Red-podded peas: the 'Roma' mangetout

Creating red-podded peas is quite easy. Pretty much any cross between a yellow-podded and a purple-podded pea should do it. But the somewhat more elusive element is the flavour.

These are my Roma peas, which have been a long time in the making. They are a cross between Golden Sweet, a yellow-podded heritage pea which is still available commercially, and Carruthers' Purple Podded, a rare heirloom from Northern Ireland which I obtained from the Heritage Seed Library many years ago (and no longer have).

The original red-podded result from that cross was stunning and a complete surprise, but it also had some flaws. It was a normal shelling-type pea, like its dad. So I got to enjoy the beauty of the pods in the garden but they had to be grown to full maturity and then the peas shelled out (discarding the beautiful pods) and used like normal peas. Except that they were pretty starchy and bland, which kind of defeated the point. I spent many years trying to select slightly sweeter variants from that original line, but to no avail.

It would make much more sense to breed a mangetout or snap pea with red pods, so that you could actually eat the whole pods and enjoy their beauty on the plate instead of chucking them in the compost. I spent some years making crosses of my original red-podder to various yellow mangetouts from my own breeding projects (which were themselves derived from Golden Sweet). But again the results weren't to my liking. They looked lovely, but the pods always had a soapy bitterness to them. This to me is no good. It would make the variety a novelty, and nothing more. Something you might grow in the garden once as a curiosity and then not bother with again because it didn't taste good enough. We've all grown veg that looks stunning in the garden but is meh on the dinnerplate, and that's not a hall of shame I want to add to.

Then, a breakthrough. In 2019 I grew out some purple-podded mangetout peas that were from exactly the same original cross, with the same genetics, but which had evolved in a different direction. These peas, which I named Barcarolle, were very much purple, and they were also very handsome with a lovely sweet and rich flavour. None of the bitter or soapy flavours that afflicted their red-podded cousins. Well, among this particular batch were a few which were not true to the Barcarolle type. They had red pods. This wasn't entirely surprising as they were from the same original cross and there was always the possibility that they had the recessive gene lurking in their genepool which would express red pods in a small minority of offspring. I tasted a couple of sample pods and was thrilled to find that they had a delicious sweet flavour. So my job then was to save as many seeds from them as possible and then grow out a whole batch of them, hoping the gorgeous flavour would persist.

And here they are. Named Roma, after my dearly loved and much missed mum. Once again I'm growing them primarily for seed, so I've only tasted a few samples. But they were absolutely bloody delicious. I still don't want to get too far ahead of myself and declare that I've found the holy grail I've been seeking all this time, but I am now very very optimistic.

You can read about the development of this project in many previous posts on this blog. But for now I'm just going to bombard you with beautiful pictures. I also made a short video in the garden last night, which I hope will help to illustrate how lovely these are. They have been an absolute joy to me all through their creation (yes, even the frustrating bits) and it feels like the best bit is only just beginning.

Pink flowered pea update – the F3 generation

The climate in the UK is bonkers at the moment. Within the last fortnight we had a frost which had me scrabbling to protect all my tender plants. Now we have a record-breaking heatwave, with temperatures well over 30° … extreme and abnormal for May. Aside from being an alarming sign of how the climate emergency is accelerating, for my pink-flowered pea project it couldn't have come at a worse time.

Peas are a cool season crop. They can't deal with intense heat from the sun. If temperatures are too high, they struggle to flower and set pods. If they're exposed to full-on hot sun, their delicately watery leaves just dry up and shrivel. Normally the British spring weather is ideal for them, but this year they have been hit by conditions they can't deal with, right at the time they started flowering!

Above is the very first flower from this batch, which opened the day before the heatwave hit.

24 hours later, many of the plants looked like this:

Yes, that is a flowering top full of newly formed buds, dried out and burned to a crisp.

Damage like this is woeful for any gardener trying to get a crop of peas, but when it's a breeding project where the seeds are irreplaceable, it's potentially calamitous. I sowed almost all of the seeds I had available, so if this crop doesn't produce seed then I'm stuffed.

I do still have a couple of spare metres of Thermacrop fabric, so I chucked that over the top of the pea frame to screen a little of the sunlight off the plants. And it seems to be working. Thermacrop is designed to do the opposite of this, keeping plants warm. But in this instance it seems to work for keeping them cool, giving them dappled sunlight rather than an intense blast, and allowing air flow through so the heat doesn't build up underneath. Many plants are already damaged but this is at least stopping it from getting any worse.

The damaged plants are gamely still opening their blossoms where they can, and those which are more severely affected should be able to produce new shoots and have another go. So fingers crossed this is a setback rather than a disaster.

