced a couple of apologetic looking bud clusters which promptly aborted before they even thought about opening. Then it made its tubers, and then … when the tubers were already full size and the season was nearly over, it began to flower properly. Not all the plants produced flowers, only the two biggest ones, but they were a lovely surprise. Very pretty, elegant flowers in a light mauve with bright yellow anthers. They were a joy to behold. More for the sake of scientific study than any serious hope of finding anything, I plucked an anther and prodded it to see if there was any pollen in it. There were veritable plumes of it! Masses and masses of pollen. In fact, left to dehisce naturally it was dumping big white splodges of powder on the leaves underneath. It's pretty rare for potatoes to produce pollen in that kind of abundance. Excitedly, I dabbed some of it on the pistils of its own flowers, and on one or two other potatoes which were still flowering, which wasn't many at that late stage in the season. To my delight, every dabbing resulted in a plump healthy berry. So Foula Red, as well as Shetland Black, belongs with the 4% or so of cultivated potatoes which have complete male/female fertility.

Foula Red flowers

This is really good news. As with Shetland Black, it will allow me to make new varieties from it (if I can find a partner for it which flowers at the same time). But more importantly, it is a huge help in ensuring the variety's future survival. Tubers have a finite lifespan, and any variety which can't produce its own seed (i.e. most of them) is difficult to maintain long term. Foula Red's ability to produce TPS, either by itself or by contributing its genes elsewhere, will enable it to regenerate. Of course being tetraploid (I assume Foula Red is tetraploid) the seeds from self-pollinations will not come "true" to the variety in every detail but they are nevertheless a recombination of the same genes. And who knows, they might even throw up a variant with decent yields. Ha.

So thank you very much Jon. And all credit to the crofters of the Shetland Isles who know a good tattie when they see one.

Proud author

2010-08-07T16:15:00.002+01:00

My apologies for being a bit quiet the last couple of weeks. I've just been ripening the fruits of another big project.

I've been running a small record label with Daniel, my music partner, for a couple of years and while it isn't hugely lucrative we do find it rewarding. The long-held dream, however, was always to found a small literary press. It might seem like a bit of an ambitious thing to do, but I have a publishing background and it was always my intention to make use of it. I originally worked as a typesetter in my teens, in the pre-computer age when they had phototypesetting machines whose output had to be processed in a photographic darkroom (I think that's how I became a singer, because I'm scared of the dark and used to sing all the time in there to take my mind off it). Different fonts were kept on strips of film, so when you wanted to use another font you had to open the machine and attach the appropriate filmstrip around a drum inside which had all the delicacy and charm of a piece of agricultural equipment and would nearly have your fingers off. The typesetting process made the most unbelievable noise, like a load of baked bean tins rattling around in the bottom of a metal dustbin. Once developed in the darkroom, the sheet of text had to be coated with sticky wax on the back and then cut up and arranged into a page layout by hand. If anything was cocked up, you had to start all over again. Mercifully I was rescued by a job with a major educational publisher, the one now known as Nelson Thornes, where I trained in book production (i.e. tut-tutting over other people's typesetting instead of doing it myself) and later moved on to be a graphic designer and editor, both of which I loved. When I got fed up with working for the buggers I went freelance. It's all done on Macs now of course but with the cumbersome clatter of typesetting machines still jangling my memory after 20 years, I always regard Adobe InDesign software with goggle-eyed wonder. Still can't quite believe it will let me change typefaces without snapping my fingers off.

So now Skylight Press has come into being, and after all these years of designing and editing books for other people I have one of my own. At some stage there will be Daughter of the Soil plant breeding books, but don't hold your breath on those because I haven't written them yet. The first masterpiece to roll off the press is This Wretched Splendour, a stageplay about the First World War which I wrote in my 20s. And of course there's a story behind that too.

I walked the Somme battlefields in 1996, primarily on the trail of Wilfred Owen, who is a special favourite poet. It was an experience which affected me very deeply. Everyone has seen photos of the cemeteries with rows and rows of white slabs, but until you go out there and see them for yourself you really have no concept of the scale of it. I spent a week out there picking up buttons and bullets in fields, putting my fingers into the carved names of the missing, the tens of thousands of people who were simply blasted out of existence. I collected poppy seeds from old trenches and stood on the edge of the Sambre à l'Oise canal where Wilfred Owen was gunned down. The night after attending Owen's grave I had some very deep and strange visionary dreams. In the following days and weeks they began to crystallise into ideas for a play. I was heavily involved in theatre at the time, so I was confident I knew how to write for the stage. It turned into a full length play about a group of bored and demoralised British soldiers in a front line trench whose lives are transformed by the arrival of a new officer, who uses his sense of humour to deal with the tragedies of the war and inspires them to face their fate with a new stoicism. I gave my newly finished script to a director at the Cheltenham Playhouse, who loved it and managed to get a theatre company down there to sponsor a full production. And a marvellous production it was too, which still brings happy memories to all concerned.

I also decided to try my luck further afield, so I sent out 30 scripts to major theatre companies and producers. 29 were rejected or ignored (I have a personally signed rejection letter from Alan Ayckbourn, yay!) but one London producer phoned up and said "this is brilliant, I've got a director lined up and we're staging it in February". And then things went a bit mad for a while. The play was put on at the Grace Theatre in Battersea. Susan Hampshire came to see it (she was so radiantly beautiful I'm sure she must glow in the dark) and came over afterwards to say hello and told me how she felt the best war drama is written by women because we have more empathy for its human aspects. Michael Billington from The Guardian came to see it - and wrote a spectacularly glittering review. That caught the eye of the top London literary agents who all started ringing the theatre wanting to "have lunch" with me. And at this point I kind of freaked out. I was still quite young at the time and I'm a shy and reclusive person, and all the attention just terrified me. I was frightened of the agents and didn't follow them up. And within a few weeks I found my celebrity status had evaporated as suddenly as it started. The play was forgotten and I came out of the experience with a three-year writer's block.

So anyway, now that the time has come to launch our small publishing venture, it seemed like a good idea to resurrect the play which has sat in my bottom drawer for 12 years. It still reads pretty well, and I've done a cover design for it which features one of the Somme poppies from my garden (though much Photoshopped). I decided to release it under my maiden name of Rebecca Wilby since that's what it was originally performed under. Should anyone be curious enough to want a copy, it's currently available direct from the printer for £8.25 (or $11.89 in the USA). I think they charge about £2.99 for postage as well, but for those who don't mind reading things on screen it's also available as a download, which is cheaper. At some point soon it will be available "from all good bookshops" as they say, but it may take two or three months yet for it to navigate the murky bowels of the global bibliographic databases.

But fear not, amid all this excitement I am still pollinating potatoes and staring at peas.

TPS: blooms, hybrids and berrybags

2010-07-11T19:45:00.000+01:00

Beautiful purple potato blossom with white star points. This is seedling no.3 of Pirampo x Khuchi Akita.

My potato plants grown from TPS have started flowering, and very beautiful they are too. At the moment it's only the diploid ones which are in bloom, and although the tetraploids are starting to form buds they are a way behind.

I have two diploid lines on the go, both of them grown from hybrid seed produced by Tom Wagner and given to me by Patrick. They are Skagit Valley Gold x Thumbed Nose F1 and Pirampo x Khuchi Akita F3. Actually I also have some diploid plants from Mayan Gold OP seed I collected a couple of years ago, but those were sown a couple of weeks later than the other two and are not flowering yet.

Skagit Valley Gold is one of Tom Wagner's own varieties, derived from Andean potato lines, which makes it genetically distinct from the vast majority of American and European potatoes. It has small round tubers with orange-yellow flesh which cook very quickly, taste very special, and are high in carotenoids and Vitamin E. Thumbed Nose, its partner in this cross, is also one of Tom's own varieties but I can't tell you much about that one. I only have two plants of this hybrid and they are looking extremely unlike each other, although both have the distinctive diploid foliage. One is tall and dark-leaved with pigmentation in the veins, and hasn't flowered yet (though it has buds). The other is a bright lime green and much more compact, with little or no pigment. That one is flowering (pictured below) and the blossoms are an attractive pink mauve.

Skagit Valley Gold x Thumbed Nose F1 blossom, providing some entertainment for a bee.

The flowers on diploid potatoes look just the same as flowers on tetraploids (although they seem to have some additional colour options - I've never seen dark purple blossoms on a tetraploid) but they have some practical differences. Maybe it's to do with Tom's diligence in using only the most fertile varieties in his breeding work, but these flowers are producing stupendous amounts of pollen. As you can see in the photo, they are attractive to bees. This is interesting because bees are among the natural pollinators of potatoes but I've very rarely seen them taking an interest in regular tetraploid varieties. So prolific is the pollen production on these blossoms there were plumes of it going up like a puff of talcum powder just from the beating of the bee's wings. Needless to say I've been using the pollen to make some more crosses and a single anther is enough to pollinate pretty much everything I have available. There is just masses of it.

The other thing that's different about diploids is that they're normally self-incompatible. This inability to fertilise their own flowers is genetic, and forces them to outbreed with other potatoes. The first two blossoms on this plant fell off, unfertilised, despite the amount of pollen they were chucking around, as there was nothing else to fertilise them. Now that the Khuchi Akita hybrids are flowering I've been pollinating them with that, so hopefully I will get some berries now.

Pirampo and Khuchi Akita are both rare landraces from Bolivia. I don't know much about them, the only available information being in the records of the United States Department of Agriculture genebank, which lists them both as a "primitive cultivar". My understanding is that they have been cultivated for many generations by Bolivian farmers but have never been commercially available, and are closer to wild potatoes than to modern spuds. The appeal of this is obvious - they have diversity which would simply not be found in so-called "advanced cultivars". They are both of the Stenotomum type - that is, they're what used to be regarded as a separate species called Solanum stenotomum but which is now classified merely as a subspecies or subgroup of the standard Solanum tuberosum. Confused yet? Just look at the pretty flowers!

Pirampo x Khuchi Akita F3 blossom. This is plant no.4 in my batch, but they all have fairly similar flowers so far, varying in shades of purple and mauve.

The seeds I was given are described as being an F3. That just means that Tom has recombined the offspring a couple of times since the original cross. They have a lot of diversity, which I'm seeing more clearly because I have a number of plants ... about 15 altogether, of which eight or nine are now flowering. Most of them have flowers similar to the one shown above, a deep rich velvety purple. There are subtle variations in the purple, with some having a magenta hue and others more blue. Some have white tips on the petals. There are also some coming out mauve, again with some variation between pinky-mauve and bluey-mauve. Unfortunately the blossoms tend to be borne facing downwards, so you have to lift them up to see how beautiful they are! The plants are also varied in tallness, vigour, and the amount of colour on the stems and leaves.

I know little about the tuber characteristics of the parent varieties nor what to expect from my plants, but while I was earthing up the other day some soil fell away and I got a glimpse of a pink-skinned tuber under one of the plants, which seems to have set tubers exceptionally early. I'm not talking about the subtle rosy brick pink of a Pink Fir Apple here. I mean this one was really PINK. As in bright, vivid carmine. I left it in situ and covered it back up, but I can't wait to see what other variants these plants come up with.

I have to say, TPS is amazing stuff. The seeds are tiny and the emerging seedlings as fine as cotton threads; they have no tuber to provide them with support or nourishment. And yet in less than three months my TPS-grown plants are as large and voluptuous as most of my tuber-grown plants.

So of course I've been making a lot more hybrids for next year's seed, using various tuber-grown varieties. This berry is on a Sharpe's Express plant, pollinated with Salad Blue.

The one berry containing (I hope) F1 seeds of Sharpe's Express x Salad Blue.

Sharpe's Express is not an easy variety to make berries with, as it is a very poor flower holder. It produces very pretty flowers when it's in the mood, of a pale lilac mauve colour. But the vast majority of its buds are thrown off before they open, and I only had one cyme of mature buds this year, of which only three flowers opened. I pollinated them all very carefully with pollen from Salad Blue. Two of them fell off before they had a chance to develop into a fruit. But one - just one - successfully set a berry. I go out every day and pray for it to stay on just a little longer and not drop prematurely. Such is the tenuous nature of making hybrids with some varieties.

There are other frustrating varieties too. Negresse, which would be a wonderful variety to breed from, appears not to produce any pollen (is anyone else having any luck with it?) Its anthers are hard and sterile and I can't get anything out of them. Congo is not much better. And my Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy is declining to flower at all this year, casting off its unopened buds with wilful profligance. But I've also had some successes. Pink Fir Apple was being a pain in the arse, producing masses of flowers but not holding them long enough for a berry to set. Through patience and persistence I've now got quite a lot of berries on it, simply by keeping on pollinating more flowers day after day. Again Salad Blue has been the primary pollinator ... as I'm tempted by the idea of knobbly blue fingerlings. Highland Burgundy Red has given me a pleasant surprise too. I've been growing it for years and it's never once set a berry for me. However I've found its female fertility to be very high - it sets berries very readily when presented with decent pollen. I assumed it was itself male-sterile, but just out of curiosity I made a couple of test crosses, using its pollen to attempt to fertilise other varieties. To my surprise I got a berry. So I tried hand-pollinating it with its own pollen, and again, one or two berries ensued. The pollen fertility doesn't seem to be as high as Salad Blue's, but it certainly can be used as a male parent as well as a female. Perhaps the reason it doesn't naturally pollinate itself is more to do with flower physiology. It has an exceptionally long pistil which sticks way out of the end of the flower, and it also has very small compact anthers. Maybe the distance between the anthers and the stigma is just too great to enable self-pollination without assistance.

So I now have quite a lot of swelling berries on a great many of my different potato plants, all hand-pollinated and marked with colour-coded wool to identify the fathers. However, there is something I will have to watch out for. The berries are quite visible to start with but as they get heavier they tend to sag down into the foliage, and are lost from view. Some sag as far as the ground, where they're vulnerable to being nibbled at or stepped on. They also have a habit of dropping off the plant unexpectedly, which is not a problem in itself as the seeds inside will carry on maturing even when detached from the plant prematurely (within reason), but it does become a problem if there's a chance of them getting lost. If they roll away from the plant it can be difficult to be sure where they came from, and the coloured threads which identify the father varieties are very liable to get detached from them. What I need - at least for those which are most precious or easily lost - is a small and very lightweight bag to hang over the berries as they near maturity, so if they do suddenly decide to make a break for freedom I have them protected and contained. I've read about people using paper bags for this, which are certainly a cheap and convenient solution, but in the British climate that's about as much use as a chocolate teapot (and for similar reasons). They need to be weatherproof, and porous enough to let air and moisture in and out, translucent enough that I can see the berries inside and light enough not to add any extra strain on the stalks, and ideally re-usable. Here's what I came up with.

Berrybags. Not the tidiest stitching, but I think these will do the job very nicely.

They are simply made from a scrap of nylon gauze of the type that's sold for making window drapes (hence the pretty gold pattern, but that's optional) and offcuts of this kind of material can be got from fabric shops for next to nothing. I'm simply folding them over and stitching them up by hand, and very roughly, as the aesthetics don't really matter. The top edge has a piece of wool folded into it to make a drawstring, and I sealed the edges with a fray-stopping chemical goo so they don't fall to bits. They take about 15-20 minutes to make and as I'm the kind of person who never measures anything they are in several different sizes, some small enough for a single berry and some big enough for a whole cyme. The bag goes over the berry (including its coloured marker thread, to make sure that stays with the berry) and the drawstring is tied up around the stem.

July miscellany

2010-07-07T22:53:00.000+01:00

Is there anything more beautiful than poppies at this time of year? This is one of my Somme poppies (see below) but with white flecks.

My last couple of posts have been pretty demanding in terms of time and research, so I feel the need just to blather about more casual stuff today.

Tomatoes ... what can I tell you about tomatoes?

I have a greenhouse full of 'em, laden with flowers and green fruits. I've been doing a few crosses, in a half-arsed kind of way, but I consider them very much a sideline. For one thing, I get fed up with hand-pollinating tomatoes very quickly. In principle they are exactly the same as potatoes and all the instructions I gave in my potato-hybridising post should translate conveniently to tomatoes, which are of course from the Solanum family and have the same basic flower type, except that they're small and yellow. But I find tomato pollination much more frustrating. The small flowers are very fiddly to work with, and the anthers tend to be tightly fused into a cone, so you have to separate them with a careful incision ... they can't be succulently and individually plucked like potato anthers. They are quite a bugger to get off, in fact - which wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't for the fact that they are snugly clamped against a ridiculously fragile pistil. There's none of the "green bendy bit" as described in my pea video ... with tomatoes it's an unyielding green brittle bit. I've destroyed flower after flower by accidentally clonking the pistil off as I attempt to wrench at recalcitrant anthers. Some varieties have a pistil so fine and spindly you can barely see it. And when you do find it, the pollen has to be applied so lightly and delicately, because the tiniest shove in the wrong direction and the pistil is cast aside like a green splinter. Grrrr.

Before I put you off tomato breeding forever, I should mention that I have a preference for small tomatoes, which tend to come from small flowers. Many of the larger-fruited varieties have much sturdier blossoms which are relatively easy to work with. Ever wondered why large-fruited tomatoes are so popular among hobbyist breeders? Now you know.

Just to show that I can and do get successful hand-pollinations though, here is a product of my own fair wobbly hand.

It's an F1 hybrid of Banana Legs x Green Tiger, a cross I made in 2008. Let me admit now that I know very little about tomato genetics, and made this cross very much on a whim just to see what would happen. Banana Legs is an American variety derived from the breeding work of Tom Wagner, though it wasn't raised by Tom himself but selected from a batch of mixed seed bought from his TaterMater company in the 1980s. It's a long plum tomato with a bright banana yellow skin with silver-green stripes, and yellow flesh, and attractive lacy foliage. Green Tiger is something of an enigma, as I obtained it from a packet of Marks & Spencer's eating-tomatoes, and they claim it's exclusive to them (or it was, until me and dozens of other gardeners started saving and sharing its seeds). It has a dark olive green and red striped skin, dark red flesh, and is as round and shiny as a snooker ball, but with a better flavour. Intriguingly, the F1 is producing egg-shaped fruits, which are pretty much intermediate between the two parent fruit shapes.

My tomato experiments are always going to be limited though by the fact that I don't have the space to do it properly. It's all very well having this solitary F1 plant, as you don't need to grow many plants at the F1 stage. Next year when I come to plant the F2 I will have a problem, as I won't be able to grow more than three or four plants ... so it's pot luck whether I'll get any interesting phenotypes. That's fine though ... I have enough on my plate with the peas and potatoes, and can do without too many extra projects. I'd rather give away the F2 seed, if I can find anyone who wants some, so that those with more space and more tomato passion can make use of it.

