July miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Here's another tomato curiosity: variegated Green Zebra.


Variegated leaves on a Green Zebra tomato.

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

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




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


Somme poppy, with a partial black cross.

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


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

And finally, a whinge.

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

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


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

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.

Purple GM tomatoes? Yeah right

I don't exactly make a secret of my opposition to genetically modified foods, so you wouldn't expect me to be impressed by a piece in today's Guardian trumpeting the wonders of a new GM tomato. But actually I was bloody boiling mad after reading the piece. Not because of the GM tomato itself (nobody is trying to force me to eat it) but because the report is a gross and cynical misrepresentation.

"Tomatoes that have been genetically modified to be rich in antioxidants can give protection against cancer, a team of British scientists has found.

Researchers at the John Innes Centre in Norwich created the crop of purple tomatoes by altering them with genes from snapdragon flowers. In tests, mice that were prone to cancer lived almost a third longer if their diet was supplemented by the modified tomatoes.

The findings, which appear in the journal Nature Biotechnology, pave the way for a new generation of "functional foods" that could potentially offer protection against serious diseases.

Derek Burke, former chair of the UK's regulatory committee on GM, said: "This is a truly positive outcome from genetic modification of plants, and a real help to people wanting to improve their diets." "

It's not that the health claims being made here are untrue. Purple fruits and veg are rich in anthocyanin which is already known to have health benefits and may indeed be useful in fighting cancer, which is why most of my pea-breeding projects focus on producing purple peas. These findings are not new, and I don't dispute them.

The suggestion, however, that this is a wonderful new breakthrough only made possible by genetic engineering is complete and utter bollocks.

To the general public who are used to seeing only red tomatoes in the shops, the idea of a purple tomato may seem quite novel (and for sure they have nice pictures of it and it looks very pretty). But for those who browse heirloom seedlists they're not exactly new. I seem to recall seeing a packet of exquisitely purple toms from the SSE floating around in Patrick's box at the Oxford seed swap. Admittedly I haven't seen any with the intensity of purple shown in the GM ones, but the point is that if tomatoes can naturally produce anthocyanin then they can be selectively bred to produce larger amounts of it. No gene splicing from the flower borders required.

So I really have to ask ... what the hell is the point? Normal red tomatoes are naturally rich in lycopene which is another nutritional wonder-pigment. Orange tomatoes are generally rich in beta-carotene which makes Vitamin A. You are already doing plenty of good to your health if you eat red and orange tomatoes.

More or less any fruit or veg with purple colouring is already packed with anthocyanin. Blackberries, blueberries, blackcurrants, jostaberries. Red cabbage. Aubergines (egg plants). Cherries. Purple sprouting broccoli. Red wine.

Which begs the question, why go to all that trouble to splice anthocyanin into tomatoes? It adds nothing to western diets. It uses an expensive patented technology which the consumer will ultimately have to pay for. And it's being presented to the public in a cynical haze of hype and spin.

Whatever the motivations of the team who developed this tomato, who may have had good reasons, I am disgusted with the way the report is being carried in the media. It looks to all intents and purposes like a propaganda campaign on behalf of the industry. GM technology getting the credit for something that nature is producing perfectly well by herself. A cynical attempt to sell the idea of GM foods to the general public on the basis that most people don't know much about the science of plant pigments and won't realise it's a marketing wheeze.

I find it quite scary that the former chair of the UK's regulatory committee on GM is trumpeting this tomato as a nutritional advance. I wonder what planet these people are on and whether they read anything other than Monsanto brochures.

Want to get the benefit of this amazing cancer-eradicating anthocyanin stuff? Then take my advice. Eat more blueberries.

EDIT: Here we go, it has already been done. Many thanks to Graham for pointing me to this excellent discussion about a purple-blue tomato bred by Oregon State University using conventional methods. It has an exceptionally high anthocyanin content (as well as the usual carotenoids) and is derived from crosses with wild tomato species. All in the public domain and being freely shared among breeders.

Contaminated manure alert

Potato haulms showing typical symptoms of aminopyralid poisoning. Growth is stunted and the edges of the leaves curl upwards in a strange spoon-like pattern. Photo © Green Lane Allotments.

