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?