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.