If you're not yet acquainted with the news that gardens and allotments across Britain are being contaminated with a toxic herbicide residue, you can read the full story in today's Observer. There's also a very detailed article (with more pictures of contaminated plants) from some of the growers affected at Green Lane Allotments, who kindly provided the photo.

The gist of it is this. Gardeners have been finding their plants growing a distorted mess of curled up leaves with an almost fernlike appearance. The leaves curl upward tightly in a spoon shape, and the plants are stunted and don't grow properly. The curled leaves get worse near the top of the plant. It's known to affect tomatoes, potatoes, peas, beans, carrots and salad vegetables, but possibly not courgettes. Fruits and tubers either don't form at all or are distorted and sometimes rotten. The symptoms are those of hormone weedkiller poisoning, and it's showing up in organic gardens.

The poisoning has been traced to manure, which most of us use abundantly on our gardens. Specifically to manure evacuated from the backsides of animals fed on hay or silage made from grass which had been sprayed with aminopyralid, a hormone herbicide made by Dow AgroScience.

Thus the buck stops with Dow AgroScience, but I think we can expect them to squirm every which way to avoid being held accountable. They'll most certainly try to blame it on the farmers. There is a reason it's called AggroScience.

Aminopyralid is used on grassland to kill off meadow weeds. It's a new product, introduced in the UK in 2006 and is not licensed for use on food crops. Treated grass is fed to livestock, and the toxin stays in the grass matter as it passes through the animals' system and lingers in the manure even after lengthy periods of stacking. Then the following season gardeners spread it on their plots. As the manure breaks down in the soil the aminopyralid is released and poisons the crops. Nobody (not even Dow) knows whether the poisoned crops are safe to eat or not, because the stuff has never been tested on food crops.

I certainly add my voice to those calling for an immediate withdrawal of aminopyralid products and for some chain of accountability.

If you think you've got aminopyralid poisoning in your garden, I suggest you get in touch with one of the campaign groups like the one at Green Lane Allotments or refer to their blogs for the latest advice on how to deal with it. The RHS also has an information page about it. There may be some chance of making Dow face up to their responsibilities if confronted with enough evidence from enough people.

If you don't yet have a problem, I suggest being extremely careful about sourcing manure, including bagged compost products that may contain it ... or avoid manure altogether for the moment. If you buy hay to feed to animals whose manure you then spread on the garden, be very cautious even if your hay comes from a trusted supplier. The problem has been reported across the whole of the British Isles but I'm not sure what the situation is in other countries. It's also important not to panic if you see poor growth or distorted leaves in your vegetable plants ... the symptoms of aminopyralid poisoning are very specific. If your plants don't look like the photo above, you haven't got it.

Take up thy seeds and sow

Association Kokopelli is in trouble. And it breaks my heart to see it. Their French website says "ON A PERDU!" in capital letters.

For those of you who don't know Kokopelli, they're a French-based seedsaver organisation who maintain 2500 varieties of rare and endangered vegetables and run several charitable initiatives in developing countries. Their work is vital and indefatiguable. Unfortunately it's also illegal, due to the preposterously backward seed laws in Europe, and this has now resulted in them being clobbered with a €35,000 fine. The gist of it is that Kokopelli were hounded through the courts by a commercial seed company, Baumaux (shame and damnation on them) because their catalogue of thousands of unique heirloom vegetables gave them an "unfair trading advantage". I won't subject you to the language that came spouting out of me when I read that but it's a truly insidious example of what happens when big business gets waaaaaay too much control of our garden seeds and our food chain. And it sounds a danger signal for the future of biodiversity in Europe.

Where else but Association Kokopelli can you get Venus' Nipple tomatoes? Seen here with Speckled Roman, Des Andes, Peacevine, Caro Rich and others.