Here's another tomato curiosity: variegated Green Zebra.

Variegated leaves on a Green Zebra tomato.

It would be nice if this was a heritable feature, but no such luck. It's a spontaneous somatic mutation - which is the posh way of saying that nature freaked out and made a cockup in the cell division, and the cockup then replicated itself, resulting in two different types of leaf tissue within the same leaf. As the cockup is in the cells of the leaf, and not encoded in the DNA, it won't be passed on to the plant's offspring. In fact this tomato is already reverting to normal fully green growth.

And funnily enough, there is a similar thing going on in one of my peas. This is a variegated form of the already lovely Buerre Cosse Rouge. Again, I'm pretty sure it's a somatic mutation and won't be passed on in the seeds.

Then there's my Wilfred Owen poppies, which were pretty much the first thing I wrote about when I started this blog in February 2006, and you can read the story of them if you're interested. The gist is that I collected wild poppy seeds from plants growing in a relic of a first world war trench on the Somme. The trench was, I believe, occupied by Wilfred Owen in January 1917 and his poem The Sentry was written about his experience in it. I've been growing the Somme poppies for many years in my garden, and they are rather lovely ... deep silky bright red with a distinctive black cross at the base, though they vary in how strongly the black cross is expressed.

Somme poppy, with a partial black cross.

The native wild poppies of northern France probably haven't changed much since WW1, but during its tenure in my garden the Somme poppy has taken the opportunity to hybridise with some Mother of Pearl poppies I had growing elsewhere at one time. There's not a lot you can do about this; poppies are sluttily promiscuous and will cross over large distances. And I can't say it bothers me. I'm of the view that genes are the important thing, and outer appearance is secondary. I still get plenty of "true" Somme phenotypes every year, and additionally I get some beautiful variants like this.

Natural hybrid between a Somme poppy and a garden variety. It has the perfect black basal cross of the Somme type with the pink radial stripes of Mother of Pearl.

And finally, a whinge.

When I moved into this house/garden, there was a trellis fence along the western boundary adjoining my main vegetable plot. The previous owner, who was also a keen vegetable gardener, had made a point of having a fence there which let full sunlight through to his vegetable plot. Well, my next door neighbours just took it upon themselves, without consulting me, to remove the trellis fence and replace it with solid 6ft panels. I can see why they didn't consult me. They knew very well I would object, on the grounds that I now have a permanent shadow along a sizeable strip of my vegetable plot. They didn't even do a tidy job ... I'm sure it looks immaculate on their side but they've lumbered me with scrappy bits of wooden battens with sharp nails sticking out of the wood. As they just went ahead and did it, the only recourse I have would be to try to force them legally to remove it. Do I want to get into legal shenanigans with people I have to live next to? No, not really. But all the same, I am well pissed off.

I get on fine with the neighbours and haven't had any dispute with them before, although our garden ideals are polar opposites. Their garden is polished and scrubbed with lawns as sterile as astroturf, and mine is a voluptuous muddle. That, it seems, is the reason for the fence - the missus got fed up with untidy things from my garden growing through the trellis. They have no knowledge of the work I do with my scruffbag plot; they just find it baffling that I grow vegetables for seed and don't eat them. Why save seeds when you can get them for 99p down B&Q? The concept of breeding new varieties and conserving heritage ones meets with blank incomprehension. It's just a different outlook on gardening, and neither of us appreciates the other's aesthetic or way of doing things. At least now they won't have to worry about my dandelion seeds contaminating their garden, and I won't have to worry about their chemical sprays contaminating mine. The privacy is also a blessing. But I'm still pissed off.

Yes I know it's extremely childish, but it makes me feel better.

Hybridising peas: the video

2010-07-01T22:05:00.000+01:00

Here's a demonstration of the method of hand pollinating peas for anyone who has 10 minutes and 39 seconds to spare. Sorry about the business with the cat, he distracted me and it wasn't really possible to edit it.

How to breed your own potatoes

2010-06-27T00:31:00.003+01:00

Breeding new potato varieties is easy. You can hand-pollinate potato flowers in far less time than it'll take you to read this article, but I'm going to attempt a reasonably thorough explanation, so I hope you find it helpful.

Potato breeding is done through sexual reproduction, i.e. pollinating flowers to produce berries which contain true seeds (TPS). Normally when you plant potatoes you propagate them from tubers, confusingly called seed potatoes but which are not actually seeds, but root cuttings. You can't cross tubers. They can only reproduce themselves as they are. Occasionally a plant may produce a spontaneous mutation but it doesn't happen often enough to be useful as a breeding method. Flowers are the way to go, because they give you the option to combine and reshuffle genes from the parent varieties of your choice.

There's a lot to be grateful for in the anatomy of a potato flower. Hand-pollinating them is very easy. The flowers are large and easy to work with, and the individual parts are easy to manipulate.

What's not so easy is making careful plans and predictions for what you might get out of it, and that's because potatoes are tetraploid. If you've no idea what I'm talking about then have a look at my previous post about TPS for a simplified explanation. To give a one-sentence summary: a tetraploid has double the amount of genetic material that a normal (diploid) organism has, which is a bit like inheriting traits from four parents rather than two. Tetraploids are a quirk of nature but in potatoes they are a very successful one, and the vast majority of cultivated potatoes in Europe and North America are tetraploid.

You may still come across the occasional diploid. Mayan Gold and its associated varieties are diploid, and those who are growing TPS from Tom Wagner may have a few diploid lines from him. Diploid potatoes can be recognised by a tendency to have smaller and less fleshy leaves, but the most distinctive feature is the berry. A diploid potato berry has a distinctively pointed end, kind of strawberry shaped, while tetraploid berries are more rounded and tomato-like. If you're feeling experimental you can try crossing a diploid with a tetraploid. At best you will only get a few viable seeds out of it, but it's a brilliant way of introducing new diversity into potatoes. At some point soon I will give it a whole article of its own, as it's too elaborate a subject to go into here.

Potato berries (these are tetraploid ones) in development.

However, assuming the potatoes you want to cross are tetraploid, since most of them are, it's very difficult to predict what the resulting offspring will be like because of the genetic variability involved. With tetraploids, the convenient order of the Mendelian ratio is thrown out the window and replaced by something more akin to a gene tombola. F1 hybrids are not uniform as they are in most other types of breeding project. If you grew a lot of offspring from your cross you'd find that many traits show continuous degrees of variation through the population, rather than segregating into Mendel's either/or groups … which happens because there are so many different ways the alleles can arrange themselves. To quote a research paper by Scotland's premier spudmeisters, Meyer et al (1998) "[Tetraploid] inheritance implies the random pairing of four homologous chromosomes at meiosis, and in a highly heterozygous outbreeding species results in a large number of possible allelic combinations at a single locus. In the most extreme case, eight different alleles could segregate independently in a population, resulting in 36 possible genotypic classes in the progeny." In other words, potatoes naturally have a mixed up genepool (from outbreeding) and when they pollinate and set seed those alleles can arrange themselves in any order - with each different combination having a unique effect on how that trait is expressed. And we're just talking about an individual locus here … the same is happening at every other locus throughout the whole genome. Yowza!

In short, tetraploids are complex and contain a lot of genetic material which can be immensely variable. Scientists doing genetic research on potatoes often choose to work with diploid lines instead, because tetraploids make such a muddle of their data it's hard to interpret anything.

So where does that leave you as a home gardener or small-scale farmer wanting to develop your own potato varieties? It leaves you in a position where you may as well have fun, experiment, use your imagination, be creative. As the results can't easily be predicted, you don't actually need to know anything about genetics. Think more along the lines of what you might get if you cross this colour with that colour, or this flavour with that shape - and then be prepared to be surprised!

One piece of misinformation I see spread all over the internet is a belief that you won't get anything worthwhile out of a home-made potato hybrid because producing just one good variety takes thousands of plants and many many years. This myth has arisen from under the slow-grinding wheels of the potato industry, which does work like that. Sure, if you want to breed a variety which will be listed in all the catalogues and sold in Tesco's and will make you rich from the royalties, your chances are very slim. The selection criteria for commercial potato varieties are immensely restrictive - and largely at odds with what most gardeners would want. Commercial breeders may well churn through (and reject) 200,000 seedlings to find one with commercial potential, then spend the next eight years doing field trials with it before it's ready for release. But don't let that put you off. You can breed a good variety within two years - easily. The majority of your home-made potatoes will be worthwhile, at least decent enough to eat and enjoy and feel proud of. A few will be exciting and wonderful. Even if you're only working with a very small patch of garden, you will almost certainly get some tubers that are worth saving and growing on next year.

The beautiful thing about potatoes is that it only takes two seasons to get a completely stable new variety. So it's actually quicker than most other vegetables. You make a pollination the first year and produce the F1 seeds, which are all unique individuals because of the genetic diversity. The second year you grow plants from those seeds and they make tubers. If you like the tubers, you simply propagate them by saving and replanting them. As the tubers are basically root cuttings of the parent plant (clones) they are genetically identical. There's no arsing about trying to make F2 and F3 hybrids (unless you want to) or years spent roguing out unwanted recessives. Once you've got something interesting, it's instantly a new variety.

Hybrid potato grown from TPS. This is one of Tom Wagner's hybrids, an F3 of Pirampo x Khuchi Akita. The parent varieties are Bolivian landraces, and are diploid.

If you've dipped a toe into plant breeding before, you'll know that plants tend to be either inbreeders or outbreeders - though that's more of a sliding scale than a polar absolute. Potatoes are really a bit of both. The natural status of potato is outbreeder. The various (diploid) landrace species from which cultivated potatoes are derived have a self-incompatibility mechanism which prevents them from pollinating themselves. The majority of diploid varieties are self-incompatible, although there are exceptions. This forces them to hybridise and mix their genes up in every generation, hence the wondrous diversity found among diploid landraces. However, when potatoes went tetraploid the compatibility barrier got screwed up somewhat. Many tetraploid potatoes have sterile pollen which can't fertilise anything at all, but others can fertilise themselves as well as each other. So they're designed to be outbreeders, but in practice a lot of flowers simply get knocked up by their own pollen.

Which gives you a choice: you can make hybrid seeds by crossing two different varieties, or you can make self-pollinated seeds which are the product of just that one variety.

Choosing parents: hybrid or OP?
Both are worth experimenting with, but for different reasons.

When a potato plant sets berries naturally without your intervention, it's most likely that it self-pollinated, but it may also have made hybrids with other potatoes flowering nearby, and you may have a mixture of selfed and hybrid seeds in the same berry. This is called open pollination (OP) … and the results are basically pot luck.

Making a deliberate hybrid is the most usual way to breed a new variety, as it introduces a lot more diversity. The basic method is to emasculate the flower to stop it from pollinating itself (which you don't even need to do if it's one of the many varieties with sterile pollen) and fertilise the female part of the flower with some pollen from a different variety. The offspring will be very varied, but that's the fun part and you should also get some hybrid vigour which makes for healthy and abundant plants. The only problem with this is that so many varieties of potato are poor berry setters, so not all varieties can be hybridised.

If you want to grow seeds from one specific variety it can be as simple as saving naturally pollinated berries from it, but if you want to be sure of getting self-pollinated seeds, it's easy enough to do (as long as it's one of the fertile varieties). Just dab a flower with pollen scraped from its own anthers, or other flowers on the same plant, or from other plants of the same variety. Bear in mind though that you will not get a true-breeding offspring of the parent variety by doing so. As potatoes are very heterozygous and have four lots of genetic material to throw around with cheerful abandon, even when they're self-pollinated they segregate into many different phenotypes. If you grow self-pollinated seed from Salad Blue, for example, you will not end up with a lot of spuds which look like Salad Blue. You will get varying shades of blue flesh, some much lighter than the original, some darker, and a few with pinky skin. If you grow selfed seeds from Congo, another blue variety, you may end up with a baffling range of purples, pinks and pure snowy whites, with considerable variation in tuber shape. What's happening is that all the genetic material which has been funnelled into the variety from various ancestors is segregating. Recessive traits emerge which weren't apparent in the variety you started with. If you grow enough self-pollinated offspring, you can start to build up a picture of the variety's pedigree, as many of the ancestral characteristics magically come back to life. So it can be a really fascinating thing to do.

A seedling grown from self-pollinated seed of Salad Blue. It's the only plant in the batch which has this striking black tinged foliage and black stems. I'm hoping it'll produce some dark tubers to go with it.

It's important to remember though that nature designed potatoes to be outbreeders, and if they self-pollinate they may show some degree of inbreeding depression. Only a bit though. As most spuds have such a rich and diverse genepool they can get away with a certain amount of inbreeding, but you may find self-pollinated seeds grow less vigorously than hybrids. That's not a problem and shouldn't put you off trying self-pollinated seed … but it's better to sow a few more than you need and then select the seedlings which show the most vigour and whoomph.

Variety differences
Differences in the fertility of individual varieties will most likely dictate what crosses you make, and how you do them. Over many years of being propagated by tubers, cultivated potatoes have moved away from the idea of flowering and producing seeds, and many of them can't be bothered to do it any more. Ironically for such a naturally variable and heterozygous plant, a historic lack of genetic diversity is thought to be the cause of the potato's fertility issues. The vast majority of modern cultivated potatoes are descended from one single Chilean spud, which had what is known as T-type cytoplasm, a genetic predisposition to making offspring with infertile pollen. Over the years many of these semi-infertile lines have been selected deliberately, as the male-sterility makes the process of hybridising them much easier. Consequently an awful lot of modern spuds have infertile pollen, and some are female-sterile too. Some can't be arsed to flower at all, and just dump their buds as soon as they appear. There are things you can do to force a reluctant variety to produce flowers, but it's a lot of hassle which I won't go into here, and from the point of view of future breeding work it makes more sense to choose varieties that at least show some willingness to come up with the goods.

I wish I could give a simple list of which variety does what, but I only know about the ones I've grown and observed myself, and it can vary from garden to garden anyway. Different countries have different varieties - import restrictions have affected exchange of material - so the ones I work with in the UK may not be available to people in the USA (just as most popular US varieties are strangers to me). So you will have to experiment with whatever you have available. As far as I can see, varieties fall roughly into four categories.

Some potatoes are very fertile and make excellent male or female parent varieties. Salad Blue is the Cassanova of the potato world - it only has to look at another potato and a berry starts swelling. You can usually tell a fertile variety because it naturally sets its own berries in profusion. Desirée is another very fertile one, and so is Mayan Gold, although the latter is a diploid so it needs to find the right kind of partner, or get lucky mating with a tetraploid.

Most cultivars fall into the male-sterile or almost-male-sterile category - these are the ones which flower happily enough but don't tend to set berries. Highland Burgundy Red is a good example of this, as is British Queen. It gamely produces a mass of dainty little flowers but in years of growing it I've never had a single berry. Give it a dab of pollen from a fertile variety though, and it sets berries very readily. So it makes an extremely good female parent. The advantage of male-sterile varieties is that you don't have to emasculate them, which makes it much quicker and easier to hand-pollinate them. Some varieties which appear to be male-sterile may actually be female-sterile. So it's worth trying the pollen on another variety to see if it will take. The disadvantage of using these partially sterile varieties is that it perpetuates the poor fertility of potatoes. If you want to do Solanum tuberosum a real favour in your breeding projects, select the progeny for good berry production. Because good berry production is what will keep its genetic heritage alive, as well as enabling some much needed new diversity to come in.

Then you have what you might call the awkward buggers category. These include Pink Fir Apple (syn. Rose Finn Apple) which not only has male sterility issues, it often can't be bothered to set a berry even when it's given fertile pollen. What usually happens is that the flower opens happily enough and you carefully pollinate it two or three times and on the third day the whole bloody thing drops off. Or worse, it starts to set a berry and then it falls off before it's mature. It pays to try again though, because there's a good chance that one of the pollinations will take eventually, when the plant is in the right mood and the planets are in the right alignment or there's an 'r' in the month. It's a pain in the backside to have to keep pollinating more flowers, but bearing in mind that each berry can easily produce 100 seeds or more, it only takes one successful pollination to give you loads of future breeding material - so it's worth persevering. Again, with a variety like this you don't need to waste time emasculating. I just go through the whole crop each day dabbing fertile pollen on every stigma I can find and saying "come on, set a bloody berry you sod!"

And finally you have the total refuseniks. There is a wonderful Victorian potato called Witch Hill which is reputed to be one of the best flavoured potatoes around - it is truly delicious. I would love to use it in breeding work. But every year the flower buds appear, and just as they're starting to look promising they drop off. All of them. Little dessicated posies cast to the ground. Now, unless it changes its mind, I cannot breed from it. If a variety won't flower, there is no breeding possibility, it's as simple as that. I could grow fields of the stuff and hope for a spontaneous somatic mutation, but that may never happen. Witch Hill is a genetic dead end. This is why breeders like Tom Wagner select breeding lines from varieties which are good berry setters. If a variety won't flower or won't set berries, it has no future.

The annoying thing is, Witch Hill did flower for me a couple of times when I first got it (it came to me as a laboratory-grown microplant) but I hadn't got into potato breeding at that time so I didn't think to make any crosses with it. D'oh!

Hybridising potatoes: the practical bit
Let's be grateful for small mercies: potato flowers are nice and simple and easy to work with. They are 'perfect' flowers which contain both male and female parts.

Anatomy of a potato flower. Each of the anthers is a double sac, both halves containing pollen. When the anthers mature they develop little holes in the ends (like a salt cellar) and the pollen falls out onto the stigma.

The Mayan Gold blossom shown above is fairly typical, but there are variety differences in the exact shape of the flower. Some have a long style where the stigma protrudes some way out of the flower (be aware that a sticky-outy stigma has more chance of being cross-pollinated by passing insects than one where the stigma is hidden away). Some produce a neat little fused anther cone, others produce a rather grotty collection of misshapen anthers which don't hold together properly. Some (like Pink Fir Apple) do weird things where anthers and petals morph into one another. None of this matters - the principle is the same. You'll get to know the individual character of the flowers in your own garden as you work with them.

In order to control what pollen fertilises the flower, you have to stop the flower from fertilising itself, so that means removing the male parts of the flower before they mature. As I explained above, with some varieties you don't need to do this - if the variety produces sterile pollen or none at all, you can save yourself the trouble. The instructions shown here are for if you have a fertile variety or want to be sure of getting hybrid rather than selfed seed.

Potato flowers are produced in cymes - bunches of flowers which open consecutively, 2 or 3 at a time. The flowers last two to four days but tend to close up in late afternoon. The anthers develop holes in their tips when they're ready to dehisce, though they're not very glamorous - in fact they look more like some insect has had a go at them. Potato pollen is white, powdery and very fine. The stigma is receptive for about 2 days and the period of pollen shedding also lasts about 2 days. Fortunately for the garden dabbler, the female part tends to become receptive just before the pollen starts to shed, so you have a window of opportunity to intervene.