Let's have a recap on this project. It started way back in 2007 when I made a cross between Alderman, my favourite tall white-flowered garden pea with outstanding flavour, and a strange little pink-flowered umbellatum-type pea which came from the Heritage Seed Library under the generic name Salmon Flowered, but which resembles a Swedish heirloom called Rosakrone. Umbellatum or crown peas, once thought to be a different species because they look so different, are the result of a combination of recessive genes which cause fasciation, or stem-thickening, leading to all the flowers and pods being produced together in a clump at the top. Now very rare, they used to be popular in the 17th century before modern pea types superseded them. The aim of this project is to create something with all the garden and culinary qualities of Alderman, but with those beautiful pink blossoms.

For various reasons it took until 2019 for me to grow out the F2 seeds from this project (see this post for the write-up) but it was broadly successful and from 16 plants I got 4 plants with the recessive pink flower trait – a perfect Mendelian ratio, no less. One of them was lost to a weather-related accident, but the other three produced seeds for the F3 generation. And those were what I sowed this year.

Here they are, newly sprouted back in March.

Ignore for now the two rows on the right hand side. These are growing alongside the others but are from a separate project, a cross between Sugar Snap and Salmon Flowered which are still at the F2 stage and will be covered in a separate post. The four rows on the left are what we're talking about here. 

The first two rows are seeds from a plant numbered ASF 06, which was the best of the F2 plants in 2019. This plant produced seeds with a lot of diversity, including some which were wrinkled and some which were smoother with dimples. I've sowed one row of each, marked with W for wrinkled and D for dimpled. I thought it would be interesting to sow these separately, since wrinkled seeds are associated with higher sugar content and sweeter flavour. 16 seeds altogether from this parent plant, of which 15 germinated. Next we have 8 seeds from plant ASF 03, and 8 from ASF 15. These all germinated, so that gives me a total of 31 plants for my F3 generation. I'm pretty chuffed that most of them did germinate, given that the seeds had been left in a box for seven years.

Fast forward two months, and all of the above plants are starting to flower. There are some which are earlier than others, but there's only really a few days between them, so the flowering times are showing more uniformity than they did at the F2 stage.

Now, this project potentially has two recessive traits which I would like to get rid of. One is the umbellatum trait which has all the flowers clustering in a single bunch. I really don't want this, because it reduces yield and makes the plants top heavy and liable to fall over. The other is the gene which causes white flowers. As regular readers will know, there isn't a gene for white flowers as such, there's simply a gene which switches off all pigment production in the plant, of which white flowers are the consequence. This too I need to eliminate, because the whole point is to have pink flowers. If I'd been really lucky, I might have found one or more of these breeding lines not carrying either of the unwanted recessives. Sadly, both traits are indeed showing up in the F3 crop. Arse.

The umbellatum clump-top trait is complicated, and to the best of my knowledge involves three recessive genes. I don't know much about how they work, or whether all three of them are needed in order for the umbellatum trait to be expressed. Maybe they will only have two and will express partially, or maybe all three genes are lurking in the genome and will randomly appear in subsequent generations on the occasions when all three align. That scenario would make the umbellatum types relatively rare, but make it hard to eliminate them altogether. In this F3 crop only one plant is expressing it, and that's one of the offspring from ASF 03.

It is very pretty, and the flowers are pink, but this one unfortunately won't be contributing further to the Pink Flower project, because we don't want any more of these recessive genes thank you very much.

The white flower gene is much more straightforward. One recessive gene, with one simple function. Easy to spot and easy to weed out. Except that in the F3 plants so far, it's not inheriting in quite the way I expected.

It's still early days and not everything is in flower yet, but the presence or absence of a pink splodge in the leaf axils is a reliable indication of flower colour, so I'm able to predict what the colours will be. All three of the F3 breeding lines are producing some white flowers, so obviously all three of them have this unwanted recessive. Given the simplicity of the gene and past experience of working with it, I would expect an average of one in four of these plants to have white flowers. But the ratios are looking like this.

ASF 06 – 7 pinks and 8 whites

ASF 03 – 6 pinks and 2 whites

ASF 15 – 4 pinks and 4 whites

Hmm. We have a normal Mendelian ratio on ASF 03, but the others are looking more 50/50 pinks and whites.

A couple of caveats. One is that they aren't all in flower yet, and it's always possible that I've misidentified the colours until I actually see them bloom. The other is that this is a very small sample size and they won't necessarily make the expected ratios in such a small quantity of plants. This is probably the most likely explanation, i.e. it's nothing more than luck of the draw that I've ended up with fewer pinks than anticipated.

It's a minor frustration inherent in plant breeding. But on the plus side, I get to eat the white ones. Nom nom.