Now, a few weeks ago I was honoured with this "E for Excellent" award by Jeremy from Agricultural Biodiversity and was too busy to do anything about it at the time. It's just an informal fun thing but I'm very appreciative of the endorsement, not least because Jeremy is the author of a much respected seed saving book and a long-time champion of heritage vegetables, so I consider it a great compliment that he reads my blog at all, let alone considers it worthy of mention. The deal is that I'm supposed to nominate 10 other blogs for Excellence, but as this one has already been doing the rounds for a bit, a great many of my favourite blogs have already been awarded it. So here's what I'm going to do instead. I'm presenting my "E for Excellent" award to one of my greatest gardening heroes. And the hero of the moment for me is Association Kokopelli's Dominique Guillet.

Back in the 1980s, Dominique Guillet was an entrepreneur making products for the Bach Flower Remedy company. What frustrated him though was that there wasn't much point in people taking remedies when the food they were eating was rubbish. So he sold up and spent the money on a plot of land in the Auvergne, where he set about growing organic vegetables and collecting rare and unusual heirloom varieties from all over the planet. Some came from botanical gardens, some from organic growers, and many from individuals who had created and maintained their own varieties. He set up a non-profit organisation called Terre de Semences to produce and sell a huge range of these seeds, enthusiastically taken up by garden centres all over France.

Disaster struck in 1997 in the form of the French Ministry of Agriculture, who started getting heavy-handed over Terre de Semences' distribution of "illegal" seeds. They were faced with an obligation to pay a £45 registration fee for each of their 2000 varieties, or face enforced closure by the French fraud squad. Unavoidably, the organisation ceased trading.

Undeterred, Dominique bounced back with the foundation of Association Kokopelli. In addition to producing and selling organic heirloom seeds, the Association set up numerous charitable projects in countries across Asia, Africa and South America. These include educational foundations to teach local people to produce their own vegetables and also the large-scale distribution of free seed packets to the poor, including 50,000 packets given away in Afghanistan. All the seeds Kokopelli supply are open-pollinated (non-hybrid) varieties so that people can save their own seed from year to year and not be locked into a cycle of debt by big seed corporations.


Dominique's book The Seeds of Kokopelli is my joint-favourite gardening book ever (along with Carol Deppe's book on vegetable breeding). It's a very large chunky 440-page hardback book and contains a descriptive catalogue of 2500 vegetable varieties (the majority of which are available from Association Kokopelli if you want to try them) ... 600 tomatoes, 370 peppers, 200 squash, 130 lettuces, 40 melons, 50 aubergines and a whole load of things I'd never heard of. It has sections of colour plates with the kind of pictures I never tire of drooling over with childlike wonder. There's a historical and nutritional section for each type of veg, and cultivation instructions, including cross-pollination issues, seed saving methods and sometimes instructions for how to create new varieties. For tomatoes, for example, there's a detailed explanation of how different genes create different colour combinations. There is truly no other gardening book like it.

Not only is it one of the most inspiring vegetable gardening books ever written but its sale directly supports Association Kokopelli's charity work. In the UK it costs £24 including postage and comes with three free packets of tomato seed! (If you're in the US or Canada, you can get it here.)




I dunno what to do to help Association Kokopelli other than to support them by buying their seeds and encouraging all you heritage veg lovers out there to do the same. They need all the income they can get at the moment, and there's also the unmentionable possibility that these heirloom treasures may become unavailable if Kokopelli can't ride out this storm. They have a UK branch run by Chris Baur, an organic farmer in Kent, and a slightly scaled-down American presence. The online UK catalogue lists over 1000 varieties of wonderful stuff, much of which isn't available anywhere else, and if you buy more than five packets they send freebies. Sometimes the seed packets are in French but it's not difficult to work out what "fruits en forme de banane" are or that you need to plant out tomatoes "après les dernières gelées". Unlike most seed packets they tell you who grew the seed, and when.


The diversity of European seeds is under more threat now than it's ever been (with even more backward legislation on its way in for 2009) so it's never been more important for all of us as individuals to save and maintain non-mainstream varieties. Sow your heirloom seeds with pride and raise two fingers to the EU seed legislation and the big bloated corporations who feed off it.

I don't know what the future holds for Dominique Guillet and his team but he's an absolute inspiration to me and I wish him the very best of fortune and every ounce of strength to fight back.