The best time for hand-pollination is in the morning when pollen is most abundant, and when the temperature is fairly cool. But I wouldn't worry too much about this, it works at other times too.

If you're using a variety with infertile pollen, or you aren't bothered about the chance of a few self-pollinated seeds, you can skip steps 2 to 4.

Step 1: Having chosen the variety you want to use as the female parent, find a blossom at the right stage. Potato pollen can be shed quite early, before the flower opens, so emasculation has to be done while it's still at the bud stage. What you're looking for is a nearly-ready bud where the calyx (outer green bit) has started to open but the petals are still shut. This is a variety with a sticky-outy stigma, but with many varieties it will still be hidden inside the petals. Doesn't matter either way, although a sticky-outy like this inevitably carries a small risk of picking up stray pollen from elsewhere.

You may notice a strand of mauve wool poking out underneath. I tied this around the stem of the flower (or in this instance the whole cyme, as I'm going to hand-pollinate all of them) as a marker, so I can be sure I know which ones I've hand-pollinated. I use a different colour of wool to indicate different pollen fathers.

Step 2: Peel back the petals and you'll find the anthers inside. They are still immature at this stage - with no holes in the ends. If they do have holes and are shedding pollen, try a slightly younger bud instead!

Step 3: Using a blunt scalpel blade, tweezers or similar, pull/scrape the anthers off, being very careful not to damage the style - the central stalk with the stigma at the end.

Step 4: After removing all the anthers you're left with a denuded female part, ready to be pollinated with the pollen of your choice.

Step 5: Next find the flower you want to use as the male parent. Choose a blossom which is newly opened, as those are the ones most likely to have a good pollen stash (the ends of the anthers should be open at this stage). Pull off a single anther using tweezers/scalpel/fingers.

Step 6: When you turn the anther over you'll see it has a seam down the back, separating the two pollen sacs. Additionally, each individual sac has a little slit down its centre. Carefully slip the tip of a blunt scalpel blade through the slit and slide it along. Note that the slit should be open so you can insert the blade freely ... you want to avoid cutting into the anther if you can.

If there is pollen inside, you will see it on the tip of the blade. It's a very fine white powder. If you don't see any white powder, try another anther from a different flower. You don't have to collect all the pollen at once ... just scrape out enough to dab on the female flower, and use the rest for more pollinations. (When the first sac is empty you can do the same with the other side. You can often pollinate ten or a dozen flowers from the pollen in a ripe anther like this.)

Step 7: Armed with your pollen-tipped scalpel, go back to the bud you just emasculated and dab the pollen powder onto the stigma - which is the knobbly-bobbly thing at the end. The stigma is mildly sticky when it's receptive, so you should find the pollen grains sticking to it quite readily. No need to make a song and dance with it - just a gentle dabbing so as not to risk damaging the stigma.

Step 8: The next day, go back to the same flower and pollinate it again with pollen from another fresh anther. The stigma remains receptive for around two days in total but you don't know exactly when that is, so for best results give it a pollen dab on three consecutive days. You'll notice that the petals have opened on this flower now, although it looks a bit weird as it has no anthers. Once the petals have closed and wilted a bit, you can assume it's no longer receptive.

Step 9: The berry starts to form. Yay!

From this point on, patience is the order of the day. Potato berries seem to mature painfully slowly. Try to resist the temptation to prod and poke them, you don't want them to fall off as they dangle clumsily on their alarmingly scrawny stalks. After about four weeks you need to watch for them dropping off naturally. Ideally, tie a little cloth or paper bag over them at this stage so that they are caught safely if they drop. Alternatively, be very vigilant, and ready to rummage about on the ground if you notice them suddenly go AWOL. Fortunately they don't taste nice enough for animals to be interested in them, at least not in the way of UK garden wildlife, so they're unlikely to be carried off, but you don't want to chance it.

One key factor about potato berries, significantly unlike tomatoes (to which they're closely related), is that the seeds carry on developing even after they've detached from the plant, and the berries will stay firm for months. This has several advantages. For one thing it takes the pressure off you to extract the seed from them ... you can leave them until you've got the time and inclination, even weeks or months down the line. Secondly it means that all is not lost if the berry is dropped too early or the plant dies prematurely. This is very significant in the light of the blight problems we are all besieged with. The plants can be struck down by blight, wither and rot - and the berries will still survive. Save the berries and let them mature, and as long as you clean them thoroughly they will yield perfectly healthy seed.

The topic of cleaning and processing TPS from the berries is to be the subject of a separate post. In the mean time, go out and make some berries!

With thanks to Tom Wagner and friends at the TaterMater forum for advice and suggestions (any errors are entirely my own responsibility).

Gene genie

2010-06-21T11:58:00.001+01:00

Genes are the most wondrous things. What flower colour do you suppose I got when I crossed this white blossomed beauty ...

... with this gorgeousness of rosy-pink?

Well, I got this:

It's my F1 hybrid of Alderman x Salmon Flowered. It has just blossomed and produced flowers of the 'standard' mauve and maroon two-tone, the colour you get in field peas. Neither parent shows this colouring. Alderman is a delicious late Victorian pea with the snowiest of snow white blossoms. Its partner in this liaison was the strange umbellatum variety Salmon Flowered, supplied by the Heritage Seed Library, which is the only pea in my collection to have the particularly lovely two-tone pale pink and salmon pink flowers.

I don't know all that much about the genetics of pink flowers, but I know there are at least a couple of genes which can produce them. I don't know which one(s) are present in Salmon Flowered, but the ones I'm aware of are both recessive. The white flowers of Alderman are also recessive. (Yes, despite the fact that most garden peas have white flowers, it is a recessive trait.) When you cross two varieties which both have different recessive alleles controlling the same trait, some weirdness can show up in the hybrid.

So am I surprised that my hybrid came out purple? Actually, no, not really. I did wonder if it might. And here's what I think the explanation is.

I've mentioned many times in my pea genetics posts (for those who don't glaze over while reading them) the existence of a gene called A. That's short for anthocyanin. This particular gene is an on-off switch which controls the production of anthocyanin, the pigment responsible for all pink and purple colouration in peas. The function of A is that simple - on or off. There are other genes which control which part of the plant the colour is expressed in ... flowers, pods, leaf axils, seeds. They are all separate genes which can inherit independently. But none of them can express themselves without the dominant A allele which switches on the pigment production. Without it, the colour genes are still there but they are mute.

With Salmon Flowered, it's obvious that it has genes for colour in various places. The rosy pink blossoms, the pink blush on the pods, the soft pale pink smudge in the leaf axil. The presence of all these colours tells me that it has the dominant AA genotype - in other words, anthocyanin is switched on. Conversely, Alderman shows no anthocyanin pigment whatsoever. It is entirely green leaved and white flowered. I can safely assume that it carries the recessive aa genotype - in other words, anthocyanin is switched off.

Because Alderman is genetically incapable of producing anthocyanin pigment, I have no way of knowing what other colour genes it has hidden away, clawing at their nucleotides and begging for release. It's very possible that it has a full palette of colour genes, and that it wants to express purple flowers, splodgy leaf axils, purple stems, the works. Even though all these colour genes are dominant, they are helpless, disempowered, in the presence of aa. It's a curious subversion of the usual law of inheritance, with a recessive allele suppressing the expression of several dominant alleles.

Now this is turning into a very wordy explanation, but it's all so gloriously simple. The mystery purple flowers in my hybrid have almost certainly come from Alderman. I believe Alderman has the dominant gene which makes purple flowers, but it's not normally expressed in Alderman plants because they have no pigment capability. When I made the cross with Salmon Flowered, I gave it the 'on' switch. In a cross between a plant which is aa and one which is AA, the hybrid is going to be aA. The dominant allele gets the upper hand, anthocyanin is switched on, and all the colour genes in both varieties are free to express themselves. My hybrid is showing colour traits from Alderman as well as from Salmon Flowered.

I suspected this might be the case when I saw the colour blotches on the leaf axils in the hybrid plants. They were very prominent, with the dark pink colour streaking right out into the stems. Although Salmon Flowered does have pink in the leaf axils, it is very pale and subtle. This was quite different and could only really have got there if it came from Alderman. So I knew there was a good chance that Alderman might have a purple blossom gene as well, especially as those two colour genes are closely linked and usually appear together.

What this means for the F2 generation next year is that I will get a quarter of the plants unable to produce anthocyanin, and therefore having white flowers. Of the remainder, I will get mostly purples but I'm hoping that there will also be a few rosy pinks. I don't know exactly how the pink-flower gene works, so I wouldn't want to predict anything more than that at this stage.

Last time I wrote about my Alderman x Salmon Flowered F1 hybrid I said it was expressing the recessive trait for fasciation (stem widening). Well it isn't. It did show some fasciation, but it turned out to be from environmental causes and the plants reverted to a more normal pattern of growth. They do have very thick stems, but this is common to nearly all my F1 hybrid peas and I think it's mostly just hybrid vigour. They are, however, saving their flowers for the top of the plant, and have grown to almost 6ft before showing any buds. This, coupled with the late-maturing trait from Alderman, makes them very slow to reach maturity. That's probably something I will have to select against in the F2.

Meanwhile, jolly solstice blessings to all who observe such things.

A triumph of carrots

2010-06-18T21:52:00.003+01:00

There is, you'll agree, a certain 'je ne sais quoi' oh, so very special about a firm, young carrot.

So said Uncle Monty in Withnail and I, my favourite film of all time (though in all honesty I don't watch that many) and it's certainly a triumph to me because I'm absolutely rubbish at growing carrots. I've grown the odd good one in the past, "one" being the operative word. To actually be able to hold up a bunch of homegrown carrots without them wilting in spindly shame is a first for me.

These photos are from the first batch I harvested. I dug up another load a week later and the colour was better on some of them in the second batch. They might have grown bigger if I'd left them a bit longer but I needed to vacate the greenhouse borders for my tomatoes.

So what did I do different this time? Well I started them off early and grew them in the greenhouse, which is probably what made the biggest difference to their fortunes. They were safe from the buffeting of spring weather and the oscula of marauding slugs. Also, instead of direct sowing the seeds in rows in the traditional way, I sowed tiny groups of seed in small modules and then transplanted them into the greenhouse border in baby clumps (no thinning needed).

I still need to perfect the method though, because some of them got into a bit of a cosy relationship under the ground, like these Purple Dragons.

Ménage à quatre

So let's have a little rundown of the varieties (see pic below).

Red Samurai - this one is an F1 hybrid. If you've read some of the cynical ranty stuff I've written about commercial F1 hybrids you might be a bit surprised that I'm growing one. But I always reckon if you're going to slag something off it's as well to be sure you know what you're talking about. So although I think commercial hybrids are largely a waste of money, I sometimes grow them to see how they compare with the OP varieties I sing the praises of ... and also to see whether they have potential for breeding work, because the F2 seed they produce can segregate into interesting new combinations. Anyway, Red Samurai is a red carrot - or at least a kind of brick red. The ones shown here are not very red, but I harvested some better coloured ones in the second batch. I also had some which didn't look right at all ... thin, spindly and whitish. The presence of the thin white dud in a carrot crop is usually a sign of an accidental cross-pollination with a wild type of carrot like Queen Anne's lace. Such crosses are not uncommon even in commercial seed because carrots are such tarty outbreeding slappers. But I did get enough decent red carrots to be able to evaluate it. It was sweet and tasty and pleasant. Did it have that special extra edge to justify the cost of an F1 hybrid? No. In a word. Nice, but nothing special and there are plenty of OPs which are better.

John's Purple - or John's Light Mauve, if my specimens are anything to go by. This is from the Heritage Seed Library and not commercially available. It was raised in the 1970s by a chap who spotted a purple carrot in a bag somebody gave him for his rabbits. The roots are neither large nor pretty, but they are certainly different from anything else I've seen. Eaten raw it has a strong, earthy, slightly soapy flavour and is very juicy with a really nice texture. The carrot is white inside but the mauve colour extends some way into the flesh. Worth giving this one another go, I think.

Cosmic Purple - hmmm ... I suspect I may have a packet of mislabelled seeds, because the carrots I dug up are neither purple nor particularly cosmic. Maybe that's a blessing, because I've heard nothing but negative things about the flavour and texture of Cosmic Purple. The thing I have here is a decent, nice looking orange carrot with a smooth skin, a sweet and juicy flavour (though rather mild in character) and lovely texture. God knows what it is though.

Purple Dragon - ahhh ... now this is purple. The ones I dug up in the second batch had an even stronger colour. Rich though the colour is, it's entirely on the surface. Slice it open and the carrot is a normal orange colour all the way through. Raw flavour is very sweet but with a hint of a bitter undertone, and the texture is firm and crunchy. It does however keep its colour pretty well when it's cooked, and loses the hint of bitterness. It's a nice variety and one I will grow again.

Left to right: Red Samurai F1, John's Purple, Cosmic Purple (supposedly), Purple Dragon.

Purple Dragon is certainly the pick of the bunch, and the one I'll continue to grow. It's not the best carrot I've ever tasted ... that particular accolade goes to a heritage yellow variety called Jaune Obtuse du Doubs. If I had time I might even try crossing them, but I shall need a couple of extra lifetimes to fulfil all my plant breeding ideas.

Purple Dragon, sliced.

And another nice little triumph. Yesterday the blog's hit counter clocked up the 100,000th visit. I managed to capture the moment in a screenshot. This has taken exactly four years ... I put the site meter on here in June 2006, a few months after I started the blog. It was depressing to have it there at first because I had bugger all readers - even the spammers couldn't be bothered. It has built up steadily since then. So I'd encourage anyone who's just starting out with a blog not to get despondent if it seems like nobody's reading it. It can take several months to a year before you really get noticed. Anyway, thank you to everyone who has supported and encouraged me and left comments over the last few years.

Beautiful Luna Trick

2010-06-13T23:34:00.000+01:00

Everything's happening so fast in the garden at the moment I'm barely able to upload my photos onto the computer before they're out of date (however did I manage in the days when I had to send films to Bonusprint?) so I'm just going to chuck a few pictures of my Luna Trick F4 peas up here to show you how they're getting on.

I'm very happy with the way things are going with this variety. You may recall, dear reader, that I have two separate batches of F4 plants because last year's Luna Trick F3 segregated into mangetout (snow) types and sugarsnap types, and as I'm intending to develop them as different varieties I'm growing the two types separately. Or I thought I was. As it turns out I have sugarsnaps among the mangetouts and mangetouts among the sugarsnaps, so balls to that idea. The former situation was entirely expected - I knew some of the mangetout-podded plants I saved seed from last year would've sneakily closeted away the recessive n allele in their genome, ready to spring forth unbidden in future generations. This recessive allele singlehandedly creates the sugarsnap type simply by thickening the pod wall, transforming a wide flat pod into a slim, round, plump and juicy one. I love both types, so I'm open minded about what I get. But the recessive nature of this gene means that it will be hiding itself in a proportion of the mangetout plants for a generation or two yet, and I won't know which ones until I grow their offspring.

Upside down flowers? Well why not.

The most promising F3 plant I had last year was one called LT10. (There's nothing arcane about this name, it was simply the 10th plant in my Luna Trick trial to get a label stuck on it.) It was a tall mangetout-podded plant with a divine flavour. And the gene gods were smiling on me, because when I started growing out the F4 it turned out to be the only one of my mangetout lines which was true-breeding for tallness, which is what I want. All the others had hidden recessive dwarfing genes lurking in them. If I save seed only from LT10's offspring and not from the other lines I should have no more trouble with dwarves. I supposed it would be too much to expect LT10 to be true-breeding for mangetout pods as well, and indeed it has presented me with a goodly smattering of sugarsnaps. They may well be good enough to contribute to the development of my sugarsnap line, but in the breeding of a stable mangetout line they are a pain in the backside.

While I was expecting to get sugarsnaps in the mangetout batch, I certainly wasn't expecting to get mangetouts out of the sugarsnaps - that was a complete surprise. A recessive trait is by definition true-breeding. It can only express itself when a matched pair of recessives get it together and there are no dominants involved to spoil the party. As the mangetout-pod trait is dominant it couldn't possibly be present, hidden, in any of the sugarsnap plants I saved seed from last year. So I was intrigued to see not one but several of the F4 sugarsnap plants developing mangetout pods. How could this be? Is there some other gene at play which suppresses the sugarsnap gene? Did the faeries dig my plants up and move them in the night? The solution became obvious when I looked at the identification tags of the plants concerned. They were all from the same parent plant, LT2. I'm growing ten of LT2's offspring, and the majority of them have mangetout pods, with a few sugarsnaps. While I hesitate to declare a Mendelian ratio on such a small sample size, it seems obvious that there is one and I made a mistake in classifying LT2 as a sugarsnap when it was nothing of the sort. Sometimes mangetout pods look a bit sugarsnappy. It's a relief to find such a simple explanation, and it's one of the reasons I number my plants at the F2, F3 and sometimes F4 stage - as laborious as it is, it enables me to track the pedigree of each individual, to find patterns in weirdness and resolve mistakes.

The first Luna Trick F4 pod, still with its little petal nosebag on. This one is a sugarsnap type (honest).

The same pod five days later, now with a beautiful luna crescent shape.

In the last couple of days I've managed to do the first couple of taste tests, and so far they've all been very nice. Flavour is the most important thing I'm selecting for, apart from healthy vigorous plants which goes without saying. But I'm also looking out for crescent moon shaped pods, particularly among the sugarsnaps. I'm also mindful of the colour intensity. For the most part Luna Trick has a stronger and longer-lasting yellow colour than its yellow parent, Golden Sweet, but in last year's batch I did have some which faded to pale washy green a bit more quickly than I would like.

I'm also busy with the scalpel using Luna Trick for various hybrids, particularly as it represents a superior alternative to Golden Sweet, so rather than doing backcrosses to Golden Sweet in my Peachy and Red-Podded lines, I'm using Luna Trick instead. I'm making these crosses with both the mangetout and the sugarsnap types, which I'm hoping will give me a red sugarsnap as well as the decent flavoured red mangetout I've been coveting. I've also made some crosses with Salmon Flowered (the antique umbellatum pea) which is more of an experimental endeavour. What I have in mind is to extract the gene which makes the rosy pink flowers, which would look lovely on a yellow-podded pea. But my weird imagination also conjures up a vision of a yellow-podded umbellatum, crowned by a giant clump of sticky-outy golden sugarsnaps. What a spectacle that would be.

This is one of the mangetout type pods.