As I said, it's early days with this crop, and I now have the fun (but hard work) bit to look forward to: making notes and observations on every individual plant as they develop. I am pleased to say that nearly all the plants are showing good vigour and have grown to 5 or 6ft tall. This might be hybrid vigour from the cross of two very diverse original parents, or it might just be that they've all inherited the gene for tallness, which is dominant.

The plant which is looking to be the most interesting so far is ASF 06 / 01. Very vigorous and strong, it has lovely big pink splodges in the leaf axils and is also producing very developed sideshoots. It's too early to say whether the sideshoots will develop fully and actually produce flowers and pods, which is a relatively rare thing in peas, but they do look as though they might. This plant is also at the moment showing a very intriguing flower colour. Instead of the two-tone pink which others have, this one has a more uniform apricot pink which I've never seen before. I was quite excited when it first appeared, but knowing how environmental factors can impact the pigments in pea flowers, it may well just be a byproduct of the heat damage. As you can see in the photos below, this plant did suffer a bit while the buds were forming and so this colour may not be representative!

On the other hand, if the flowers do stay this colour I will be well chuffed! I've never seen this apricot shade in peas before, and it's lovely.

Finally, I built a decent pea frame

Look at this magnificent specimen. Well, it's magnificent by my standards. Despite my long term pea passion, this is the first time I've had a purpose-designed pea frame, and I thought my breeding projects probably deserved it by now. It's made from aluminium tubing with jute netting, and it's very sturdy (purchased from Gardening Naturally in Swindon). I even splashed out on some Thermacrop to wrap round it, a type of horticultural fleece which is normally used to keep plants warm but in this instance is for keeping the wind off. Peas aren't too bothered by the cold but they get traumatised by the blustery squally winds which are part and parcel of our spring weather in the UK. The way things are going, it might also come in handy for shading the plants from the full force of the sun.

The new frame (frames, actually, because I bought two) has been brilliant so far. I can fit two whole seedtrays of peas in it because it's so spacious, so it's now planted up with both red podded mangetout peas and pink-flowered peas – two breeding projects in one frame.

Just to give some context, I used to do it like this.

This contraption (from 2009) was made from some of the reams of net curtain which I removed from the windows of my house when I first moved in, plus some bamboo sticks painstakingly lashed together with string. It may look as if Miss Havisham's bloomers blew off the washing line but it was actually extremely effective at doing what it needed to do, which was to give targeted wind protection without losing too much sunlight. So I would absolutely advocate doing it this way if you're on a budget and have a heap of unwanted net curtains available.

But it's labour-intensive to cobble together a shoddy frame like this, and it seldom survives more than a season without needing to be redone. It's too small-scale to hold a lot of plants and sometimes needs emergency reinforcement when their weight gets too much for it. The net curtains work fine but Thermacrop does a better job, because it's got a very open weave which lets the wind move freely through without buffeting the plants. Thermacrop doesn't cost much anyway, so it was well worth the upgrade.

To prepare for the new frame, I dug over a small patch in a sheltered corner where the soil is really good, because I've dumped loads of horse poo on it over the last couple of years. When I say dug, I should explain that my methods have changed a bit in recent times. I now work on the basis of doing as little digging as possible, and I've also discovered a medieval-style field hoe which has been a gamechanger in backache-free tilling. I use it just to very gently cultivate the top couple of inches of soil, leaving the deeper levels untouched. I don't dig with a spade any more unless I really have to. The worms and microbes do a fab job of maintaining the deep soil structure without any need for my intervention.

So here we are with the basic layout. Forty minutes of swearing later, I had this:

The swearing is no reflection on the product itself, which is excellent. It's just that I was putting it together on my own, and it is definitely easier as a two-person job, just because you need someone to hold one end up at the right height while you put it together. I had to resort to propping it up on the back of the bench. You're also supposed to use a mallet to bang the bits together, but I didn't have one, so I had to make do with a metal claw hammer with a sliver of wood under it, which was suboptimal.

And then it was just a case of adding the jute netting, and getting the building inspectors to come and check it out and make sure I'd done a proper job.

The inspectors agreed that yes, this is absolutely the best cat lavatory they've seen in the garden this year.

And in go the peas! 

My Alderman x Salmon Flowered F3 hybrids went in first, and then a couple of weeks later were joined by the red-podded mangetout project, which is now in an F5 and hopefully starting to be properly stabilised (I bloody hope so anyway).

Even though the frame has netting for the peas to climb up, I still put a load of twiggy sticks in there. The main purpose of this is to keep the young plants off the ground, as they tend to flop and that makes them vulnerable to slugs and snails. The twigs hold them up and also give their little tendrils something to grab hold of to help get them started. I put small twigs in among the newly planted plants and then a row of taller sticks down the middle of the bed, which will give them some extra support at a later stage. (It needs to be done now, because it's really hard to add them later without damaging the plants.)