Commercial F1 hybrids

Rants are like buses. There had to be another one round the corner.

It's been nearly two years since I wrote a post about F1 hybrids, and with the seed-buying season now underway it seems like a good time to revisit it.

If you browse through almost any seed catalogue, even those of ethical and responsible companies like the Organic Gardening Catalogue, you will see a lot of varieties with 'F1' next to their name. Most vegetables, with the exception of peas and beans, are extensively offered as F1 hybrids. There is a good reason for this: they are extremely profitable for the companies who produce and sell them. Sometimes they have benefits for gardeners too. But there's a catch. Well, several actually.

Commercial F1 hybrids are produced by environmentally dubious methods and they often need chemical inputs in order to grow properly. They're expensive, and they force gardeners to keep buying more packets year after year because you can't save true-breeding seed from them. They effectively curb the centuries-old sustainable practice of seed-saving and replace it with a cycle of marketing.

There is nothing wrong with F1 hybrids in themselves. They are the first step in every plant breeding project. When I breed my peas, I make my own F1 hybrids by hand-crossing different varieties and then use the resulting genepool to select potential new varieties. Nature creates F1 hybrids all the time, which is how plants evolve and diversify. It's a natural, wholesome and vital process. The problem lies in the commercial abuse of it.

The basis of F1 hybrids' popularity is hybrid vigour, or heterosis. When two dissimilar varieties are crossed, the result is a hybrid which will often be bigger, brighter, faster-growing or higher-yielding than either of its parents, which makes for a great selling point. But it's a one-hit wonder. Subsequent generations don't have the same vigour or uniformity, and the idea is that you don't save seed from it, you just throw it away and buy some more. This is bad for the plants, bad for the garden and bad for you, but the seed companies make a packet out of it and gain increasing control of what we buy and grow.

In my opinion, hybrid vigour is slightly overrated anyway. There's no doubt that F1 hybrids can produce abundant crops in the right circumstances, but so can natural open-pollinated varieties. You can make more of a difference to a crop's performance by providing decent growing conditions than by buying "superior" seed. I'm not convinced that the benefits of F1 hybrids are worth the costs.

One of the costs is that it's part of a push to industrialise seeds, giving corporations more control of what we grow. Industrialisation also involves taking seed production and plant breeding out of the field and into the laboratory, with patented technology increasingly seen as the path to profit. It's easy for me as an amateur plant breeder to condemn these practices, and I do understand how hard it must be to make a living from natural plant breeding - I don't expect to be financially compensated for the hours of work I put in on mine. But I still don't like the way things are going.

The problem in producing F1 hybrid seed commercially is that it's expensive. Hand-pollinating flowers is not difficult in itself, but it's time-consuming. One solution is to have the work carried out in countries where skilled labour is cheap. That may work with tomatoes, where hand-pollination is easy to do and a single pollination produces a large amount of seed. But it ain't much use with things like carrots, where the flowers are so tiny that hand-pollination is practically impossible. The only way to make F1 hybrids economically viable is to use Cytoplasmic Male Sterility (CMS).

The simplest application of CMS is to find a naturally-occurring gene for male sterility and breed it into your target crop. The plants are unable to produce their own pollen, which makes it easy to pollinate them en masse by exposing them to pollen from a different variety. Instant hybrids, in whatever quantity you want.

However, not all plants have been obliging enough to offer a male sterility gene, so it has to be done forcibly. One way of going about it is to use chemical sprays to prevent pollen being released. Another is the patented technique of protoplast fusion, where leaf tissue cells from different plants are fused (either with electrical current or chemicals) to transfer the male sterility attributes from one species to another. It's a method of forcing the transfer of genetic material between plants which don't naturally cross, although at the moment it only works with related species. The resulting plant tissues are tetraploid (i.e. they have double the normal number of chromosomes) and are propagated in the laboratory. It's not the same thing as GM, because it's a joining together of two complete and separate genomes rather than splicing genes from one genome into another. But some argue that it is a form of genetic engineering and should be labelled and regulated as such.