A wildflower interlude

2010-06-09T20:23:00.003+01:00

A thunderstorm chucks its load on the Severn Valley (and shortly afterwards, on me) during my walk on Sunday. Normally you get a spectacular view of the Malvern hills from here, but they are swamped!

I rarely blog about anything that isn't in my own garden, but it's worth making an exception sometimes. Not least because I ought to mention occasionally that I have an interest in native British wildflowers (and have a Flickr set of my best photos). And that I'm also lucky enough to live in the Cotswolds, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, so I have no excuse not to go out and gawp at them.

I don't have to go very far to find them. Cheltenham sits within a cosy semicircle of hills which form a continuous ridge around it. The ridge gives the town a beautifully sheltered climate and keeps frosts in my garden to a minimum. And the ridge itself is mostly grassland overlaying beautiful honey-coloured limestone which makes a wondrous habitat for wild flowers and butterflies. All of the Cotswold hills have their own unique character and variations in plant life, and when I feel the need for a botanical frenzy I tend to go to the quieter ones which the tourists (and even most locals) don't know about. My favourite is Nottingham Hill, which is a spur at the northern end of the ridge.

Nottingham Hill is a very special place to me. The whole of the top is an iron age hillfort, but you can't see it from the ground because it's too big to view in its entirety. The earth is full of natural holes, dips and openings. The lower slopes (particularly on the N and E sides) are liberally dotted with springs, some of which are the sources of local brooks and streams. Most of the trees around the fort are magical trees, elder, hazel or thorn. There's also a very strange grove on the southern edge just below the fort where almost all the trees are hollow or have holes in them, growing in the dips and hummocks left by ancient quarrying. Some are small finger-sized holes, some cup-shaped holes with grass and violets growing in them, some large oval holes right through the tree. With gorgeous views over the Severn Valley to go with it, it's an incredibly evocative place.

It's also lush with wild flowers.

Rock rose (Helianthemum nummularium) growing next to a common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii) on Nottingham Hill.

These pictures were all taken on Sunday, when I went out for a walk up there on what seemed like a charmingly pleasant early summer day. I was having a great time grovelling about in the undergrowth with my camera when it became apparent that the distant booming I could hear was not some bizarre rural motorsport as I'd assumed but a rather formidable thunderstorm approaching very stealthily. I can't resist rainstorms ... they are an exhilarating manifestation of nature's power and they make me feel wonderful. So once I'd got my camera to a place of safety (just as the rain was starting) I went off up another footpath and climbed up onto a mini-hillock on the hillside and embraced the storm while it pelted down and soaked me. It was bliss!

I had to drive home with a wet arse, but it was worth it.

None of these are particularly rare plants, but I don't care, it's always a joy to see them.

Wild thyme, which is a species called Thymus polytrichus. It looks like a miniature version of garden thyme and you certainly can take it home and sprinkle it on your pizza, but I've found Cotswold wild thyme to be decidedly lacking in the aromatic department, so I generally just admire it and use home-grown stuff for eating.

Yes I know this stuff is common as dirt. But it doesn't half look beautiful once you get down on your hands and knees for a proper look. Bird's foot trefoil, also known as Eggs and Bacon, and Lotus corniculatus.

The decidedly blue flower known as green alkanet, and also by the glorious botanical name of Pentaglossis sempervirens.

Although it looks a bit like lady's bedstraw, this is the slightly more subtle crosswort (Cruciata laevipes). Most things with 'wort' in their name have a history of medicinal use.

Another old healing herb, common milkwort (Polygala vulgaris) which I found in two shades of blue and a pink variant, all growing together in the same clump.

A particularly elegant blossom of creeping cinquefoil (Potentilla reptans).

One of the highlights of my walk was not a flower but a particularly beautiful moth. I don't know much about moths at all but these days all you need is a quick trawl of the interwebs to identify things.

This gorgeous chap (two views of the same moth) is a five-spot burnet, or Zygaena trifolii if you prefer.

Finally, here's something that is in my garden.

I have a few wild plants naturalised in my garden, either because they've always been there or because I've introduced them through locally collected seeds. My house was built in the 1930s on land that was formerly a damson orchard, and I still have some damson trees in what was originally a field boundary at the back of my garden, and it's quite possible that some of the native wild flowers have stuck around here too.

At any rate, when I moved here in 2004 and started weeding the garden, which had been fallow for a year, I found a scarlet pimpernel with purply-mauve flowers instead of the usual pale red. I carefully weeded round it to give it a chance to mature and set seed. I wasn't sure whether the flower colour would come true from seed, but sure enough the following year there were more.

It's not particularly unusual to get colour variants in scarlet pimpernels. But blue is a more common one to find, or white. I'm not sure how widespread the mauvey purple ones are. But it certainly is a heritable trait because there's no variation from year to year. I try to help them colonise by carefully preserving all the pimpernels when I'm weeding and then removing a lot of the scarlet ones once they show their colour. Sometimes if I'm out there with my tweezers I grab an anther off one of the purples and dab it on the stigma of another purple on a different plant, just to make sure. But in all honesty it doesn't need my help, it's surviving fine by itself.

Violet-purple petals on a scarlet pimpernel, Anagallis arvensis. Native to my garden!

TPS potatoes: transplanting and growing on

2010-06-04T17:43:00.004+01:00

A young TPS seedling ready for a new home. This one is from an OP berry of Mayan Gold which I collected in my garden in 2008.

Well, I said I would give further instructions on cultivating potatoes from TPS (true potato seed) once I had some photos from my own crop, so it's about time I got on with it. These tips draw heavily from the videos of Tom Wagner's potato workshop posted on Patrick's blog, so if you want more details I recommend giving those a spin.

Last time I wrote about sowing and growing young seedlings from TPS. Once the seedlings get established, you essentially grow them the same way you would ordinary tuber-grown potatoes … you earth them up as they grow. The only difference is that they are smaller and more delicate than tuber-grown potatoes, at least until they get established, and need to be handled a bit more gently.

The first thing you will probably notice about potato seedlings is that they grow very fast. When they first germinate they're so tiny they almost look like little threads of cotton sticking out of the soil. But it doesn't take long for them to outgrow their seed tray and be elbowing each other for space. They also tend to be a little bit straggly and thin-stemmed (though less so if they've been given plenty of direct sun) and when they reach a couple of inches tall it's time to give them their first transplanting.

Find a container or module thingy deep enough for the whole seedling. That is, the depth of the soil in the seed tray plus the height of the plant. Make a deep well in the centre of the module/pot and drop the seedling into it. Bury the whole plant right up to its neck - stem, leaves and all. Just leave the growing tip and a couple of sets of leaves sticking out at the top.

Put the seedling into a deep hole in the compost and bury the stem and lower leaves, submerged up to its tip, like the one on the right.

Once they are potted up they will grow like rockets. The submerged stems will grow little feeder roots which will help the plant grow bigger and better. They are exactly like tomatoes in this respect. They have the additional advantage though that they can also set tubers from these roots ... and earthing them up in this way will increase their tuber production just as conventional potato crops are earthed up for the same reason. When transplanting them, there's no need to remove the lower leaves - just bury them. They're better left in place to wither naturally rather than causing unnecessary injury by pulling them off.

Keep the potted up seedlings well watered in a sunny place for a few more weeks and admire them as they turn into something like this:

A mature seedling ready to be planted out in the garden. This is a Pirampo x Khuchi Akita F3 plant grown from Tom Wagner's TPS, now starting to look properly potato-like. Ignore all the funny business at the base of the stem ... relics of the fused cotyledons which this plant produced before growing normally.

When there's a good bit of stem growth on the seedlings and all risk of frost is past, harden off the seedlings for a few days and nights and prepare a plot of ground for them. By now they are getting to a point where they can be treated more like tuber-grown potatoes, and you can plant them in the same kind of soil you would use for any other potato crop. Having said that, the lack of a tuber does make them more vulnerable. If a tuber-grown potato haulm is damaged, it usually regrows fairly easily from the tuber, which is full of stored energy and nourishment and capable of compensating for pretty much any degree of human ineptitude. TPS-grown potatoes don't have that backup - they are dependent solely on their youthful root system, which is somewhat fine and tangly. Add a thin and brittle stem into the equation and you have a rather more delicate plant than a normal spud. Even so, it's amazing what they will survive. One of my seedling batches newly planted out this week had a devastating visitation from the Arse of Doom, which left evil deposits followed by a savage ground raking in which several plants were damaged. I was pretty surprised to find that baby plants reduced to mangled muddy stumps with all their leaves ripped off were sprouting new green growth within two days. Them's tough little chaps.

Depending on how mature the plants get by the time you plant them out, you may find tiny tubers already forming when you take them out of their pots, as shown on this Carola hybrid above. The tubers form on special chunky roots called stolons. Sometimes you get stolons above soil level with little microspuds on the end, but usually when stolons grow above ground they develop leaf shoots, which is not what you want, so plant them out and get them earthed up. Something else I noticed was a very slight blue-ish tinge in the roots of some of my Salad Blue OP seedlings. I may have imagined that though, I was drinking some Belgian Leffe at the time, and that stuff is like LSD to me.

Dig a little trench. Tom recommends a north-south orientation to make the most of the sun passing overhead. Then dig out a hole at the bottom of the trench deep enough to accommodate the whole height of the plant and its rootball. Yes, once again you are going to bury most of the plant right up to its top leaves. The original seed level is going to end up some way underground, which allows lots of stem depth for making extra roots and tubers.

I have been planting my seedlings around 10 inches apart. That's slightly closer than I would with tubers. Plants grown from TPS are not realistically going to produce as big a yield as a tuber-grown crop in their first year (they will make up for it next season) so I squeeze them up a little. Space is at a premium in my garden so I sometimes need to plant things a bit on the close side.

If waterlogging is a problem in your soil, you can plant the seedlings slightly to one side of the trench rather than in the bottom (choose the side where they will get most sun) to ensure the roots aren't sitting in a puddle where they might rot. My soil is sandy and well drained so I don't worry about it.

The seedlings planted along the base of the trench, planted deeply with just their growing tips exposed. They will soon grow up and away, and as they do I will be able to fill in the trench to keep them earthed up.

The earthing up process continues as the plants grow. The filling in of the trench is followed by a gradual mounding up, so that you end up with a long hillock around the plants. Just as you would with a conventional potato crop.

Next instalment will be an explanation of hand-crossing potato flowers to make your own TPS. Wahey!

Please universe, may I have some edible red podded peas?

2010-05-31T23:59:00.001+01:00

Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded F2. First one to flower.

Today has been a perfect day for hand-pollinating peas. Warm and dry but not too sunny - which creates just the right conditions for pollen to spill its abundance and for stigmatic goo to be in the right mood to receive it. Even more usefully, it was completely breezeless with not so much as a leaf blade stirring. The bitter lessons of trying to hand-pollinate flowers that are thrashing about in the wind, not to mention walking across the garden with a precious blob of pollen on the end of a scalpel, have taught me that pollinations on breezy days are the stuff of futility. All the more so for those of us with waist-length hair, which is guaranteed to flap across your face at the very moment you were trying to deposit a miniscule dab of pollen onto a particularly wobbly and elusive stigma.

As the weather was so perfect for it, I was really hoping to get some useful pollinations done for my red podded pea project. Only trouble is, most of the flowers I want aren't ready. The true red podders aren't even producing buds yet, and my semi-red mangetout line, which I'm hoping to cross with the Luna Trick sugarsnap for some peachy-red snap pods, didn't want to play either. I found a prime pollen-bearing bud on it that was well past the usual stage for self-fertilisation but when I cut it open I found it stubbornly refusing to dehisce.

An F4 plant from my semi-red podded mangetout line, currently struggling under the temporary working name of Peachy, getting ready for some blossom action (but not yet).

So instead I did some pollinations I didn't really need using the flowers I had available. It is worth pointing out that my beloved Luna Trick pea is the result of just such a casual union, in which I used up the last of some Sugar Ann flowers to pollinate a few buds of Golden Sweet just because I was bored. It turned out to be an inspired combination. Today's efforts mostly involved Sugar Snap flowers as females, pollinated with some of my purple F2 plants which may or may not turn out to be any good. I used the opportunity to take some close-up photographs of the pollination process. It's my fourth attempt to take such pictures. Thing is, you really need three hands for it, or an assistant who knows what they're doing. I have neither, so Plan B was to stick the camera on a tripod and use the self-timer for some very cumbersome hands-free photography, which resolved the three-hands issue but gave me some more challenges in trying to get it to focus in the right place when there's negligible depth of field. Anyway, if any of them are any good I'll add them to my previous pea-breeding tutorial.

The hand pollinations are just one aspect of what I'm doing on this crimson seeking project. Since my pièce de résistance in the red podded pea department stubbornly refused to yield me any fibre-free pods, I've been looking at alternative ways of getting them. Which now involves several simultaneous endeavours.

Growing out the rest of the F2 seed from whence the original came. This is the biggest hope. The particular combination of genes I need are a minority class which will only show up in a small proportion of the F2 offspring. I need the yellow pod gene (recessive), two purple pod genes (both dominant) and two fibre-thwarting genes (both recessive). I can't be arsed to look up in a Punnett Square what the actual chances are and calculate the number of plants I need for 95% probability … I'm content to know that it may take a lot of plants in order to deliver the holy grail. This year it's down to luck anyway, as I have only a small amount of F2 seed left and so I can't grow lots of plants. Even the seed I do have is of poor quality because it was grown from a late summer crop (I used to have this trick of growing two consecutive generations in one season to double the speed of my breeding work, but have since stopped doing it because the second crop yields weak seed at best, and at worst yields nothing and just wastes valuable breeding material). So I have about fifteen, maybe twenty plants, and they may or may not offer any red pods. The moment of truth is approaching, as the F2 plants have got flower buds.

They're very pretty buds, with the mauve blush that promises bicolour flowers. Both parent varieties had bicolour flowers, so I'm expecting to see it in all the offspring. The ones shown above are fairly typical and there are others similar, with more or less purple sploshing on the stems and leaves. But I can already categorically rule out any red pods from these two plants or any of the others currently budding. The reason? Green calyx.

Green calyx means green pods. I've noticed from my work with yellow podded peas that there is a direct correlation between the calyx colour and the pod colour. Yellow podded peas are always preceded by pale cream buds which turn into a cream calyx. Sometimes it has green mottling, and pink dapples, but the base colour is always cream. (Have a look at the picture of Peachy above and see how cream the calyx is compared to these F2 buds). I suspect the cream calyx/yellow pod may actually be coded by the same gene. If they are separate genes, they are certainly slapped together pretty tightly on the chromosome, and inherit together. It's not affected by flower colour - you can get white flowers or purple bicolour flowers on a yellow-podded pea, it's just the calyx and pod colour that are inseparable from each other.

When I say that green calyx means green pods, it may also mean purple pods … or partial purple. That's because purple podded peas are in fact green podded. I know that sounds weird, and I've had to explain it so many times on plant breeding forums it's obviously something a lot of people find hard to follow. If you look closely at a purple pod, the very tip where it attaches onto the plant is green. Break it open and it will be green inside. The purple pigment, no matter how intense it looks, is merely on the surface, and the base colour of the pod is green. This is also the reason why all purple podded peas turn green when cooked. The water-soluble anthocyanin pigment is just sitting on the surface and is washed away in hot water.

I admit it did take me a while to work this out. The first time I grew F2 seeds from this cross, it produced red, green, yellow and purple pods in varying proportions. I couldn't understand why a cross between a purple podder and a yellow podder yielded so many offspring with green pods. Neither of the parents appeared to have green pods so where did they come from? The simple answer is that the purple parent is green podded, with the green hidden under the layer of purple. In the great gene reshuffle, some of the offspring end up with green pods without the genes for purple overlay, and so they stay green.

The same principle applies to red pods. They are simply yellow-podded peas with a purple overlay, which combines visually to make deep red. It's not possible to have red pods unless the base colour of the pod is yellow. That's how I know the two buds shown above are not going to give me red pods. A red-podder bud will invariably have a cream calyx, not a green one.

While I shouldn't condone the practice of peeking inside unopened leaf clusters to look at bud colours, I naturally can't resist it. And it's been very encouraging. Because two of the upcoming F2 plants which are not ready to blossom yet are showing cream buds among distinctly yellowy foliage. Even when they're tiny, the cream colour is unmistakable. The cream buds don't necessarily result in red pods, some will just stay yellow, it depends whether the genes for purple overlay are also present. But they do open up the likelihood of it. Also, one of the cream buds is showing a speck of pink colour on the calyx. While I don't have a genetic explanation for it, I have noticed a strong correlation between pink markings on the calyx and red pods. So I'm feeling lucky with this one.

Maybe it's not very clear in this photo, but this developing bud has a cream calyx - ergo yellow pods. Also a tiny pink spot on the calyx which is a good sign.

It's still pot luck whether any of the plants in this small sample will give me exactly what I want, but the solution is in there if only I can grow enough F2 plants. Which brings me on to my convenient back-up plan …

Growing out more F1 plants to make new F2 seed. I still have a number of F1 seeds saved from when I made the original cross. The seeds are good, healthy mature ones too. I started off a batch of about ten F1 plants this year. The beauty of peas and their efficient self-pollination is that you don't need to do anything except grow the F1 plants and save seed from them. They are veritable F2 seed machines. Every pea they produce has a unique individual genome, its own personal reshuffling of all those genetic goodies. Somewhere among the reshuffles is bound to be the specific five-gene combination I'm looking for.

F1 hybrid of Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded. Flowering like billy-o and hopefully making lots of nice F2 seeds for me.

What's interesting about these F1 plants is that they are showing massive hybrid vigour, or heterosis. It's a phenomenon brought about by having a mixed up genome, a by-product of heterozygosity. Its cause has always been something of a mystery, though I'm told that some recent research has put it down to an enhanced ability for photosynthesis. Whatever the reason for it, my own observation is that it only happens in certain crosses - though there are degrees of it. And it's for one generation only - you don't tend to see it in F2 plants. This has been especially marked in my current crop, because I sowed the F1 and F2 seeds from the same cross side by side in the same rootrainer tray, and they are now growing side by side out in the garden. And from the moment of germination, the F1 plants rocketed away from their F2 nephews. They grew faster, had thicker stems, established themselves in the outdoors quicker, produced substantially bigger leaves and grew taller. They were also earlier to flower - and still having a burst of surplus energy to get shot of, have thrown out a lot of sideshoots too. Pea sideshoots are usually feeble, spindly things, if they ever get going at all. These are nothing of the sort. They are full-size, chunky, vigorous new branches which look set to flower and make pods.