I also added the Thermacrop curtains, which fitted beautifully around the frame and was just long enough to meet in the middle, keeping it all fully enclosed to stop the cats from getting in there.

As you can see, that's going well.

I'm really pleased I invested in these frames though. They are well made and should last years. I've now built the second one (this time with the help of my music partner, Marvin) and that's now been planted up with my F5 purple-podded mangetout peas plus a few satellite projects derived from my red-podded projects. So there's plenty to look forward to.

Cheltenham Green Top – can I rescue this?

Here's one I prepared earlier: a flower spike from the last time I did a seed run with Cheltenham Green Top, in 2006.

High on the list of seeds I wanted to buy this year was my favourite beetroot, Cheltenham Green Top. It feels personally important to me because I live in Cheltenham, and this heritage variety, known to be well over 100 years old, most likely originated in my local area. The soil in much of Cheltenham is light and sandy, offering a great environment for its long, deep-growing, tapered roots, which are shaped more like a blocky carrot than the familiar globular beetroot of the modern day.

I wasn't expecting to have any trouble getting hold of Cheltenham Green Top, because it's been widely available for a long time, and has had a bit of a renaissance too in the last few years with a number of high profile gardening people singing its praises. So it was a bit of a shock to find that its availability on the UK market (at least for the moment) is basically zero.

A few seed companies list it, but all are out of stock. Most don't list it. I drew a blank on big mainstream seed merchants and all the small independent ones I could find. The only places it was available and in stock were a couple of sellers in continental Europe, but thanks to Brexit (no, honestly, don't get me started) it's no longer possible to buy seeds from companies in the EU, nor for our friends in Europe to buy seeds from the UK. I find this desperately sad and it has had a big impact on what is available for us home gardeners to buy. (Especially with potatoes, where the heritage spud market is all but destroyed by trade barriers, but don't get me started on that either.)

I don't know whether the absence of my special beetroot is temporary or permanent. But I do know that this is how vegetable varieties disappear. We take for granted that they're always available until suddenly they're not. Seeds get discontinued without fanfare, or the big companies don't bother maintaining them properly so they lose vigour and reliability until nobody wants to buy them any more. Heritage varieties are almost always open-pollinated, but the big seed merchants make much, much more profit from selling F1 hybrids, so they often don't really care very much if the older varieties fall by the wayside. But once they're gone, their unique characteristics and irreplaceable genes are also lost, to the detriment not only of home gardeners like us but potentially for the future food security of humanity.

What if Cheltenham Green Top beetroot has gone? This may well be a temporary shortage and it will come back in the next year or two, but what if it doesn't? I have been worrying about this quite a lot.

Then a ray of hope. In a half-forgotten cardboard envelope in the corner of my office, I found this.

A new/old UNOPENED packet of Cheltenham Green Top seeds from the late lamented Chase Organics, the company who ran the Organic Gardening Catalogue. These seeds would have been among the last packs produced by Chase and they date from 2016, with a sow-by date of 2018! Eight years out of date. I bought them almost a decade ago and didn't get round to sowing them.

They were still sealed. This boosted my hope that they might still be viable. If it had been a long-ago-ripped-open packet of this vintage then I wouldn't have had much expectation of them germinating. Though I would still have sowed them anyway. You never know until you try, do you?

If I can get these seeds to germinate then I can do a seed run from the resulting plants. 

Saving beetroot seed is not the most straightforward process as it takes 2 years. You have to grow the plants to maturity the first year, store them through the winter, then re-plant them the following year, at which point they turn into tall gnarly monsters and produce stupendous amounts of seed. You don't get to eat much of the crop, which is a bummer. There are additional complications, such as avoiding cross-pollination and ensuring you have enough plants to maintain a diverse genepool. 16 is around the minimum you need, and they have to be good quality, true-to-type specimens.

Chase were an excellent and venerable company founded by a true pioneer of organic horticulture, but sadly they were gobbled up by Suttons in 2018 and the Organic Gardening Catalogue became a bolt-on of Dobies' catalogue. I don't know what its long term future will look like. I've bought some good seeds from Dobies but others have been unmitigated shite, so they're not among my preferred suppliers. Finding an old pack of Chase seeds, which will have been produced to a high standard, is quite a blessing.

But will they grow? We all know that 'sow by' dates are pretty meaningless, and have more to do with regulatory compliance than with the actual life expectancy of the seed. But the other date is suspect too. 'Packeted year ending October 2016' doesn't necessarily mean they were produced in 2016. They might just as easily have been harvested the year before, or even earlier. So at this point they are at least 10 years old.