There are other problems with the production of commercial F1 hybrids. The parent varieties will usually have been inbred to an extremely unhealthy degree (because a lack of genetic variability is crucial to the uniformity of the resulting hybrid). Extreme inbreeding goes against nature and reduces genetic diversity. CMS (even in its "natural" form) has problems ... a male sterility gene used in maize hybrids happens also to convey susceptibility to a form of corn blight, which nobody realised until the blight started wiping out crops on a huge scale. Hybrids made by CMS sometimes produce sterile seed, so you couldn't save and replant it even if you wanted to.

But perhaps the most simple and straightforward objection to F1 hybrids: they are extremely poor value for money. Here's a few examples from the 2008 catalogues I happen to have lying around on my desk (try it for yourself):

Tomato Roma (non-hybrid) £1.99 for 75 seeds = 2.65p each
Tomato Suncherry Premium F1 £2.99 for 6 seeds = 49.83p each

Carrot Yellowstone (non-hybrid) £1.99 for 1500 seeds = 0.13p each
Carrot Purple Haze F1 £1.99 for 300 seeds = 0.66p each

Cauliflower All The Year Round (non-hybrid) £1.25 for 250 seeds = 0.5p each
Cauliflower Concept F1 £2.75 for 30 seeds = 9.16p each

Pepper Oro (non-hybrid) £1.49 for 45 seeds = 3.31p each
Pepper Attris F1 £3.09 for 5 seeds = 61.8p each

You will notice that catalogues disguise the price difference by varying the quantities in the packet. You may not worry too much about the difference between a £1.85 seed packet and a £2.85 one, but when the cheaper one contains 100 seeds and the expensive one 5 seeds, that's a huge differential, and one which they're hoping will slip beneath your radar. It's daylight robbery.

There are three ways you can help reduce the stranglehold big business has on garden seeds:

1. Boycott F1 hybrids, by choosing only non-hybrid varieties when you buy seeds.

2. Dehybridise them yourself: call the seed companies' bluff by saving and sowing seeds from F1 hybrids and selecting the best progeny, to create an open-pollinated version of the hybrid.

3. Make your own F1 hybrids. It's easy and fun!

Tomatoes are particularly suitable for home-made F1 hybrids. Choose any two non-hybrid varieties (the more unalike they are, the more fun the results) and when they are both in flower cross them manually (here's my easy guide to hand-pollination). Even from just two or three hand-crossed fruits, you can save enough seed to provide you with more than you can grow. Given that tomato seeds can easily stay viable for 10 years, if you like your hybrid you can keep sowing the seeds from the original cross for many years without having to redo the cross or save seeds from the hybrids.

There's never been a better time or a better reason to become an amateur plant breeder!

GM contamination? It's all God's fault, apparently

(image copyright Greenpeace International)

I don't like to rant too often on my blog, but there's a new fuss kicking up this weekend about genetically modified crops in the UK, with two lots of bad news being reported in yesterday's Guardian. One, which wasn't actually news if you follow the various GM watching websites, but I'm glad the paper decided to highlight it, concerns the resumption of GM crop trials in the UK after several years of absence. The other, which IS news and pissed me off a great deal, is that the government is now thinking about keeping the locations of GM trials secret to thwart protesters. Opposition to GM in the UK is now so widespread that it's almost inevitable that crops will be trashed unless kept under 24-hour guard. It's quite clear that the public don't want them. So what's the natural response of our economy-worshipping government? Yep, let's raise two fingers to democracy and do it behind people's backs. The all-consuming satanic mills of Economy have to be kept grinding at all costs. Heaven forbid that Britain's businesses should miss out on the chance to milk the GM cash cow.

Around 1997 when genetically modified food first came knocking at Britain's door, I did a lot of reading on the science, the social and the environmental issues. And it horrified me. I became an active campaigner and harangued the supermarkets and politicians (including Michael Meacher, who was then Environment Minister and seemed to be a stubborn pig-headed supporter of GM, so it amazed me that he became a high profile anti-GM campaigner as soon as he left office). Tesco's responded to all my efforts by sending a standard letter about "cautiously welcoming" GM foods. When I wrote to them and complained that they were insulting my intelligence by repeatedly sending me their standard letter and not addressing my concerns they responded with ... you've guessed it. It seemed like nobody was listening. But then suddenly a de facto moratorium was put in place which essentially ended the threat of GM crops in the UK, at least for the foreseeable future. That was an amazing outcome. Consumer power, levered via the supermarkets, thwarted the big biotech firms and the government alike.