Something else peculiar about the F1 plants, or one of them at least. I've been writing about the leaf aberrations in my peas this year, which I'm beginning to conclude are probably weather related. I mentioned the fasciation (thickening of the stem) in one of my other hybrids, despite the fact that it's a trait caused by recessive genes. Well, now some spontaneous fasciation has occurred in one of these F1 plants. To my knowledge, there are no fasciation genes in this hybrid, which is not related to the other one - they are completely separate breeding lines. Which leads me to assume that pea fasciation is not solely genetic, and can arise as an environmental reaction. What's even more weird is that the plant in question managed to unfasciate itself by splitting into two stems. A single stem with a well developed sideshoot is one thing, but this is a pair of twin stems growing at the same rate in different directions, equal and opposite.

This F1 pea developed spontaneous fasciation (stem widening) and then split into two separate but equal growing tips. This is not normal for peas!

Edit: I've just done some homework on fasciation, following a link from Rhizowen's wonderful blog, and it seems that spontaneous fasciation from environmental stress is a well known phenomenon - actually more common than genetic fasciation. It's caused by damage to the growing tip by virus, bacteria, insect nibbling or frost - and a reversion back to normal growth is also common. In this case, frost is almost certainly the culprit.

Other avenues. I had just eight seeds left from my original red podded pea. I sowed them, and three fell victim to marauding gastropods. The five survivors are doing well though, and although there will be no edible pods among them, they will enable me to make some crosses. The priority will be to cross them with my two Luna Trick lines, which are genetically similar, being derived from the same original parent variety, but represent a superior form of it with good-flavoured and fully edible yellow pods. Another batch of twenty or so are on the go, thanks to my big haired friend Graham, who grew some last year and gave me back some seeds from the best of them. Again, they won't have edible pods, but they will be priceless for making crosses and might also make the basis for a red-podded shelling pea. Also of course there's the Peachy line which has edible pods which are part-red. That might turn into a variety in its own right, and will certainly be useful for making crosses with the pure red (if it ever gives me any pollen).

A tomato round-up

2010-05-29T22:24:00.003+01:00

I never got round to blogging about last year's tomato crop, so here is a very brief summary of it before this year's crop reaches the point where I have to blog about that instead. I didn't grow very much last year, so here are the three best ones. Bottle tops are included for scale.

Essex Wonder

Essex Wonder - I got this one from the Heritage Seed Library, mainly for sentimental reasons. I grew up in north Essex which has (or had) an extensive market gardening and glasshouse industry. Essex Wonder was a popular market gardener's tomato from the 1930s to 1950s, extensively grown in the area before dropping from the catalogues and fading to near-extinction. I found it to be a very pleasant if rather "normal" tomato compared to the weird freakish stuff I usually grow. The fruits are almost perfectly spherical and bright red and come in a range of sizes from mini-cherry to golf ball, all with a pretty decent flavour.

OSU Blue Fruit

OSU Blue Fruit - oh this is special! Bred by Jim Myers at Oregon State University in the US, it's a dark anthocyanin-skinned purple tomato which, given enough direct sunlight, turns coal black when it's ripe. At the moment it isn't available commercially (as far as I know); they're working on improving its flavour and shape, and this prototype is doing the rounds among curious collectors and amateur breeders. I got mine from Michael Johnson in Nottingham.

The fruits are only purple/black on the outside. Cut them open and they are red. They also stay red - or a deep bronzy red-black - on any part that doesn't get full sun, because they need strong light to develop their colour. That includes the area underneath the calyx at the top of the fruit, so they have a little red star on the top when you harvest them. They are supposedly more reliable at developing the full colour when grown outdoors, but I grew mine in the greenhouse and they came up a treat.

As with many exciting plant breeding developments, the mechanism behind the blue fruit is relatively straightforward. There are three wild species of tomato which contain some anthocyanin pigment in the fruit, each involving a different gene. Two are dominant: Abg comes from Solanum lycopersicoides while Aft is found in Solanum chilense, and the recessive atv comes from Solanum cheesemanii. All of these genes have already been bred into cultivated tomatoes over the years, without producing fully blue fruits. What the OSU team discovered was that if you combine all three of these genes together you get a cumulative effect which intensifies the pigment. Voilà blue fruit.

The downside of OSU Blue Fruit is said to be its flavour, which has a reputation for being "inky". Anthocyanins are normally tasteless, but they're often accompanied by other compounds and biochemical changes which can affect the flavour. Consequently I wasn't expecting that much from it in the way of taste. But I was pleasantly surprised - it was actually pretty palatable. I'd be lying if I said it was up there with the best tasting tomatoes, but it certainly wasn't poor either … it was as good as or better than most of what you'd find in the supermarket.

Pugliese Green

Pugliese Green - this Italian variety was given to me by Jeremy Cherfas over at Agricultural Biodiversity. Despite the name, it's very much a red tomato, and doesn't look significantly different from other red tomatoes, though it has a certain intensity of colour. There is one thing that makes it stand out though - the flavour is stupendously good. I'm even able to nibble at it raw (see below). It's fruity and juicy and succulent with just the right balance of gel and flesh, and will probably become a flavour benchmark for me. Thank you Jeremy.

That was last year's crop. Meanwhile the 2010 crop is going nuts in the greenhouse making the most of the unlikely sunny weather. Here's what I've got crammed in there …

OSU Blue Fruit
Tangella
Isis Candy
Anna Russian
Green Zebra
Green Tiger
Darby Striped Pink/Yellow
Darby Striped Red/Green
Pugliese Green
Essex Wonder
Pink Freud F3 (one of my own experiments)
Banana Legs x Green Tiger F1 (another bit of hand-pollinated jiggery pokery)

The horrendous affliction of late blight means that it's no longer practical to grow tomatoes anywhere but inside the greenhouse, where they're sheltered from the warm summer rain which brings the deadly spores to the garden. Normally it's not worth trying to grow any outdoor tomatoes any more, but Patrick kindly sent me some seeds of Tomatito de Jalapa, which is supposed to be blight resistant. There are genes for blight resistence in certain wild species of tomato, and some of these are being bred into garden varieties. From what I gather, this has been working OK with small cherry tomatoes but is not much cop when it comes to the big-fruited types. So if you want blight resistance you have to have tiddly little fruits. Which is fine by me, I don't mind. I have little knowledge of what Tomatito de Jalapa is like or how assiduously it fends off blight, but I'm looking forward to experimenting with it. The greenhouse is full, but the beauty of this one is that I can grow it outdoors.

Tomatito de Jalapa seedlings, as photographed a couple of weeks ago. They have since been potted up individually and are growing like rockets.

I've also got another tomato that I pinched from a restaurant. I don't know what variety it is, but I had to have it. At this point I need to confess something. I actually hate raw tomatoes, and can't eat them unless they're mixed with something else. I love them cooked, and I love growing them, but when it comes to snacking them off the vine - forget it. They actually make me gag. But a couple of months ago I was in a little basement restaurant in Cheltenham called Café Rubik, which does very nice food. The curse of being vegetarian though is that everything you order always comes with salad. Chefs seem to assume that all vegetarians are health freaks and don't want to eat chips or anything stodgy and interesting, so if you're vegetarian simply because you don't want to eat dead animals but do want to eat stodgy interesting and unhealthy stuff without dead animals in, you're out of luck. So, confronted with the mandatory pile of bleak greenery, I was thinking "fuck, how am I going to get through all these raw tomatoes?" But when I nibbled the edge of one I was surprised to find it rather fruity. I nibbled a bit more. It didn't taste of tomatoes at all, it was like a tangy little fruit - a cape gooseberry or something. I then astounded myself by eating a whole one, and actually enjoyed it. This really was a momentous event because I've never eaten a raw tomato like that before. It was unprecedented.

Well obviously there's only one thing you can do in those circumstances, and that's steal one to take home and get the seeds out of it. I waited some while for a moment when the waiter wasn't looking, but he seemed to be looking all the time, so in the end I just grabbed one and shoved it in my pocket. He looked a bit surprised but didn't say anything. I took it home and fermented the gel and got quite a few seeds from it. Although received wisdom has it that tomatoes need to over-ripen to the point of inedibility in order to produce mature seed, I've always had perfectly good results saving seeds from eating-stage tomatoes, and indeed other vegetables. If you like the taste of it scrape some seeds out of it, that's my motto.

The original Café Rubik tomato, as pilfered.

Sure enough the seeds germinated rampantly and have grown into very healthy plants. They all look the same so far too, which is a good sign, as it implies that it's a true-breeding open pollinated variety and not a hybrid. I've no idea what variety it is, though presumably it does have a real name. It might even be a well known mainstream commercial variety for all I know. But I've called it Café Rubik in lieu of an identification. Not much to tell from its outer appearance … it's round, and red, and tomatoish. I'll post pictures of the plants as they grow in case anybody recognises it.

Leaf weirdness

2010-05-19T23:56:00.003+01:00

Well it was only a few days ago that I blogged about the likely genetic expression in my Alderman x Salmon-Flowered F1 pea. And already the plants are thumbing their noses at me and proving me wrong.

Let me begin my explanation by showing you a picture of their dad.

Salmon-Flowered pea growing in my garden in 2007. This is an umbellatum type pea which bears all its flowers in a clump at the top. This happens because the new stems formed at each successive leaf node fuse together and are drawn upwards into a big fat monster stem, for which the technical word is fasciation.

I mentioned that fasciation is caused by a very particular combination of three recessive genes. Because they're recessive, and they need to present themselves all together in order to do their thing, I wasn't expecting to see any sign of fasciation in the F1. I thought they would be masked by the dominant alleles of Alderman. Shows how much I bloody know about it.

Young Alderman x Salmon-Flowered F1 plant showing early but unmistakable signs of stem fasciation. In other words, it's going to be an umbellatum phenotype with a clumpy flower posy at the top.

I don't know why this is happening - I was expecting the growth habit to be more in keeping with the hybrid's mum, Alderman. Multiple-recessives do have interesting effects, but you see that in the F2 plants, not the F1. What's most odd is that I have some young Salmon-Flowered plants on the go at the moment and they are not yet showing anywhere near as much fasciation as this. Perhaps Alderman has one or more of the recessive fasciation genes hidden unexpressed in its DNA. Perhaps the recessives don't have an equivalent dominant allele and are able to express themselves freely. I haven't got a clue (suggestions welcome) so I'm just speculating. At any rate it's showing itself consistently in all the F1 plants.

Alderman x Salmon-Flowered F1. The leaf stems have divided and doubled themselves, a feature of umbellatum peas.

Meanwhile though, I'm seeing some leaf aberrations in my other peas too, and those are even more devoid of an explanation. It takes many forms and it's mostly happening among my hybrids, but not exclusively. I've no idea what causes these effects. Cold weather? Virus? Genetic mismatch? Mystical cosmic rays?

Pea leaves usually come in pairs, but here is a gallery of weirdness.

Trefoil. Golden Sweet x Kent Blue F1.

Quatrefoil. Magnum Bonum x Carruthers' Purple Podded F2.

Another quatrefoil. This one is bearing one of its leaves upside down, and has two sets of tendrils, one on each side. Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded F2.

Quatrefoil at the main node, creating a butterfly effect. Red-podded pea (Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded F5).

Magnum Bonum x Carruthers' Purple Podded F2. This hybrid is the one that is showing by far the most leaf weirdness, with a number of the plants showing what I can only describe as a "cabbaging" effect … with surplus leaf growth bunching up around the growing tip, and sometimes even terminating the tip in a leaf-and-tendril dead end. But curiously, it is only affecting the plants that were grown from light-coloured (cream or green) seeds. I sowed the dark coloured seeds separately in the same tray and those are all normal.

May Queen, an old English variety, with two leaf nodes fused together. Each node has a fully formed pair of leaves and a single flowering stem, but all squashed up together.

At least I haven't suffered any losses (yet) in the recent spell of unseasonal frost, except for a pot of bush basil which 'melted' overnight when the temperature got too low for it. Apart from that, I've been lucky - thanks to Cheltenham's sheltered climate and my garden being hemmed in by trees and houses. Garden pests have been taking their toll though. After an abnormally dry spring which kept the slugs and snails in hibernation for weeks longer than normal, a few days of heavy rain brought them all out and they were ravenously hungry. The Luna Trick F4 crop suffered some quite severe damage, with about a quarter of the plants gnawed down to stumps within 48 hours. The damaged ones will make new shoots, but it will set them back by several weeks. Sluggy bastards. I even had a potato haulm completely devoured in the space of two nights - gone and vanished without trace. The culprits for this damage tend to be either the large brown garden snails or the tiny keel slugs who live in the soil and are barely noticed at the crime scene.

The other garden pest damaging my peas at the moment is a ginger cat with a big arse. It's a funny thing about cat social mentality - he wants attention and doesn't care whether it's positive or negative as long as he's getting it. He enjoys cuddles but is really just as happy when I'm yelling and chasing him off with a broom. Since he discovered he can get lots of noises and arm-waving from me by crashing over onto my pea seedlings, he's taken to doing it repeatedly. And the more I go "aaaargh!" the more he does it. I'm trying to reverse-condition him by walking away and ignoring him, but it's easier said than done … when someone slaps their capacious backside down on baby F4 plants that represent four years' breeding work, sometimes you just have to leap around and shout.

The Arse of Doom

F1 hybrid peas and axil splodges

2010-05-14T17:51:00.006+01:00

I thought I'd put up some pictures of the F1 hybrid peas I've got going, even though they don't look all that exciting at the moment. They aren't flowering yet but this is a good time to admire their axillary pigmentation.

I don't read up as much as I should on pea genetics, but it certainly seems that the genes controlling the expression of colour in different parts of the plant tend to come as a package deal. From what I have bothered to read, I know that there are distinct and separate genes for pink splodges in the leaf axil, for purple or pink bicolour flowers, purple seedcoat speckles and purple pods - plus another gene which switches colour production on or off for the whole plant. The purple pod genes (there's actually two of those) are often inherited separately, but the rest seem always to go together. It's quite useful in some ways, because the axil splodge enables me to predict flower colour several weeks before they flower, or even to select for flower colour before I sow by going for the dark-coloured or speckled seeds. Although they're different genes they are presumably all squidged right up together on the same chromosome.

The axillary splodges are made by just one major gene, but there is a lot of subtle variation in how they are expressed.

Golden Sweet x Kent Blue F1

I made this hybrid in 2007 and the seeds have been sitting around ever since waiting for me to do something with them. The plants have a very intense blotch in the leaf axil, with a distinctively purple hue.

I'm not sure what I'm expecting to get from this hybrid, it's one of my suck-it-and-see crosses. Both parents are heritage varieties of some considerable vintage, which usually makes for interesting hybrids. Certain traits can be predicted in the F1: Golden Sweet is yellow podded, but there is no trace of yellow colouring in these F1 plants because it's a recessive trait and will be hiding for now. I expect to see yellow pods in a quarter of the F2 offspring next year, but not in these. Bicolour purple flowers are pretty much a certainty though, as both parent varieties have them. But Kent Blue has the unusual feature of changing its flower colour. The flowers open as normal mauve and maroon bicolours, but within a day or so they change to a sky blue and midnight blue bicolour. They also have very pronounced veining on the back of the petals, which is very pretty. Whether these traits will show up in the F1 flowers remains to be seen. I'm also curious to see what happens to the pods in terms of width and knobbliness. Both parents are edible podded varieties of a slightly primitive type (i.e. not as sleek and fibre-free as a modern cultivar). There are two recessive genes responsible for edible pods and the way they interact is quite crucial. Depending on which ones I have here, the hybrid may be completely fibre-free (better than either parent) or they might be totally inedible. It may seem strange that you can cross two edible-podded varieties together and end up with inedible pods, but it does happen (and has happened to me!) It's one of the endearing little quirks you get in a multi-factor cross with recessive genes.

Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded F1

This hybrid is the parent of my red-podded pea. The red pods showed up in a small proportion of the F2 seeds, and so I'm growing another batch of F1 plants in order to produce more F2 seed, in the hope of getting some red edible podded recombos. These plants are from the original batch of seeds from the cross I made in 2007, and despite the seed being three years old they are showing considerable hybrid vigour, overtaking all the other peas in the garden.

The axillary pigmentation is very flamboyant, forming two distinct pinky-red rings with a white band in the middle, and something of a Bowie lightning flash at the top. This is an exaggerated form of the double axil ring inherited from Golden Sweet.

As I've already grown some of these F1 seeds I know what to expect from them, but a lot of it is easy to predict anyway. Both parents have purple flowers, which are dominant, so the F1 will have them too. Both parents are tall, and that's also dominant. Carruthers' Purple Podded passes on the two dominant genes for purple pods, so the F1 hybrid will have purple pods. Golden Sweet contributes the yellow-pod gene, but that's recessive, so none in the F1 generation. It's when these genes segregate out in the F2 that things get exciting, because when the two purple pod genes happen to come together with the yellow pod gene, that's the magic formula that gives red pods.

Alderman x Salmon-Flowered F1

Another 2007 hybrid which has sat in a box and never been grown before. This one is a cross between one of the best heritage shelling peas and a botanical curiosity, so it is venturing into uncharted territory. See how subdued the axil colour is on this one. It's a soft muted pink and sits tightly within the axil without spreading out into the leaf. The upper stem and tendrils have a rosy blush too, and the leaves have red edges. These traits are all inherited from dad, Salmon-Flowered. There are no obvious colour genes in Alderman, though it may have some unexpressed ones lurking in its genome waiting to burst forth in an unexpected carnival. On the surface it's a fairly normal green-podded pea, chosen for its excellent flavour.

What makes Salmon-Flowered such a curiosity is that it's an umbellatum type pea. These were popular in past centuries, once known as crown peas, but they are now rare. Instead of producing flowers and pods up the length of the stem, they bear all their bounty in a whopping great clump at the top. They look so different from normal peas that they were formerly classified as a separate species, Pisum umbellatum. This has now been dropped, however, since it was discovered that they are botanically the same as other domestic peas and their bizarre form is merely the result of a combination of three recessive genes, whose exact function and interaction is still not fully understood.

Well I don't understand them either, but as they are all recessive I can probably assume that none of the umbellatum traits will be apparent in an F1 hybrid. Even in the F2, it may be a very small minority class (where all three recessives combine). Never mind, there is other excitement to discover. Such as flower colour. Alderman is a white-flowered pea, and white flowers are recessive. Salmon-Flowered is ... er ... salmon flowered (two-tone pale pink and salmon pink) which I believe is also recessive. What happens when I cross these two shrinking violets? God knows. I'll have to wait and see. They may be pink, they may be white - or they may be neither. As I said above, a multi-factor cross with recessive genes can throw up surprising and counterintuitive results. I'm looking forward to seeing what turns up.

Now this is good customer service ...