I've said it before, but ... old seeds are always worth a try. I would use fresh seed given the choice, but when you only have old ones available they have to be worth a pop. Worst case scenario is that you have to recycle the compost.

I opened the pack and sowed a few in some modules. This is the sight that greeted me today. Yesterday there was nothing. And today, here they all are.

I will have to sow quite a few more of these now, to ensure that I have a good selection and can find at least 16 good ones, plus some extras in case of losses. Fortunately there is a generous amount of seed in the packet. I will also have to be prepared to give over a chunk of the garden to them next year to make way for their blazing triffid flowers.

There's still a long way to go before I can be confident of getting seeds from these tiny plants, but it's a good start, isn't it?

Today in the garden ... horse fluff

There isn't that much to look at in the garden in early spring, but I thought I would put up a few pictures to give an idea of what's growing on this year.

Wild birds are always a pleasure to have around and I've got two particularly friendly robins who flit around me while I work, gobbling up any wiggly creatures which I inadvertently expose in the soil. I don't put out food specifically for birds because my garden is ramshackle enough to have lots of natural forage for them, and besides, if I encourage them to congregate too much in one place then my cats think I've set it up as a take-away for their benefit. But I do have a couple of these wire frame feeders which have been hanging around unused for years so I've stuffed them with horse fluff. Hey presto, an instant fluff dispenser which nesting birds can help themselves to.

And they really do like it. I have to top it up regularly, which is fine because both my horses are shedding their winter coats. This is horse body hair, not manes and tails. (I did put out some strands of mane but the birds didn't like it as much ... I think it's too long and thick for them to work with.) This stuff is great, because it's very soft but just oily enough to hold together and repel the rain, which is exactly how it functions as weatherproofing for horses. A few bits of hay in there as well for good measure.

Talking of cats, I made a no-dig potato bed and am waiting for the first spuddy shoots to pop up, and my assistant here is keeping them warm to make them sprout quicker.

And here's t'other one, testing out some new yoga positions.

Growing away in the greenhouse border are a few different types of radishes. These are Zlata, a Polish variety with golden yellow skin. The idea is to grab a quick crop of these before I need the greenhouse border for chillies and tomatoes in a few weeks' time.

And here are the chillies, feeling a bit chilly and growing slowly. They will perk up when the weather does. Pretty much all of these were sown around the same time, in early February in a heated propagator on the windowsill. The radically different sizes are variety differences; some of them are even from different species. The large one top left is Zitava, a sweet paprika-type pepper which is supposed to have an exceptional flavour. The small hairy seedlings are Alberto's Locoto, of the less-commonly-grown species Capsicum pubescens. I only wanted one plant of each variety but I had a policy of sowing two seeds because peppers can be precious luvvies with germination. Some germinated both seeds, some only one, so I got a bit more than I wanted but I will try to fit them in.

Finally, osteospermum plants in the greenhouse waiting to be planted out when the weather gets a bit nicer. I can't take any credit for these, I bought them from a local nursery.

Pea breeding projects are go!

What do we have here? 100% germination from 7-year-old pea seeds, that's what!

These are red-podded mangetout peas which represent my best hope of developing a really good, tasty red podded pea. They're a cross between two heritage varieties, Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded. These are an F5, so they're five generations removed from the original cross I made. Most of them are the offspring of one particular plant which was exceptional, but I also sowed a few from a couple of other plants which were also very good. I'm expecting most of them to have red pods, but there may be a few yellows, because of the possibility of a recessive gene lurking in their genepool which switches off anthocyanin production. If I'm really lucky they might not be carrying this gene, in which case they should all be red. But I can already see, even when they're just a few days old, that a few of the seedlings look completely green, while the majority have a red blush on the stem. The absence of a red blush may be an indicator that they can't produce anthocyanin, the pigment responsible for red/purple/pink colours in peas. If the anthocyanin switch-off gene is in there, then I would expect it to show up in roughly a quarter of the plants – a simple Mendelian ratio. We will see – it will become more apparent as the seedlings grow, and it's likely that I'll be able to deduce the pod colour without having to wait for them to produce pods.

This project has been languishing for a few years as I've struggled through my bereavements, but fortunately I'm able to pick it up where I left off. I sowed 56 peas in this tray (two in each cell) and they all popped up within 4 to 6 days, with no duds. The seeds were from a crop I harvested in 2019, and no I didn't have special facilities to conserve them – as is my wont, they were stored in grip-seal baggies in a cat food box on top of a bookcase.