I remember in the 1990s how Monsanto (that's right, those nice friendly guys who gave us Agent Orange and PCBs) ran huge PR campaigns in the British press. Full-page colour adverts in magazines with pictures of green fields and luscious strawberries, explaining how they were going to save the developing world by introducing drought-resistant crops to the starving. These claims garnered a lot of sympathy, as world hunger was a high profile issue then (as it is now). But it was just propaganda. Most GM crops were (and still are) developed for herbicide-resistance, enabling farmers to blitz their fields with patented chemical poisons (purchased exclusively from the same companies, of course) and wiping out local wildlife and biodiveristy. Only a tiny proportion have been designed for use in developing countries, and as a patented technology it remains way beyond the financial reach of the people who need feeding. Starvation is largely an issue of poverty, not food shortage. Now of course they're jumping on the climate change bandwagon, trying to convince us that GM is the only way to secure our future food supply in a scary and changing world. More callous propaganda. The rush to push GM crops into developing countries has nothing to do with saving the poor, and everything to do with controlling and consolidating markets.

Then there was the rice contamination incident. Despite huge European consumer resistance to GM and the halting of field trials in the UK, an unauthorised and unapproved GM rice found its way onto the supermarket shelves and dinner plates of 15 European countries in 2006, including Britain. And whose fault was it? Well, it was a great example of how smartly the biotech firms squirm out of taking responsibility for the losses they inflict on others.

It's still unclear what happened, but somehow the American rice industry made a serious boo-boo. An experimental GM rice crop called LL601, which had been trialled for a few years but then withdrawn and never approved for use, found its way into 60% of supposedly non-GM rice grown in the US, which had already been exported all over the world before the contamination was discovered. The result was a disaster for the US rice industry. Orders were cancelled, products were rejected, imports of American rice were halted and farmers were left without income.

The company who developed the GM rice in question, Bayer CropScience, were baffled. The field trials of LL601 had ended in 2001, so how could it have caused such a colossal scale of contamination five years later? Unfortunately there was no way of tracing the original source of the problem because the records of the field trials were lost, destroyed, or inadequately kept in the first place. In a staggering act of corporate irresponsibility, Bayer simply declared the contamination an Act of God.

Nothing to do with us guv, the Lord Almighty cross-pollinated 60% of America's rice crops when we weren't looking.

So who is paying for the estimated $1.2 billion losses incurred by the incident? Why, the farmers of course! They're now pursuing class action lawsuits against Bayer CropScience, but there's no guarantee they will ever be compensated for this huge loss of income over something which was entirely not their fault.

In the UK, the official response to the incident was atrocious. Rice contaminated with LL601 was found on sale in Morrisons and elsewhere. The Food Standards Agency, which is supposed to be there to protect the public but enjoys a cosy relationship with big business, failed to issue a Food Alert, failed to identify the contaminated rice batches to the public, and initially (until threatened with legal action) told food retailers there was no need to withdraw the contaminated products from sale. They later had a thorough ticking off at an independent judicial review, but the damage was already done.

Most of my own objections to GM crops are centred on social, environmental and economic factors. I think GM is being used in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, and will aggravate the already very serious problem of global food supplies being controlled by a small handful of increasingly powerful corporations. But I also have a lot of concerns about the technology itself. The basis for declaring GM food to be safe is the assumption that the crops are "substantially equivalent" to non-GM crops. That's one extremely dubious assumption.