2010-05-07T17:24:00.004+01:00

Always looking to explore unusual heritage varieties and seek out material for breeding experiments, I was pleased to see that AlanRomans.com were stocking minitubers (that is, small laboratory-grown seed potatoes) of an old and hard to find blue potato called Congo. I'm interested in Congo because it's blue-fleshed - blue all the way through - and I have a strong interest in vegetables that bear this colour pigment because of its nutritional benefits as well as its glorious beauty. As well as being historically interesting and quirky, Congo has a reputation for being a good berry setter. That would make it an excellent variety to experiment with in breeding work, because it would ensure a good supply of TPS. I could have some real fun crossing it with other varieties, but also growing out its own self-pollinated TPS, which would in itself yield some interesting segregation for different traits (if you've read my article about TPS below, you'll know that the tetraploid arrangement of the potato genome gives it something of the nature of a genetic fruit machine).

So I ordered a pack of five Congo minitubers - not the kind of quantity that would give a good yield for the dinner table, but plenty enough to get the variety established in my garden and see what it has to offer. When my order arrived a couple of days later it contained not one minituber pack but two. The handwritten note explained that they only had 15mm-ish tubers left in stock rather than the 20mm-ish ones they preferred to supply, and so they sent me 6 rather than the 5 I ordered. Additionally, they sent me a pack of 5 minitubers of another rare and special variety, Red Craigs Royal, as a freebie. The Red Craigs Royal tubers had already started to chit and were at a stage where they really needed to be planted. This is really good customer service - it's a great way to keep people like me happy, because I get to add another precious heritage spud to my inventory and ensures that I will want to order from them again next time, and it shows that their attitude to heritage varieties is well motivated, in that they would rather give unsold stock to a good home.

As far as I'm aware, nobody in the UK is doing more than Alan Romans in conserving and promoting heritage potatoes. You may have seen these varieties making an appearance in Thompson & Morgan's catalogue, and in Waitrose - but all that is down to him. And it's not a simple case of reintroducing them on a whim either ... the laws and regulations relating to the sale of seed potatoes (and culinary ones) are complex and restrictive, and he's had a heck of a lot of bureaucracy to struggle against. It wouldn't be legal to sell field-grown potatoes to gardeners without an expensive process of certification, and minitubers are his latest solution to this obstacle. They are produced in a laboratory environment from disease-free plants held in vitro. Although they are small, they can be grown on and will soon build up a decent yield. The sterile environment in which they're produced may make them a little vulnerable when you plant them in the unfettered ravages of the soil, but they seem to cope and I've managed to grow laboratory-raised plants under organic conditions without too many problems. The bottom line is, if it wasn't for the laboratory process these rare and interesting varieties simply wouldn't be available at all.

Red Craigs Royal minitubers. The original Craigs Royal was introduced in 1947, bred in Scotland from a cross of Craigs Defiance x Gladstone. This red-skinned sport appeared in Perthshire in 1957 and quickly became extremely popular for its good yields and excellent flavour - only to be plunged into obscurity a few years later as the market moved on to other things. It's a second early type with a floury texture. As for its usefulness in my breeding projects, well, I'm not sure what to expect because the European Cultivated Potato Database lists it as a poor producer of berries but also as having high fertility pollen.

Congo minitubers. They don't look very exciting at the moment, but they are full of potential. There is a degree of confusion over this variety because there are two Congos. This blue-fleshed one is of British origin, thought possibly to have been created by a shepherd in the Scottish borders in the late 19th century. The other Congo is from Sweden and has white flesh (edit - or maybe not!). As if that wasn't confusing enough, there are suggestions that the blue version has many synonyms and may be known around the world as All Blue, British Columbia Blue, Russian Blue, Himalayan Black and McIntosh Black, amongst others - though they may be variants rather than identical clones. Congo is a very late maturing variety - so here's hoping the blight pestilence will be merciful.

Sowing potatoes from TPS

2010-04-29T18:07:00.002+01:00

Flowers of Salad Blue, one of the few potato varieties which produces copious quantities of true seed.

I have a very exciting new project underway. My good friend Patrick sent me some true potato seed - generally called TPS - from legendary potato-tomato breeder Tom Wagner. Tom was the founder of TaterMater Seeds in the 1980s, is the creator of the Green Zebra tomato and various others which are now ubiquitous in seed catalogues, and now dispenses his wisdom on the TaterMater messageboard. These potato seeds are from various hybrid and open-pollinated lines in Tom's ongoing breeding work and it's a real privilege to have them.

Not many people grow potatoes from TPS, and there's a few reasons for that. It's not as quick and easy as chucking a few shop-bought tubers in the ground … although the long term rewards are greater. The seeds are not readily available either. I've never seen them for sale anywhere, and you generally have to save your own.

First I should explain what I mean by true seed. When you buy a bag of spuds for planting, they are normally sold as seed potatoes. But it's a bit of a misnomer really. A seed potato (i.e. a tuber) is a root cutting - or clone to use the US term - of the original plant. Tubers are genetically identical to each other, as they only reproduce by mitosis - that is, they are a vegetative extension of the parent plant. Although spontaneous mutations can and do happen, they're uncommon enough that you are pretty much assured of getting a harvest that exactly matches the tuber you planted.

TPS is not the tuber, but the actual seeds - which come from the plant's flowers and fruits. As seeds are produced by sexual means, a coming together of egg and pollen from different flowers or different plants, they represent a genetic recombination. In other words, they are not genetically identical to the parent plant. They are newly created individuals.

If you sow these seeds they will grow into unique new potato plants, and produce their own tubers. The tubers will be small the first year, and will need to be replanted the following season to produce decent sized yields. So it takes two years, but then you go on growing it from tubers as you would any normal potato, and you effectively have a new variety. Potatoes raised from true seed are generally free of virus and disease (at least for the first couple of years).

True potato seed, extracted from the berries of Salad Blue. The seeds look rather like tomato seeds, but smaller and smoother.

Potato varieties don't come true from seed, so you never know exactly what you're going to get. Conventional wisdom has it that any plant that doesn't come true from seed is not worth sowing. But to me, and probably most people reading this blog, the unpredictability is exactly what makes it interesting! Even if you sow seeds which were self-pollinated, you can end up with a lot of variation.

A lot of people don't realise that potatoes produce fruits, for the very good reason that most of them don't. Domesticated potatoes have got so used to reproducing through root cuttings - tubers - that they can't be arsed to make viable flowers any more. Some don't flower at all, while some make flowers with sterile pollen, and the flowers just drop off. But every now and then you will find plants which set berries. It's mostly a variety thing, although environmental factors also play a big part. The berries look like small green tomatoes, sometimes with a blush of blue or purple. Some potato varieties produce berries very freely. Salad Blue (pictured above) is a prolific and reliable berry bearer. As is Mayan Gold below.

Potato berries on Mayan Gold. This variety is a hybrid of Solanum phureja, a little different from yer common or garden spud, which is Solanum tuberosum. The berries are slightly strawberry shaped - indicating that this species is diploid - whereas most potato berries are more rounded, but the same principles apply.

I'll leave the explanation of extracting and saving TPS for another post, as there are no berries around at this time of year. I will also hold off giving a more detailed genetic explanation, as I'm still on a learning curve with that myself. But what I should explain, briefly, is the reason potatoes grown from TPS are potentially so variable.

The cells of most plants (and humans for that matter) have pairs of chromosomes, in which each gene is inherited in a simple either/or relationship. This arrangement is known as diploid. When a diploid organism reproduces, each parent contributes a single chromosome, and the two join together to make a new chromosome pair. Somewhere along the line, nature had a bit of a freakout with potatoes. Instead of reducing down to one chromosome per parent, an unreduced pair of chromosomes managed to get it together with another unreduced pair. The result is a tetraploid - an organism with four chromosomes instead of the usual two. This basically means it contains two complete genomes - and twice as much genetic material.

Most of the potatoes we know and love today are tetraploid. Although it's a freak of nature, it's quite a beneficial one as tetraploids tend to be bigger and more perfectly formed than their diploid equivalents. If you're interested in how it works and why it's useful, I recommend the Polyploidy Portal for a readable explanation. For the benefit of this post however, I'm going to simplify it to its most basic level. When you make crosses with a 'normal' diploid species, the potential genetic recombination at each allele is very like what you would get if you toss two coins. Plenty good enough for some interesting combinations. With potatoes, however, it's more like the effect of tossing four coins. An exponential increase in the number of possible outcomes. This is why potatoes are so variable when grown from true seed! It's a genetic pile-up bursting with magical possibility.

TPS seedlings from Tom's seeds. These are an F1 hybrid between Mandel, a Swedish potato renowned for its flavour, and Tom's own variety John Tom Kaighin, which has been bred for flavour and blight resistance. Neither of these varieties is readily available in the UK. There is a good chance of some excellent flavoured spuds from these seeds, most likely with yellow skin and yellow flesh, and some fingerling types.

How to sow TPS
When Tom Wagner visited the UK last year he gave a lot of advice about how to grow potatoes from TPS. Much of this was captured in a series of videos which you can watch or download on Patrick's blog. What I'm attempting to do here is distil some of Tom's basic instructions into text form - but you can find a lot more detail (including a demo of how to extract the seeds from the berries) in Patrick's videos.

TPS can be sown in spring from mid-March onwards, in any kind of tray or module, and any kind of seed compost. It doesn't need to be a deep module. In this respect, TPS is the opposite of peas. I sow my peas in deep containers so that they produce a deep root run. With potatoes that isn't what you want, because the aim is not to produce lots of root under the seed, but to earth up the young plant as it grows and encourage it to produce roots along the stem. So effectively, you are encouraging the roots to develop upwards rather than downwards!

Potato seeds are small, and so are the emerging seedlings. So you don't want to bury them too deeply. Sow them thinly on the surface of the compost and either press them in or give them a very light covering. I used vermiculite to cover mine, as it helps to keep them moist. Even then I used only a tiny sprinkling, and scooped out the very fine, dusty vermiculite from the bottom of the bag where there are fewer big chunks.

Once you have sown the seeds, keep them warm and damp. As with all small seeds, it's safest to water them by lightly spraying the surface of the compost or using a very fine rose on a watering can. If you're not careful you can wash the seeds away. You can put the tray in a polythene bag or under clingfilm to keep the moisture in, but Tom doesn't recommend this as it increases the likelihood of mould forming on the compost.

Another of Tom's hybrids which I'm growing at the moment. This is an F3 from Pirampo x Khuchi Akita. These are Bolivian landraces whose tubers look quite different from modern conventional potatoes … in fact I've never seen anything like them in Europe, so I'm very excited by the possible diversity in this hybrid. Pirampo is pink, and Khuchi Akita is purple skinned and crescent-shaped. Tom made this cross to introduce a bit of historic diversity into the potato genepool. The parent landraces are diploid, but can be crossed with other potato varieties to make tetraploids with lots of diversity.

Most of the seedlings will germinate in 5-10 days. But it's not necessarily a bad sign if they take longer. Like tomatoes, they can be fickle about germinating, and will pop up when they decide the time is right - sometimes weeks after sowing.

If you're used to the big chunky shoots that potatoes produce when grown from tubers, you may be surprised - alarmed even - at how small and delicate the TPS seedlings are when they emerge. Although they look similar to tomato seedlings, they are significantly smaller. Have faith - they will grow!

Something else they have in common with tomatoes (and peppers) is seed husk retention. Some seedlings emerge with the seed husk still clamped over their heads. You don't need to worry about this though, because potato seed husks are paper thin, and much less of a problem than the tougher tomato and pepper husks. As tiny as the seedlings are, they will soon tear their way out of their helmets without any need of human intervention.

My tray of potato seedlings enjoying a bit of outdoor sunbathing. As they are still young and delicate, I put them in a box to keep the wind off them.

One piece of advice that Tom wanted to make very clear is the importance of sunlight on the young seedlings - by which he meant direct outdoor sunlight and not a greenhouse or sunny windowsill. The reason for this is that potatoes evolved in a part of the world where light is very intense and the air very thin, and so they are dependent on the ultraviolet light that can only be got from direct exposure. If there's a day when the sun is shining (and of course that is a big 'if' in the United Kingdom, but never mind) it's worth putting the potato seedlings outside in the sun, even just for a couple of hours. That way, they develop into strong sturdy plants rather than stretching out and going leggy. However they are still quite delicate at this early stage in their life cycle so you need to stop the spring winds from blowing across them. Placing the seed tray in a larger box, as shown above, should give them the protection they need while still allowing them to sunbathe in the open. If the weather is rubbish when the seedlings emerge, well, there's not a lot you can do about that, but it's a case of making the most of whatever sunlight there is.

I'm going to deal with transplanting in a later post, when my plants reach the appropriate stage and I can take some photographs. In the mean time, I can grow them in these modules until they're a couple of inches tall. The principle of transplanting is the same as that for tomatoes … they benefit from being transplanted at least twice and being buried up to the top set of leaves each time. Because potatoes, like tomatoes, are very efficient at producing feeding roots along their stems. This is, of course, why tuber-grown potatoes are earthed up as they grow. Although the TPS seedlings are tiny, the earthing up method is still the most effective way to grow them.

More anon.

Looking to grow a potato variety that is available in the UK and likely to set berries?
This list is based on a quick search of the European Cultivated Potato Database, but don't rely on it too much. The ECPD takes its data from available research - but you may find differences when you grow the spuds in your garden!

If you want a good chance of berries, try these varieties:

Cara
Desiree
Marfona
Maris Bard
Maris Piper
Mayan Gold
Pentland Dell
Salad Blue
Valor

Garden gallery: some of the herbs I grow

2010-04-25T17:47:00.005+01:00

Chocolate peppermint, a variety of Mentha piperita. I love peppermint, it's my favourite of all the mints for flavour and for medicinal use. I'm always a little sceptical of 'flavoured' herbs, because some of them really are rubbish and don't taste anything like their names suggest. We would get Pomegranate and Ginseng thyme or Oak-Smoked Cheddar and Somerset Raspberry basil if somebody thought they could make a quick buck out of it. But Chocolate peppermint is good. It doesn't really taste of chocolate of course ... the name is partly for the warmly chocolatey stem colour and partly because the sweet, clean, intense flavour evokes the taste of After Eight mints. But it's tasty enough that I eat the leaves straight off the plant. Love it.

And another of the flavoured herbs which stands out for me. This is Lemon Variegated thyme, more properly known as Thymus pulegioides Aurea and a product of Thymus x citriodorus. It has large rounded leaves of a deep green with bright yellow margins. I always thought the golden variegated thymes were bred for ornamental rather than culinary use, but this one is a corker. The lemon taste is sharp, intense and well developed with no bitter herby undertone, and a little goes a long way when you cook with it. I have two other citriodorus thymes: Lemon Curd, despite its enticing name, has an uninspiring flavour while Doone Valley, another golden variegated one usually sold as an ornamental, tastes better ... but neither of them are in the same league as this one.

Silver Spires rosemary. This is a silver variegated rosemary bred by Christine Wolters of Mayfields Nursery in Guildford. I keep reading that silver variegated rosemary, which was prized in England in Shakespeare's day, has been lost and no longer exists. Well I have it, and it certainly does exist. I bought the plant in 1997, and salvaged it from my old garden when I moved, but haven't seen it anywhere since. Shame, because I rate it highly for looks and flavour. There is a golden variegated rosemary which is more readily available, but this one is quite different.

More thyme. This one is an unknown variety, but I've had the plant for many years and it's the best culinary thyme I've ever found - very intense, refined flavour and dries exceptionally well. I've never seen it in garden centres. It has fine, narrow greyish leaves and grows taller than most popular thymes ... the leaves are looking quite green at the moment because it's on the cusp of flowering. The plant originally came from Waitrose, of all places. It was being sold as a fresh organic herb, the idea being that you don't bother to plant it, just take it home for the windowsill and murder it for this week's dinner. But I did plant it, and it thrived. It came from an organic farm in the Dolomite mountains of Italy, and that's all I know.

Rosemary blossom. One of the joys of this time of year, and the bees think so too.

Luna Trick F4 seedlings go forth

2010-04-25T17:18:00.004+01:00

Luna Trick F4 plants all tagged up and ready to plant out

Well both my F4 Luna Trick batches are now planted out in the garden - the standard version and the sugarsnap version. They were sown a couple of weeks apart, in the hopes that their development will be staggered somewhat and I will be less overwhelmed by the workload. Growing peas is not in itself much of a workload … they are independent little dears. But breeding projects have a habit of being very time-consuming, especially this one, because I'm being very careful about collecting individual data on each plant. It takes a lot of effort to label and track every single plant in the project and write down detailed notes for all of them. But it will save me time in the long run because I will be able to select more precisely for the traits I want - and it will teach me a lot about the genetics involved, and pea genetics generally. By labelling every plant with its own number, which includes a code for its specific pedigree, I can identify which lines are true-breeding for dominant traits such as tallness. I'll be able to see which pedigree lines are entirely made up of tall plants and save seed only from those, which should eliminate unwanted recessives very quickly. If I pooled the F4 seed and selected from the whole group, I wouldn't know which of the tall ones were hiding unwanted recessives. So although it would save me a lot of note-taking for this year, I'd be weeding out unwanted dwarf types for years to come.

Luna Trick F4 plant, photographed today. This one is the offspring of LT10, which so far looks to be the only line which is true-breeding for tallness.

As these plants are so important to me, I take extra care with them. They have been raised in rootrainers, which in my experience are far more reliable than any other method for producing strong seedlings and healthy plants. The expense of rootrainers doesn't necessarily make them a good option for pea cultivation generally, but for me they are a worthy investment. The next important thing is soil preparation. I don't bother with fertilisers because peas don't really need them … they have a unique mechanism for producing their own. But what they do benefit from is a digging in of organic matter of some kind. Compost is good. Horse manure is excellent, but in the light of the disgraceful aminopyralid poisoning of Britain's grasslands, I'm not using manure in my garden at the moment. Removal of perennial weeds such as couch grass root is also important, because it's difficult to weed around peas once they get established.

The other special care I provide them with is protection from the weather. Peas are hardy, and I'm not at all worried about the April frosts. The cold nights we're getting at the moment are bringing out some lovely red colour in the leaves of peas capable of producing red colour (which Luna Trick isn't) but it's not harming them in any way. What peas do suffer with though is the cold blustery winds that are so common at this time of year. Having said that, this year has been astonishingly warm and settled, so it hasn't been an issue. They are only really vulnerable to this when they're young and first planted out … the cold winds wither and damage the young growing tips. Once they've got established after a couple of weeks, they are a lot more robust. So what I do for precious peas when first planted out is set up a netted fabric screen round them. Horticultural fleece is the conventional choice, but the lovely old lady who lived in my house before me has saved me ever having to buy any. The house was festooned with about 30 miles of net curtains, which do an admirable job in taking the edge off the winds without losing too much sunlight. I'm growing Luna Trick in a frame made of bamboo canes, so it's the work of a moment to attach the net curtains round it with clothes pegs. I do have to be careful to lay a few unwelcoming heavy twigs around the outside as well, because my cat finds it amusing to charge into the net curtains at high speed.