I'm all for challenging myths in gardening, of which there are so many. The books on my shelf (just below the cat food boxes) claim that pea seeds have an expected lifespan of 1-2 years. Older than that and they won't germinate, or if they do then they'll make weak plants. I know from experience that this is nonsense. In a previous iteration of this breeding project I germinated 9-year-old pea seeds without any problems at all and the plants were vigorous and healthy. There are limits, of course. I recently experimented with trying to germinate 18-year-old tomato seeds, and it didn't work, despite my best efforts with a heatpad and some home-made gibberellic acid. But whatever the received wisdom says, there's always hope, and it's always worth a try.

I'm thrilled with 100% germination, and very excited to see how they develop.

Meanwhile, here's some I prepared earlier.

I had 98% germination from this batch, which were also 7 years old and from the same cat food box. These are from my pink-flowered pea project, Alderman x Salmon-Flowered, which is aiming to produce beautiful tall delicious shelling peas, but with two-tone pink flowers instead of the standard white. If you've read previous posts on this blog about my pea projects, you'll know that white flowers in peas are caused by the gene which switches off anthocyanin production. Almost all modern peas have it (and many heritage varieties do too) but if it wasn't there, peas would naturally produce PURPLE flowers, and have purple colouring in the leaf axils, peas and pods. As all my projects are concerned with making lovely colours, I aim always to eliminate the "anthocyanin off" gene, which is recessive, so the little bugger pops up in later generations where you didn't know it was there. 

The pink flowers in this project are (I believe) the result of a modifier gene which deletes one of the pigments responsible for purple flowers, giving them a paler, pinker hue.

The photo above shows them when they were in the greenhouse waiting to be planted out. Note that I DON'T advocate leaving them quite this long. If allowed to grow much bigger than this, they'll start grabbing each other with their tendrils and then it becomes really difficult to disentangle them without damaging them. However, the weather forced my hand on this occasion. I was about to plant them out when I saw that a blustery storm was forecast a few days away, and peas really don't like blustery windy weather. So I decided that leaving them in the greenhouse for a bit longer was the lesser evil. As it turned out, I was still able to plant them out before they reached the nightmare tangly tendril stage.

Here they are in their new home, and I'll be writing another post about the swanky new pea frame which I've set up for them.

20 years of Daughter of the Soil

 

Well, here we are. As astonishing as it seems, I started my Daughter of the Soil blog 20 years ago today.

It hasn’t been a continuous twenty year endeavour – there have been several lengthy gaps. But it served a valuable purpose back then and it still does now, with a fine collection of notes, photos and observations from my plant breeding and heritage vegetable experiments. The internet has changed a lot in 20 years, and I’m conscious that nobody really reads blogs any more – but that’s OK. If I wanted lots of exposure, I could move over to social media and post bite-size bits of gardening fluff for people to doomscroll through. But I find the likes of Farcebook very stressful to engage with, in ways which make it anathema to what I’m trying to achieve; and anyway, my preference has always been for long-form posts where I can go into a lot more detail. Again, the done thing nowadays for such detailed content would be to monetise it by moving it over to Substack or Patreon and putting all the best stuff behind a paywall. But that would go completely against the spirit in which this blog was founded, and I do still live by those values. It was always my intent to create a freely available resource that other gardeners could learn from and take inspiration from. And so I will keep adding stuff here, where it will remain free and open. I’m not selling anything, I’m not sponsored by anyone, and my opinions and experiences are my own.

There has been a long gap since I made my last post, and that’s because the last few years have been grim. From 2019-2022 our family suffered seven major bereavements over four years, including both my parents, to whom I was very close. Then in 2023 it was the turn of the animals: I lost my horse and two of our three cats. I have been absolutely walloped by all of this grief, and have really just been in survival mode. I did very little gardening during this time other than a few chillies and tomatoes. My breeding projects all went on hold, and brambles encroached on the garden. I’ve only just started to come back to it so there is a lot of work to do and it will be done slowly. We have another cat now and another horse. As a consequence of getting into horse ownership I now have an even earthier life as I do farm work every day (seven days a week, in all weathers) which is an absolute joy.