Because of the emphasis on technology and innovation, it would be easy to assume that GM is done by a very precise and high-tech laboratory process. And in a sense it is, in that it's a specialised and expensive process. I'm not going to attempt a thorough explanation ... I'm a folk singer not a molecular biologist. But this is the gist of it. A sequence of genes is constructed in the laboratory, using several components: not just the gene for the desired trait, but also a "promoter" to switch on the gene, and sometimes another one to turn it off again. There will also be a marker gene, which most commonly is a gene for antibiotic resistance (the ethics of releasing antibiotic resistance genes into the environment is a whole topic in itself). This artificially assembled collection of genes, called a construct, then has to be multiplied with the help of a self-replicating bacterium, and then inserted into the host plant's genome. And this is where it gets difficult.

The way industry lobbyists talk about "snipping" a gene from one organism to another makes it sound like it's a precise science. If you had an image of a lab-technician, scalpel and petri-dish in hand, carefully taking a segment of DNA and meticulously slotting it into the host plant, well, it's nothing like that. Nature creates powerful barriers to stop foreign DNA getting in. It's done either with a "gene gun", which bombards the host's cells with charged particles carrying the artificial gene construct, in the hope that through sheer force some of it will bash its way into the cell's DNA. Or, more commonly, it's done by means of bacteria or virus which is used to infect the host plant with the construct DNA. Whichever method is used, it's totally random. There's no way of controlling what part of the host plant's genome the construct is inserted into, or which chromosome it will end up on. It could end up anywhere.

The assumption is that it doesn't really matter where the construct ends up. The technology is based on the principle that every gene is independent and just does one thing, so as long as it's in there somewhere, it will work. This idea goes back to Watson and Crick's dogma on the double helix in the 1950s. However we now know that that's an over-simplistic model. Far from being independent and single-purpose, genes often have more than one function and are often linked in complex and unpredictable ways. Inserting a gene construct randomly into the DNA of another organism can cause some genes to be deleted either side of the insertion site, and may break important linkages and inhibit the expression of other genes. The "gene gun" method often messes up parts of the host's existing DNA and inserts additional damaged fragments of transgenic DNA. GM technology takes no account of the possible effects of any of that.

Of course that doesn't mean that GM plants are inherently harmful. But it does mean they're inherently unpredictable. Random and uncontrolled genetic variability is one of the unresolved problems which GM crops are currently plagued with. For all the marketing hype about new technology and innovation, GM is essentially founded on outdated science.

How is any of this relevant to gardeners? Well, if crop trials and the eventual commercial release of GM varieties goes ahead, as seems likely, the inevitable spectre of contamination of garden vegetables has to be considered. And the government frankly doesn't give a toss. Under proposals drawn up by Defra, all land-owners within a certain distance must be informed when a GM crop is being grown. But that doesn't include domestic crops. Only commercial growers will be forewarned, leaving gardeners and allotment holders at risk of having their sweetcorn and other crops contaminated without their knowledge, and without any means of testing it. That's disgracefully unfair, given that many people choose to grow their own vegetables because they want to take control of what they eat and avoid the contamination associated with industrial food production. There will also be no warning to beekeepers or commercial honey-producers.

It's not too late. Consumer pressure worked a miracle in the late 90s. It can again if enough people believe in it.


There's lots of information about genetic engineering and its many issues on the Greenpeace International website, including some very detailed scientific briefings. UK-specific information can be found at GM Freeze. For a detailed explanation of the science involved in GM, try the Institute of Science in Society, a non-profit organisation which aims to make scientific information freely accessible to the public.

I'll say something for the Grauniad, they do make an effort to highlight and publicise these important issues, and I commend them for that. They have a whole bunch of GM articles and stuff on other related issues, like this FANTASTIC piece by Sue Branford from last week, Homogeneous Horror: A handful of companies now dominate world farming, with profound implications for genetic diversity.

Moan of the day

'Scuse me, but there are times when a girl's gotta have a good rant.

IS IT REALLY NECESSARY TO USE PETROL-DRIVEN POWERTOOLS IN A DOMESTIC GARDEN?

We had beautiful blue skies today and bright sunshine. Joy! Time to relieve the bulging washing basket of its contents which have had to sit there for a couple of weeks because the weather has been too miserable for laundry. (I don't have a tumble-dryer, I like my clothes to smell of fresh air.) I was literally just pegging the first clean garment on the line when there was a loud vrooooom! from the other side of the hedge and I found myself engulfed by a filthy smoggy cloud of poisonous petrol fumes.