Doesn't that look grand? Well all right, it looks bloody awful, but old net curtains are very effective at filtering the English spring breezes while the seedlings get established. I make no apology for the state of my garden ... the breeding and heritage conservation work is so time consuming I don't have time to make it look pretty as well.

I keep each of my breeding projects in their own personal filing containers, made from ultra high-tech re-used cat food boxes. When I picked up an empty box the other day for a new project I'm starting, it turned out not to be empty. Rattling around inside were about a dozen lovingly sorted and labelled bags of Luna Trick seed from the best of my F3 lines, and three unmarked whole pods left loose in the box. I'm afraid I do have this bad habit of failing to label things and then forgetting what the hell they were. These seeds were all harvested earlier in the season, when I was selecting the best plants and harvesting the pods as they matured. I remember harvesting them but don't remember shelling them and boxing them up, which serves me right for smoking too much weed in my youth. There were about twelve pedigree lines in labelled bags, including a load of extra seed from my best plant LT10 … so I've sown another fifteen of those. You can never have enough LT10 as far as I'm concerned. And by starting off another batch of them now, in addition to the ones sown about a month ago, I'm greatly increasing my window of opportunity to make crosses with them.

The loose pods were something of a mystery, but there had to be a good reason I kept them separate instead of bagging them up like I did the others. According to my pollination records, which can also be a bit sporadic when I'm busy, I did some crosses between the best Luna Trick F3 plants and one of the trial varieties I grew in 2009, Buerre Cosse Rouge. This latter is quite a special little variety because it has red-sploshed pods … not quite the deep consistent crimson I got in my red-podder project, but reasonably close to it. And it's a sugarsnap type. It does have some frustrating weaknesses though. The plants (in my trial at least) were tiny and not very strong, and the yields absolutely miniscule. It produced miniscule pods that have about three peas in them, and more often than not they withered and fell off before they reached maturity. I didn't even get to taste Buerre Cosse Rouge, because I was struggling to scrape together enough seed just to regrow it this season. In doing these crosses, I had in my head the idea that I might get some red-pod gorgeousness into the voluptuous sweet abundance of Luna Trick. There is a chance - only a chance mind - that these loose pods had been kept separate because they were hybridised ones.

Fortunately for me and my slack incompetence, I should be able to find out fairly quickly. My old friend gene A will help me out. It's the gene which switches on the colour pigment in peas. Luna Trick doesn't have it - it's true-breeding for the recessive a a genotype which cannot produce anthocyanin pigment. Buerre Cosse Rouge presumably has the dominant A A type, because it has lots of anthocyanin colour. Crossing the two will give me the a A genotype, in which the recessive colourless gene gets elbowed out. In other words, if the seedlings show any trace of red colouring, I will know they are from a cross. If they turn out to be the normal unpigmented Luna Trick type, then I'll know they weren't from a cross. Thus nature sometimes forgives us for poor labelling.

(The seedlings have now emerged and so far are not showing any obvious traces of anthocyanin. Arse!)

The herb garden resurrected

2010-04-17T13:13:00.004+01:00

I've finally got round to doing something I've meant to do ever since I moved here in 2004 - install a proper herb garden. In my previous garden, which was a miniscule 30ft by 12ft, I didn't have room to grow many vegetables and so herbs were my main thing. In that tiny garden I collected 80 varieties of herbs - culinary, medicinal and shamanic ones. But over the years most have been lost, either by dying off or having to be left behind when I moved. I always intended to make a new one, but it's taken me six years.

Last year a friend up the road had some alterations done in her house which involved knocking two rooms into one, and she said I could have the bricks if I wanted to come round and collect them. As it was an 1890s house and the bricks were lovely handmade ones full of character, I thought they would be perfect for building a raised herb bed. They didn't feel quite so perfect after I'd lumped 140 of them into the boot of my small and very antique VW Polo and made three journeys back home with the exhaust pipe practically scraping along the road - and I was so knackered I stacked them up round the side of the house and didn't do anything with them for a year.

Beautiful as Victorian bricks are, if you've ever salvaged "pre-owned" bricks you'll know what a fun job it is to chisel all the old mortar off them, which has to be done before you can re-use them. But once I'd got enough of them cleaned up, I made this rather nice walled bed. It's five courses high, curved along the front edge, and has enough room for a good collection of plants which will have full sun and good drainage. There's also a border at the back of it which faces south-west, and with the shelter and the reflected light/heat from the bricks it should make another good place to grow some of the more marginal herbs.

The new herb bed planted up with a few things already. Chives, chamomile, oregano and various thymes and parsleys.

Yes, it's a bit amateur and homespun. I've never done bricklaying before (and I don't have a bloke to do this kind of stuff for me) so I just get on with it and hope for the best. I probably shouldn't admit this but I didn't make any measurements or design plans at all. I just laid out the bricks on the ground until I liked the look of them and cut round them to make the outline for the foundations. Then I positioned them all by eye without recourse to tape measure, string-line, set-square or spirit level. What would Geoff Hamilton say? Maybe I'm daft but I'm just not the kind of girl who measures or plans things. Everything I do is improvised. To be honest, the bricks are all so individual and full of subtle variations it would still have looked a bit wonky even if I had meticulously planned everything. So bugger it. I like wonky things anyway.

And as I was building it I suddenly hit on this idea of incorporating this carved stone ouroboros which I've had lying around for years. It dates back to when I was 19 and lived in a farm cottage on a Cotswold hillside (which was freezing cold and infested with mice, before anyone has the word 'idyllic' get anywhere near their head). In my youthful idealism I used to go up the hill and find flat-faced chunks of Cotswold stone, then half kill myself lugging them back to the cottage to carve medieval motifs on them. The hill where I lived, Bredon Hill in Worcestershire, was circled by pretty villages with ancient churches, some of which had spectacular medieval stone carvings in them. The idea was to make hand-made copies of some of these carvings. I can't remember which parish I found the ouroboros design in, but anyway, I spent a happy few days smacking seven kinds of hell out of a chunk of stone until this little chap emerged.

Ouroboros carving, set with a few bits of coloured glass.

I love the ouroboros symbol. It's a deep alchemical motif which carries the idea of motion within stillness, completion, wholeness, energised balance and eternal renewal of cycles. All good things to have in a garden. For years I've been carrying my ouroboros (and a couple of others I made at the time) around with me and could never decide what to do with it. After all this time it's beautifully and naturally weathered - and it fits into the wall perfectly.

Another slightly more subtle feature in the wall … when I was lumping bricks into the car I spotted a set of fingerprints in one of the bricks. It had been pressed into the clay before it was fired, and thus preserved. Maybe this picture isn't the clearest, but the brick retains every detail of the lines in this person's fingers. Things like this are really precious to me. I love the idea that an unknown brickyard worker imprinted their identity into a housebrick 120 years ago and it still survives today as clearly as if it had been made yesterday. Perhaps it has an added significance to me because my grandfather was a brickmaker. Not that there's anything remotely romantic about that. In fact it killed him at age 37. But these little personal touches (literally) of people long gone from the world are the most special historical treasures to me.

A brickmaker's fingerprints etched into a brick surface.

That's not the only bit of hard landscaping I've done this week. My neighbour informed me the other day that he is giving up growing vegetables, because "they don't come to anything anyway, it's a waste of time" (speak for yourself, mate) and turfing over his vegetable patch. I find that very sad, but each to their own. I have benefited from it personally though, because he offered me the edging stones which had formerly made the boundaries of his vegetable garden, which happened to be exactly the right size and quantity for edging the path in my greenhouse, for which I had been trying to psych myself up for a trip to Wickes because I was in urgent need of some. These are old tiles and far nicer than anything I could have got from Wickes anyway. Thank you God. Thank you neighbour.*

*Not that the two are in any way synonymous.

Report on the Luna Trick F3 crop

2010-04-11T22:04:00.005+01:00

This post comes with a little explanatory video (12 minutes running time) as an introduction to my Luna Trick pea project. It's the first time I've made one of these, so do let me know if it's useful.

Luna Trick is a new pea variety I'm working on. It's an exquisitely tasty edible-podded pea with pale golden yellow moon-shaped pods - named for my music partner Daniel Staniforth who has a music project called Luna Trick.

The project originally started as an attempt to breed a yellow sugarsnap pea. In 2007 I crossed Golden Sweet, a unique heritage golden-podded mangetout pea, with a modern sugarsnap pea, Sugar Ann. The result was a spectacular range of unexpected colour and flavour diversity - but sadly no yellow sugarsnaps. My chance of getting a yellow sugarsnap in the F2 generation was one in sixteen (a double recessive combination), but none showed up in that particular batch. I had yellow mangetouts and green sugarsnaps, but that was it. However one mangetout plant did stand out from all the rest for its elegant beauty, high yields, juicy golden yellow pods and truly exquisite flavour. This plant, which was numbered YSS 25, became the prototype for Luna Trick.

In 2009 I grew out 35 seeds from this one plant. I was hoping to get more plants of a similar type. And so I did - and a lot more besides!

The first Luna Trick yield. Golden yellow moon pods, exquisitely sweet and completely fibreless.

Hybrid vigour in peas is something I've often wondered about. I've often heard it said that hybrid vigour exists only in outbreeding plants, if indeed it exists at all, which is still a subject of debate. Peas are inbreeding plants - very inbreeding - and so you might expect them not to gain much vigour from being hybridised. However my experience is that peas do have a bit of a wahey in their size and growth when you hybridise them. It varies, but it's usually apparent in one way or another. And it may be the reason why Luna Trick turned out a lot taller than expected.

The parent varieties were 5ft tall and 1ft tall respectively. Under normal circumstances, I would expect most of the offspring to be around 5ft tall, as that's the dominant form - with about one in four defaulting to the recessive 1ft size, and maybe the odd intermediate. As it turned out, the dwarf types were nearer 2ft, and voluptuously chunky. Whereas the tall types - well frankly they didn't want to stop.

Daniel, in whose honour the peas are named, is a big bloke. He's 6' 4". I never thought the plants would get as tall as him, but they did.

The F3 crop reaches the same height as Daniel. I wasn't able to measure it after this point because my arms aren't long enough.

Most of the plants weren't going to stop there either. They just kept going, way beyond the 5ft tall frame I'd optimistically provided for them. I had to ram some extremely tall and sturdy poles into the ground all around the frame and wrap masses of garden twine around them to hold everything together. And still the plants kept growing. I couldn't even reach the tops. They were probably a good 8ft by the time they started slowing down.

But apart from this, they behaved very well and did everything I hoped they would do. I'm very optimistic indeed that they will turn out to be a wonderful variety. Not only that, they are TWO wonderful varieties. The original YSS 25 protoype plant was a mangetout type - but growing its offspring revealed the presence of a hidden recessive sugarsnap gene, and a large number of the F3 plants turned out to be sugarsnaps. Beautiful, crescent-podded, golden yellow sugarsnaps! So I got exactly what I had wanted when I made the original cross - in addition to developing Luna Trick as a mangetout type. A wonderful, beautiful and very much appreciated gift.

The key trait in Luna Trick is flavour. I'm aiming for it to have the same flavour as YSS 25, which stood out from every other plant in the F2 batch and was among the most refined mangetout flavours I've ever tasted. Very sweet and juicy, but there's a lot more to it than that - it had a rich and refined complexity to its flavour and no trace of bitterness. YSS 25 was good enough that you would want to eat its full size pods straight off the plant. A salad mangetout, effectively, because it tastes so good raw you really would have no incentive to cook it. I think a yellow mangetout which tastes good enough to include in a salad, even at full size, would be a very nice thing to have.

At the moment I'm getting a mixture of single pods and double pods - some plants produced one or the other but in many cases there was a mixture of both on the same plant. I'm not quite sure how this trait works - it is clearly partly genetic but I'm not sure whether there are environmental factors involved too, or a complex interaction of genes, because it doesn't follow normal patterns and ratios. Consequently I'm just not worrying about it for the moment. Two pods per node is often deemed more desirable but I tend to find that the two pods have fewer peas in them compared to the single ones, so I'm not convinced it actually matters that much either way.

A single flower bud. This is an unusual colour combination in peas - a white flower with a creamy blond calyx (the pixie hat bit).

To summarise the F3 characteristics ...

Luna Trick is stable (true-breeding) for:

Yellow pods - a very simple recessive gene is responsible for this, called gp. In order to express yellow pods, the Luna Trick prototype must have had the stable gp gp genotype. Which is fine by me. It holds only gp genes, so all its offspring will be gp gp too.

There is, however, some variability in how persistent the yellow colour is. One of the weaknesses of the parent variety Golden Sweet is that its pods tend to green up as they reach maturity, so only the young pods are truly yellow. Some of the Luna Trick F3 plants shared this tendency, but others were notable in their ability to stay yellow right up to the time they were harvested for seed. Presumably this is a genetic variable - though I don't yet know how it works - and I will select for it at the F4 stage.

Edible pods - a slightly more complicated trait, as there are two genes involved in the reduction of fibre in the pod, p and v, both recessive. They work in slightly different ways, and you need both of them to get a really good fibreless pod. I have my suspicions that Golden Sweet only has one of them, as it tends to go a bit gristly at maturity. However, Sugar Ann has them both - and now Luna Trick has them both too. There was no trace of fibre in any of the pods in the Luna Trick F3. Hurrah!

White flowers - peas need a dominant gene called A in order to "switch on" anthocyanin production. Without it, they cannot produce any purple pigment in the leaves, stems, flowers, seeds or anywhere else. Luna Trick has inherited the recessive a a genotype from Sugar Ann, and therefore cannot produce colour pigments. White flowers it is then.

Cream calyx - the flowers all have a cream calyx (sometimes with green mottling) rather than the more conventional green. This is a true-breeding trait because it's directly related to the yellow pods. It looks absolutely gorgeous with the white flowers and really gives this variety an extra beauty factor in the garden, adding to its luna blondness.

Luna Trick is still segregating for:

Height - I'm selecting for tallness, which is the work of a dominant gene called Le (internode length). The cross with Sugar Ann will have introduced the recessive type le into the mix. Although the Luna Trick prototype was tall, it had the recessive shortie gene lurking in its genome … and by a simple Mendelian ratio I ended up with dwarf types in about a quarter of the F3 plants. With a bit of luck the F4 generation should take care of this. By growing out several plants from each of several lines, I'm hoping to be able to identify the lines which produce only tall plants, and which are therefore likely to have the desired Le Le genotype.

Pod type - the prototype Luna Trick had large mangetout type pods, which represent the dominant form. However, squirrelled away in its genome was the recessive gene n, inherited from Sugar Ann, which gives sugarsnap type pods. Consequently about a quarter (or just over actually) of the F3 plants were sugarsnaps. I was overjoyed by this, as yellow sugarsnaps were the original intent when I made the cross. The way this gene works is to thicken up the pod wall, giving it its chunky and succulent 'snap' characteristic. To compensate for this thickening, sugarsnap pods tend to be slimmer. Although this genetic difference is simple and made by a single gene, it effectively creates a separate new variety.

The recessive nature of gene n means that any sugarsnap lines I follow up will be true breeding for sugarsnap pods, as they will be genotype n n. The mangetout Luna Trick, on the other hand, will continue to throw up the odd sugarsnap from recessive genes hidden away, and I'll have to eradicate those through repeated selection.

Even within the mangetout type, differences in pod size and shape are apparent. The ideal I'm looking for is a fairly wide crescent shaped pod, but some are narrower and some are extra wide, and some are not quite so crescent-shaped.

Flavour - this is the most important factor, and I would have liked it if all the offspring had tasted as good as the prototype - but only some of them did. I know very little about the genes involved in pea flavour. The combinations are very varied, and so I assume a number of genes have a bearing on it. Sugar content obviously is a major factor, but it's not the be-all and end-all. Some peas taste very sweet but are still quite bland, others have a rich and interesting flavour but aren't particularly sweet. There is also a kind of 'soapy' taste which peas are prone to which seems quite independent of the other flavour variables. The flavour variability in the Luna Trick F3 was quite considerable. They ranged from something akin to nectar of the gods to something bordering on bitterness. Some were just bland. Overall though, the vast majority tasted substantially better than Golden Sweet - and the best ones were truly exceptional. So I'm confident of creating a flavour benchmark with Luna Trick - it's just going to take a bit of careful selection.

Seed colour - the Luna Trick prototype was heterozygous for seed colour, producing both the dominant cream seeds and the recessive green ones. Some of the resulting F3 plants were homozygous for green seeds, but the lines I'm most interesting in following up happen to be heterozygous ones, so the variability will continue in this coming generation. I'm not too bothered about this. I might select one colour or the other if it becomes easy to do so, but I don't see any harm in having the variability. It would be unacceptable in a commercial variety to have mixed cream and green seed, but I don't see why not. One of the compensations of public domain plant breeding is that you're not bound by rules and conventions.

Sugarsnap version of Luna Trick. I will develop this type separately and make a new variety with a different name.

Luna Trick does have a potential weak spot which may be genetic or environmental or a combination of the two. The peas have a tendency to split their skins when ripe - much as ripe tomatoes do when they're over-watered. This isn't a problem when you want to eat them, but verily 'tis a bugger when you are saving them for seed. In the F3 crop, some plants suffered badly from it and some had no problem with it at all. So I am selecting the ones that didn't have the problem - kind of by default, because the ones that have split will not make good seed for replanting. If it's a genetic issue, selecting against it should soon eradicate it. If it's environmental (affected, for example, by how much water the plants get at a particular time) then no amount of selecting will make any difference. So far this seems to be the only flaw though in an otherwise wondrous variety.

Rain on Luna Trick blossom.

So what now? The F4 crop in 2010
I've already sown 100 seeds for this year's selection work - 50 mangetouts and 50 sugarsnaps - and these are the ones shown in the video above. Germination was 100%.

I'm working on the mangetout and sugarsnap versions as completely separate varieties, and at some point the sugarsnap one will get its own name. Some sugarsnap types will continue to show up among the mangetouts in this generation. I'm also seeing height variability, which is apparent even at the seedling stage.