My original spark for starting this blog was a passion and excitement at discovering heritage vegetables, and how they can be so superior to modern commercial varieties. Looking back over the last 20 years at what has changed in the heritage vegetable scene, it has to be admitted that many things have got worse. Heritage varieties were always a niche interest, but back in 2006 you could at least get them if you bothered to search them out. Now, a lot of stuff is no longer availble to buy anywhere. Most of the damage comes from the shoddy Brexit deal which put prohibitively expensive conditions on trade, making seed imports an impossibility for smaller businesses. Most UK seed companies no longer sell seeds to European customers, and European seed companies can’t send seeds to us any more. So everybody’s choices shrink. The problem seems to be most extreme with potatoes, where apparently the majority of heritage varieties were coming to us from the EU, and now they have gone. Shetland Black, Salad Blue, Highland Burgundy Red – even the popular Pink Fir Apple – none of them were available for me to grow this year. I’m having to grow modern varieties, though I did get hold of a red-fleshed one, a German variety called Heiderot, which will be interesting to try. I’ve also been unable to source any seed of Cheltenham Green Top beetroot, an old favourite which I like to grow because I live in Cheltenham, but I don’t have any fresh seed and this variety is another one which seems to have very rapidly vanished.

Another thing which has got manifestly worse in the last 20 years is the climate. I’d been noticing subtle changes in the garden for years, but the weather is now getting very weird, and consistently so. I notice it even more now that I’m doing farm work, as I see the interconnectedness of the plants, land and wildlife and how it has to adjust every day as things go out of kilter. Right at this time of greatest climate peril, we have at least two mainstream political parties pledging to scrap what little climate action we already have, because they’ve realised there are votes to be won in telling people it’s OK to do what they like and not feel guilty about it. There are few morals left in politics nor any sense of anything having value beyond money. It’s all pretty depressing.

However, me and my fertiliser-supplier would like to send a message that no matter what, it’s essential to keep smiling.

There have been many good developments in the last 20 years, it’s not all doom and gloom. Seed saving collectives and forward-thinking gardeners are still doing the good work. New seed companies have come up to replace those that have closed. There is a much stronger awareness among gardeners generally about the benefits of working in harmony with nature rather than trying to subjugate it. This is a major cultural shift which has a vital impact. Like-minded souls such as Charles Dowding are doing an amazing job of bringing holistic gardening ideas to a wider audience.

There is always hope. Things can and will get better. We all have opportunities to make positive things happen, including in very small ways which actually really matter. As individual gardeners we don’t have the means to fix the climate crisis, but the love we put into soil has its way of radiating out. 

As I said in a post way back when, there is a reason I called myself Daughter of the Soil. I went by a principle that if you look after the soil, the plants will take care of themselves. The last 20 years have reinforced that view for me in every way, not least with my accidental discovery that tomatoes yield better and resist disease better if you don’t fertilise them, and all the implications which rippled out from that. There is far more widespread awareness of the soil’s microbiology these days, and the idea of feeding the soil rather than the plants is no longer the niche minority view it used to be. I still believe passionately in the garden as a living ecosystem.

Seed sowing has begun. Chillies and tomatoes are in. Spuds are sitting in egg-boxes making colourful sprouts. The garden is waiting to wake up.

A round-up of 2019's tomatoes

My tomato crop in 2019 did extremely well, with barely a hint of blight. As it's now tomato planting time again, I thought I would do a summary of the dozen or so varieties I grew. The photo above shows one of my own breeding projects, an F2 from a cross of Banana Legs x Green Tiger.

It's been a few months since I posted anything new and I may continue to be sporadic for a while as this has been a very difficult time. We had three significant bereavements in 2019, the most recent being my mum, who died very suddenly two days after Christmas. Although she had a few health issues which were causing us concern, her death was completely unexpected and my brother and I only had an hour and a half's notice that it was imminent – and neither of us lives close enough to be able to get there in that time, so we weren't able to be with her. My mum was a great appreciator of gardens, although she preferred them tidy and full of beautiful flowers rather than the chaotic organic mess which is my domain. I found an old picture of her digging her mother's garden. I don't know when it was taken – most likely in the 1950s. I do however know exactly where it was taken: my grandmother's new (at the time) council house in Tregelles Close, Highbridge, Somerset. My grandmother grew a lot of her own veg, especially potatoes, and my mum would've been helping her to get her new garden into production. If you look closely you'll see there's a railway line running along the back of the garden, which would've been the Burnham and Evercreech branch line, now long gone.

My mother, Roma, digging the garden at Tregelles Close in Highbridge, Somerset.

On to the tomatoes. A few years ago I had a sudden thought that there might be a connection between the conventional methods used for growing tomatoes and the awful problem of blight which afflicts nearly every UK and European crop with grim inevitability. I got this idea because one year I rediscovered an abandoned tomato crop after months of neglect and they were the best tomatoes I'd ever had – unfed, unpruned, and completely healthy and free of blight. Was it just a coincidence? I wanted to find out. So I've continued to grow tomatoes since then using an alternative regime with minimal pruning and feeding, and so far it looks very promising. I haven't lost a single crop to blight since I've been doing this.

