Pea: Luna Trick

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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."