Now, fair enough if you have a huge garden, or the occasional heavy-duty job which can't easily be done by hand. But my next door neighbour, still blissfully unaware of the song I wrote about his leafblower, really has a thing about powertools. Talk about using a petrol-driven sledgehammer to crack a nut. Got a dandelion coming up? Vroooom, whip its head off with a motorised trimmer. Is that a twig sticking out of the hedge there? Eeeeeeeooooooww, shred the living daylights out of it with a power-saw. Couple of leaves just fell on the patio? Brrrrrrrrrrr, chase them off with a turbo-charged blower. I guess these gadgets make him feel masculine and empowered. But they also stink and make a horrible racket.

Maybe I'm just grumpy today because I didn't get enough sleep. Last night while I was getting ready for bed I dropped a pair of underpants on the cat, and she just sat there like nothing had happened. And I laughed so much I set my asthma off.

Meanwhile, t'other cat (the ginger peril) has taken to harvesting his own beetroot and chasing them along the garden path.

Hope springs eternal. When you're a potato.

Rather unexpectedly for this time of year, I found a baby potato haulm showing its face above ground. It probably wasn't expecting to find itself in England in January, but there it is. It must be from a previous crop, although with its rosy foliage it looks like Red Duke of York which I planted in this spot last year, way too early, and which never showed itself above ground. If so, it must have sat dormant for the whole of last season and now suddenly decided to go for it.

The lost gardens

Photographed in the garden today, a glass lantern with one of last year's leaves still stuck to it.

I try to minimise the amount of ranting I do on my blog, but every now and then I have to allow my bleeding-heart pinko leftie idealism to burst out. So here goes.

Garden Organic (or the HDRA as I've always known it) is concerned at the moment about the loss of domestic garden space in the UK because of the way the planning rules are currently defined. Because gardens are technically regarded as brownfield sites it's very easy to get planning permission to "redevelop" them with housing. And don't I bloody know it – this practice is rife in Cheltenham. It's quite a green and leafy town and a lot of older houses here were originally built with good sized gardens, and what developers have been doing is either building extra infill housing in the gardens or, worse still, demolishing the original house and building a whole cluster of new ones on the site, destroying the gardens and endowing the new houses with barely enough green space to air a handkerchief.

Yeah yeah, it's good for the economy, blah blah, and it's partly NIMBYism on my part because I don't like my beautiful historic home-town being spoiled by people who are just out to make money and who don't have to live with their own ugly contributions to the urban landscape. But it's happening on a much more insidious local-scale level too, which is nothing to do with the planning laws and is entirely down to people's attitudes and priorities.

I live in a street where all the houses have good sized front gardens and driveways big enough for one or two cars. A sizeable proportion of residents are elderly people who constantly amaze me by keeping their gardens so lovely. What happens when the elderly people pass on to other places in this world or the next is that the houses are bought by people who watch Channel 4 property development programmes ... not to live in but to rip out all the original features and chuck them in a skip, "add value" by building out-of-proportion extensions, and raze the front garden with a JCB and replace it with gravel so that the people they flog it on to at a vast profit can park their Jeeps on it.

I'm feeling a bit sore about this at the moment because there was another one only this week, a little way along the road. A developer has done up a house and put it on the market, and one afternoon along came the JCB and the dumper truck, and erased, in the space of two hours, the large mature front garden full of attractive plants that had been nurtured and tended for 70 years. By the end of the afternoon there was a nice flat expanse of gravel in its place, and the SOLD board went up within days.

I completely understand why a lot of people don't want the hassle of caring for a garden when they're working full time and that they'd rather use the space for off-road parking, which is a godsend to multiple-car households and certainly in short supply. So it's an obvious thing for both developers and residents to want to do. But the number of front gardens left in our street is dwindling very fast in favour of a boring gravelled sterility (and more cars) and it's a damned shame I say.

It may be adding value to all the properties as the street goes upmarket, but it will mean an impoverished environment for all of us in the long run.