I've chosen F4 seed from the best six plants of the mangetouts and the best six plants of the sugarsnaps. In the F3 there was one plant, called LT10, which stood out from all the others - it was the tallest, highest yielding, most beautiful and had the holy grail flavour I was looking for. So I'm growing more of those than any other, hoping that I can stabilise it pretty much as it is. But by growing out a few other good lines alongside it, I'm hedging my bets in case LT10 turns out to have any unexpected flaws - and also learning more about the genetics involved, by observing the ratios for different traits in different lines.

With the sugarsnaps, there was no obvious standout plant in the F3. Some were better for flavour, some for pod shape or colour, some for stringlessness ... so I've just selected the six that looked most promising and will see what I get.

All in all though, I'm very excited and optimistic about Luna Trick.

Red-podded pea update: the F3 crop

2010-04-04T01:01:00.000+01:00

The unexpected discovery of the 'formula' for red-podded peas was the most exciting thing to happen in the garden in 2008. Without even meaning to, I'd created something unique and special and was very excited about what it might evolve into. Following all this excitement and expectation, its progress in 2009 was frustrating to say the least.

To recap briefly: I was working with two crosses, both involving a purple shelling pea with a golden yellow mangetout, with the aim of breeding a new purple mangetout variety for The Real Seed Catalogue. One of these crosses was Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded, and among the F2 plants (the generation where all the genetic recombination happens) I found one single plant with deepest, richest blood red pods.

Beauty is not enough though, as spectacular as it is. Commercial seed catalogues are already rife with things which look good but don't taste particularly special. So much so, you could be forgiven for assuming there is a tradeoff between beauty and flavour (which there isn't) and that pretty vegetables will inevitably taste rubbish. I don't want that to happen with my red-podder. I want it to taste as good as it looks, otherwise there really is little point in it.

The original red-podded F2 plant was, unfortunately, a normal shelling pea with a fibrous membrane inside the pod. What I need is an edible podded version - which means a pod which doesn't produce a gristly inner membrane. The absence of fibre is actually achieved by the combination of two unrelated genes, both recessive. Golden Sweet, the 'mother' of red-podder, is a mangetout and has at least one of these genes, if not both. So even though red-podder itself had fibrous pods, there was a pretty good chance that it would be heterozygous at that locus - carrying a hidden recessive gene for edible pods. In fact, by the rule of Mendelian segregation it had a two in three chance of producing some edible pods, and only a one in three chance of being all gristly and inedible. Until I grew the next generation, I had no way of knowing whether it was heterozygous for that trait (carrying some variability) or homozygous (true breeding).

So in 2009 I grew the F3 plants. As the red-podded phenotype was only really asserted in one plant in my F2 crop, my F3 crop was based solely on the offspring from that one plant. The plants were absolutely stunningly gorgeous. Most of them had deep red pods, though some were coming out as plain yellows, and they all had wonderful rich colouring on the stems and tendrils, and attractive calyx markings. When the sun shines through the red pods they are out of this world.

Alas, growing the F3 revealed that red-podder is homozygous for gristly pods. In other words, it cannot produce edible pods. Homozygosity is a blessing for stabilising the traits you want. But when a trait you don't want is homozygous, you're stuffed. I could grow the offspring of my red pea for the next 100 years and probably never see an edible pod among them. The genes for edible pods are not there. It has only the genes which breed true for solid, yukky, gristly fibre.

There are five things I can do about this:

1. Stand in the middle of the garden and shout "BOLLOCKS!" in a really loud voice.

2. Go back to the F2 generation and grow out the rest of the seeds (I have about 20 left) in the hope of finding another red-podded phenotype but with edible pods.

3. Go back to an earlier generation still, the F1 seeds, and grow out some more of those. These plants will all look the same, all boring, with no red pods. But they will produce a fresh abundance of F2 seed, which I will be able to sow next year and that will give me a much better chance of an edible red-podded phenotype in the event that option 2 above doesn't yield anything.

4. I can switch to another line of F3 seed, even though none of them are proper red-podders. For example, I do have an F3 which is edible podded and produces yellow pods with a red blush. It's possible that if I grow out enough of its offspring I might get something with a stronger red. It should at least breed true for edible pods, which is half the battle. Even if it doesn't produce a decent red, it might make a nice variety in its own right - kind of peachy auburn!

5. I can grow my remaining seed from the red-podded F2 and cross it with something else. To retain the red pods I would need to cross it only with yellow podded peas - and mangetout ones at that. The most obvious thing would be a backcross to Golden Sweet, but I can go one better than that. My Luna Trick line, although not yet stabilised, is bred from Golden Sweet but is a huge improvement on it. A cross with that would give me an excellent chance of improving red podder's flavour as well as its pod structure. The other obvious cross to make is with option 4 above, which already has most of the right genes.

Apart from option 1, they will all take some time - at least a year and probably more - to get the results I want. But no matter, I have got all of them underway now. We'll see what 2010 brings.

Major Cook's Bean

2010-04-01T20:36:00.002+01:00

Some of you may be growing this treasure of a bean this year, as it appeared in the 2010 Heritage Seed Library catalogue - along with a little quote from me because I'm one of the Seed Guardians who looks after this variety. The advantage of being a Seed Guardian meant I got to try it two years before it appeared in the catalogue, and I've already written a detailed review. There hasn't been much point in me promoting it until now because it wasn't available until this year, and I couldn't offer it in any personal seed swaps because the stock I have belongs to the Heritage Seed Library and all the seed I produced went back to them.

If you chose this variety then you are in for a treat. I rarely, if ever, proclaim anything to be the "best ever" or single any one thing out as my ultimate favourite, because there are so many varieties that have merits in different areas, and diversity is in itself a blessing. But this is the exception - Major Cook's Bean is the best bean I've ever grown, and I fell completely in love with it. It is the bean that has everything.

Genuine multipurpose beans are a rarity. In most cases, there is a trade off between pod quality and bean quality, and you have to decide which you prefer when you choose a variety. Major Cook's Bean is an exception. It has the most exquisitely fat succulent pods with a gourmet flavour and absolutely no trace of fibre whatsoever, so the pods stay sweet and edible even when they're fairly mature. At the same time (even on the same plant) you can harvest mature beans which also have a gourmet flavour and a silky texture and which don't break up when you cook them.

The pods are quite curious looking as they have a strong curved shape and are mottled with purple-maroon. To start with the pods are flat and the mottling is quite blue. As they mature they become spectacularly knobbly, and the colour changes to a rich burgundy maroon. What is unusual is that the pods are still delicious after they've gone knobbly. The knobbles are caused by the complete absence of fibre inside, so the pods shrink around the shapes of the beans. The pods are also incredibly thick-walled and juicy, which adds to the knobbly effect even more. They have a strong flavour, but it's sweet and rich and delicious, and the texture is smooth and succulent - and as if that wasn't enough, they are absolutely stringless! Instead of going fibrous when left to mature completely, the inside of the pod develops a soft white layer of fluff, like you get in broad beans, and the outer colour turns almost solid dark maroon.

Like all red/blue/purple streaked pods, the colour is not retained on cooking because the pigment (anthocyanin) is water-soluble. It does turn the cooking water a lovely deep blue-green!

If you eat the whole beans rather than the pods, you are in for another treat. They will stay intact in a casserole and the texture is buttery and silky, and the flavour rich and sweet.

Fresh shelled beans. With the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn't harvest them this young. It's a waste of the good pods. The beans are at their best when fully mature and will eventually dry down to a creamy white with maroon speckles.

As a garden plant, Major Cook's Bean is not the most elegant but it more than makes up for it with its vigour. In my garden it has been completely untroubled by any pests, and although quite a few snails took up residence in its voluptuous foliage they didn't seem to do it any damage. The yields were stupendous. Even without regular picking (since I was growing it for seed I only picked a very few pods before maturity) it produced a totally mad number of pods and kept on going well into the autumn. The leaves are very large, bright green and coarse, and feel rough to the touch. They have large stipules and are prone to composites with four or five leaf lobes instead of the usual three. The flowers are mauve and quite pretty. When the pods are produced and the plants are covered with their burgundy-streaked crescents, they look much more attractive.

The catalogue description gives a little of the bean's history. It was donated to the Heritage Seed Library by Mr Luxton, who got them from his father in 1960. Mr Luxton senior had worked for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and was given the bean by a colleague, Major Cook. The catalogue suggests this happened in the 1920s but this has now been corrected - it was actually the 1950s.

In my original review I thanked Major Cook "whoever he may be" for his discernment in selecting this bean and preserving it for the future. Well I now know a bit more about who he was. I was recently contacted by his son Phil, who told me this:

"Major Cook was my father. Trained at Kew, London, where he was a Student in 1939. His first job was to train people to grow their own food as part of the war effort. Then he joined up in the Army in 1940, to be sent to various Arab nations on various missions for 5 years.

By 1945 he was a Major. He was tasked by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission with building the Cemeteries in Normandy, France, after the landings, and later to assist in rebuilding the 1st world war cemeteries in France.

Living in Albert, Somme, where Mr Harold “Lucky” Luxton was his right hand man. Also where I and my sister also grew up, from 1952 until 1970. We remember Mr. “Lucky” well.

The bean was probably much older however and could have come from Major H.V.Vokes, who was the first Horticultural Officer for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1920. (He was an uncle of Major Cook). The bean may even be older, in that Major Cook’s grandfather was also an experimental horticulturalist, he was Alderman F. Vokes, Sheriff of Southampton, UK, winner of over 1100 cups/awards for horticulture and there is a flower park named after him near the docks in Southampton."

Major Cook's Bean may originally have been developed by his grandfather, Alderman Vokes

I was intrigued to learn that Major Cook had lived in Albert on the Somme, because it's a place with a very special significance to me. I went there in 1996 during a pilgrimage to the battlefields, originally on the trail of Wilfred Owen who is among my very favourite poets, but it led on to other things. After visiting Albert I had some very strange and powerful dreams, and when I got home it all splurged out in the form of a play set in the WW1 trenches. The play got picked up by a professional theatre producer and premièred at the Grace Theatre in Battersea, London, in 1998. That's my little claim to fame - and for a while it looked like I had a literary career in front of me. Three years later I came out with a novel also set in WW1, with large parts of it set in Albert, but by that time my agent had sodded off (as agents do) and I wasn't able to place it anywhere. But that's a whinge for another day.

What's even more curious is that Phil's message arrived at the very same time I was scanning my Somme slides, as part of an ongoing effort to digitise my archive of film photographs taken during the 20 years before I went digital. I was literally right in the middle of sorting out the Albert pictures.

Albert became an iconic town during the first world war. It was an important strategic base and control centre for British troops, and consequently became a target for heavy bombardment. What was ironic was the town's motto Vis Mea Ferrum - my strength is in iron - adopted during the heyday of its local iron foundry, and which had something of a hollow ring to it by 1916 when heavy iron artillery shells had pounded most of the town to rubble. The basilica in the market square was topped by a gilded statue of the virgin holding the infant Jesus, his arms outstretched, high above her head. In early 1915 the tower was struck by a shell and the golden virgin lurched over, but remained attached to a tangle of metal which kept her suspended over the town square as if she was on a clockspring. She looked as if she was trying to hurl herself and the baby Jesus into the rubble below. Or blessing the chaos, depending how you look at it. It was a deeply striking image which was visible for miles around, and a superstition soon arose that whichever side shot her down would lose the war. Consequently she stayed up - despite more than three years of relentless bombardment in which the rest of the basilica was pulverised. The superstition turned out to be unfounded: it was the British artillery who finally shot her down in 1918 when Albert was briefly taken over by the Germans and there was concern that the tower would be used as an observation post. The statue was never found.

After the war the town was rebuilt, and the basilica reconstructed with a new (upright) madonna. Even now it's not hard to find the lingering scars … pockmarked bricks on the lower walls of buildings everywhere you look.

The town of Albert, Somme, where Major Cook was based. I took this photo while I was touring the battlefields in 1996. It shows a commemorative mural of the skydiving madonna, and the rebuilt basilica with the new statue on the top.

This first world war postcard shows what the basilica and golden virgin looked like in 1915, after a year of bombardment. You can imagine what state it was in by the end of the war.

During his time in Albert after WW2, Major Cook was superintendant of all the CWGC cemeteries in the Somme area. He gardened on a bombed out factory floor and operated a no-dig system (with compost and chicken/rabbit manure) which kept him self-sufficient in vegetables. He was an accomplished horticulturalist who collected and experimented widely, keeping a careful note of where each plant had come from. Another of his credits is the discovery of the Golden Leylandii, which he found growing in one of the cemeteries as a result of a natural hybrid. He promoted the use of evergreens in the CWGC cemeteries after the wipeout from Dutch Elm Disease.

As for Mr "Lucky" Luxton, whose family maintained the bean for the next 50 years and donated it to the Heritage Seed Library, he was a veteran of WW1 and spent most of his life with two bullets lodged in his chest. He'd survived a pelting of machine-gun fire which had hit him in the chest four times. Two of the bullets were removed but the other two were too close to his heart and had to stay there.

One of the cemeteries formerly cared for by Major Cook and Mr Luxton, photographed in 1996. The CWGC cemeteries are laid out as gardens, with immaculately maintained flower borders along the front of the graves. This is Dantzig Alley cemetery near Mametz, a few miles from Albert. Behind the wall are cornfields which were once the battlefields of the Somme.

My thanks to Phil for making the effort to get in touch and tell me about his father's work.

No I haven't given up

2010-03-26T11:51:00.000Z

OSU Blue Fruit tomato. Verily 'tis a black fruit, but red in the middle.

Last year I had to leave most of my garden fallow and take a year off. It was really a case of too many things happening at once - mostly good things, but nevertheless I got left behind with my workload until it was no longer possible to catch up. So I just focused on getting the pea trials done and a couple of the more important breeding projects, and the rest of my gardening year got shelved. There was no time to write up stuff for the blog - I only just managed to keep on top of the data collection for the trials and experiments. All the non-essential gardening went on hold, and most of the garden was left unplanted, seeds left unsown. Because I was finding it so difficult to do any gardening of my own, I dropped out of the online community … because I found it a bit depressing to see all the goodness I was missing out on. So I apologise if you have been used to seeing my comments on your blogs and have not heard from me for a while.

So what have I been doing instead? Well the main thing I was doing was recording and releasing my second album, Seven Star Green. Which has just had a spectacularly glowing review in the prestigious fROOTS magazine. I should explain that we release our music on our own label, which means we have to do all the promotional work ourselves - which is a grim, tedious, time-consuming and often demoralising slog! It's really because of this that I didn't find the time to commit to the garden in 2009. Daniel and I also launched an additional music project, Alchymical Muse, which is slightly more arty and uses our voices in combination - not just in English but in Gaelic, Occitan, Langue d'Oïl (medieval French) and even our own made up languages. (We just enjoy making things difficult for ourselves.) We're working towards a debut album release for that but it's a little way off yet.

Among the things I was able to grow were four or five varieties of tomatoes, including the amazing coal-black variety OSU Blue Fruit, shown above, which is still under development at Oregon State University in the US. I also conducted a trial planting of around 30 varieties of pea, which involved a lot of note-taking and photographing. The Luna Trick pea project was a huge success - in fact I got twice as much out of it as I'd hoped for - and will be the subject of its own post in the near future. Less easy was the red-podded pea project. A growout of the seed from the original plant yielded some wonderful beauty of colour but alas, none with edible pods. Which leads me to conclude that it doesn't have the necessary genes, and if I'm going to make any progress with it I will have to try a different tack. That will have to include crossing it with something else to introduce the two recessive genes needed for edible pods, and going back to the previous F2 generation to see if there are any other red phenotypes with a more promising genepool. Another setback was an invasion of seed-eating mice who depleted my available seedstock quite drastically. Again, I will write up more about this project when I have time. But here's a piccy from the 2009 crop.

Red-podded peas: F3 plant in flower. It has the most beautiful buds of any pea I've seen.

I've not been able to take part in seed swaps this year, for two reasons. Firstly my seed stocks are very depleted, and much of what I have got is older seed, which will have to be germination-tested before I can send it to anybody. Secondly, I already have a backlog of seeds which people have sent to me in previous years, and I've already got more than I can realistically hope to grow with the time and space I have available. Every year my breeding projects take up more and more space, as well as the increasing number of growouts I need to do with varieties I've already collected in order to maintain them. So the traditional seed swap model is not practical for me any more - it's not that I don't want the seeds people have to offer me, I simply have nowhere left to grow them! I guess the solution is to set up a system where people who want seeds from me can just pay for the postage rather than sending seeds in return. I can probably do that with a PayPal button but I haven't had time to do it yet.

You may notice that the blog has a new design. Well, 'design' may be too strong a word because Blogger has a pretty rubbish range of templates to choose from compared to the likes of Wordpress. My main www.daughterofthesoil.com site was designed from scratch in Dreamweaver, which gave me a lot more control but it's also a lot more work to do updates, so sticking with one of the Blogger templates is the only viable option for the blog. The main thing that bothered me about the previous design was the black background and the white text. I originally chose that layout to showcase my photographs, because there's no doubt in my mind that most photographs look their best against a black background. But the opposite is true of text - it can be quite wearing on the eyes to read white text on a black background. And much as I like to show off my photography, the legibility of the text is more important. I'd been thinking about changing it for a long time, but it didn't look too bad on my computer so I didn't worry too much about it. But then just before Christmas my trusty old G5 finally popped its chips and I had to replace it. Now equipped with a shiny new iMac (whooo) I went to have a look at my blog and uuuurrrrgh! Websites always look different on different screens and with different browsers, but I was astonished how drastically different the blog looked on the iMac compared with my old computer. The font was much heavier and it made the column width appear narrower - just cramped and hard to read. So, now we have a white background for better legibility, and a flexible column width which I hope will enable it to adapt to different screen sizes without going weird. The removal of the column width restriction also enables me to post slightly larger pictures, and hopefully that'll make up for the loss of the black background.

One of the thirty or so rare peas I trialled in 2009

I'm experimenting with hosting my images on Flickr instead of uploading them direct to Blogger. I like Flickr, it has a much better interface than the cackhanded Blogger uploader and it displays images better. Maybe only a nerd like me would notice the difference, but still. I have a whole load of other stuff on there too, from 18th century gravestones to pavement furniture (yeah I do have some weird hobbies) so there's plenty to look at.

I must also take this opportunity to pay tribute to Val McMurray, a very wonderful lady devoted to the cause of promoting endangered vegetable varieties, who sadly had to relinquish her battle against cancer earlier this week. Founder of a seedbank in Canada with her husband Dan, the energy with which Val collected, trialled, preserved and distributed seeds - especially tomatoes - was absolutely remarkable, not to mention her kindness and generosity in supporting other gardeners with advice and encouragement. She was a ray of light and an inspiration, and will be deeply missed, although her spirit thrives in gardens all over the world - in 24 countries - where she sent her seeds.

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.