It's too soon to say for sure whether the growing method is what's making all the difference, but it certainly has made me question the standard practices of tomato growing. One factor I suspect might be our obsession with 'tidying' tomato plants by hacking bits off them, when it's in their nature to sprawl everywhere. Pruning – and worse, the picking off of leaves to allow the sun to get to the fruit, which is nothing short of plant abuse – causes them stress which can only weaken their resilience to blight. I pinch out a few sideshoots when the plants are young, but largely allow them to grow to their natural shape and size, and this seems to keep them happy and healthy. A much bigger factor though, I think, is the issue of feeding. I'm working on the hypothesis that the lush growth encouraged by regular feeding makes the plants far more susceptible to blight – as well as encouraging the plants to grow bigger than they need to, which in turn leads to more pruning. Whether you prefer a chemically formulated purpose-made tomato feed or go for something organic, the received wisdom is that you MUST feed tomato plants while they're setting fruit, or they won't produce a good crop. I don't believe that this is true. I think that if you provide them with decent soil in the first place, they are more than capable of producing good yields with minimal or no feeding.

In my current growing method, I prepare the greenhouse border at planting time with a bit of seaweed meal and some chicken manure pellets, and give the odd splosh of seaweed extract or nettle tea while the plants are growing, but they get no feed or special treatment while they're producing and ripening fruit. And while I haven't done any scientific trials to see whether the absence of feeding causes a reduction in yield, I can only say that I haven't noticed anything lacking in that department. I'm still getting more tomatoes than I can eat, which is good enough for me.

Clockwise from biggest to smallest: Costoluto Fiorentino, Salt Spring Sunrise, Darby Striped Pink/Yellow, Grushovka, Bloody Butcher, Tomatito de Jalapa.

I intend to continue the same way with my 2020 crop, which is currently on the windowsill in my music studio. And here are a few notes on what I grew in 2019. It's not a complete list, just a small selection. All the tomatoes shown in this post were grown with NO feeding, other than giving them reasonably decent soil to grow in.

Rose de Berne

Origin: A Swiss heritage variety with large dark pink fruits
Type: Vine
My seed source: Real Seeds
Pros: Outstanding flavour, extremely productive
Cons: I had some minor issues with blossom end rot

This variety makes large and vigorous plants which take up a fair bit of space in the greenhouse, and right from the seedling stage they grow faster and bigger than most other varieties. The yields are pretty damned hefty though, so they more than justify the space they take up. They have large flowers which sometimes form weird composite shapes, and the first few usually fall off without setting fruit – this is nothing to worry about. The tomatoes themselves are pretty large, in fact they were the largest fruits of any variety I grew last year. They make slightly flattened globes of the most beautiful rich dark pink colour, with a smooth and silky skin, while the flesh inside is also deep pink, smooth, chunky and jewel-like. The plants need quite a lot of water, and I obviously didn't get the balance quite right in 2019 because the first three fruits suffered blossom-end rot. However, such was the size of the fruits that even the ones with BER were fine after cutting off the brown bit, leaving a substantial chunk of perfectly useable fruit. They're too good to waste. Despite their size, they are relatively early to ripen and they keep going right through the summer.

The flavour is truly magnificent, and has a rich and complex range of flavours within it, beyond the standard tomatoey flavour. It is fantastic cooked, and tastes sublimely lovely if you slice it roughly on top of some pasta and bake it in the oven, where its deep colour, texture and flavour put it in a league of its own. This is one of the few tomatoes which I love so much I want to grow it every year, and it never disappoints.

Gardeners' Ecstasy

Origin: Bred by Tony Haig
Type: Vine, cherry
My seed source: Real Seeds
Pros: Early, huge yields which keep on coming, gorgeous tangy flavour
Cons: Fruits are a little prone to splitting

I've grown this in the greenhouse and outdoors in the garden, and both did well, but the greenhouse one did significantly better. This variety was the earliest of my 2019 tomatoes to start setting fruit and the fastest to ripen. It ripened earlier than all my 'early' varieties, in fact. The plants were completely trouble free with lots of branching, and not too fussy about water. Cherry-sized round fruits were borne in generous trusses, ripening to an orangey-red, and staying productive over a long season. The greenhouse plant was producing new ripe fruit every day all through August and September, and it went on into the autumn. The fruits are very juicy and thin-skinned, which means they are a little bit prone to splitting, but I don't mind that too much. If you harvest them every day then the ones which have split can be eaten before they deteriorate, so that's fine. The flavour is excellent and very tangy. It's definitely down the more acidic end of the spectrum, which is just how I like it, though if you're not a fan of acidic tomatoes then it might not be for you. It is an excellent variety though, and highly recommended – a good all rounder and definitely one of the most productive varieties I grew last year.

Any way up is fine ...