Seeds too pretty to plant?

Sometimes when you open a packet of seeds you find that the seeds themselves are so gorgeous it almost seems a shame to sow them. Like this Rainbow Inca sweetcorn, which comes in a tantalising mixture of reds, pinks, oranges, yellows, purples and charcoal blacks, not to mention combinations of stripes and streaks of all colours. These seeds did end up buried in compost modules ... but it pained me to do it!

Anyone else got any seeds which are too beautiful to plant?

French beans are often very beautiful. This is an old heritage variety called Coco Bicolour.

And here's dwarf French bean Purple Prince. They look more like gemstones than beans!

New blog: Root Cause

Gratuitous picture of a self-seeded wallflower which is looking very pretty at the moment

In between potting up about 500 seed trays over the last couple of months I've been involved in the launch of a brand new blog. Entitled Root Cause, it's a joint effort between myself and Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots but the idea is for it to become a multi-contributor blog, so if you like the look of it and want to write something for us please get in touch. It's just gone live today with a post about perennial onions and will aim to cover a range of subjects broadly connected with biodiversity, self-sufficiency, heirloom and open-pollinated vegetables, plant breeding and local and home-made things.

In its early stages it will probably focus mainly on gardening, since that's what Patrick and I are mostly into and feel most qualified to write about, but we're hoping it will evolve into something different from our current blogs and involve more people (bloggers and non-bloggers) who feel they have something to say. Ideas, comments and suggestions are very welcome!

Whoops

Hmmm, something tells me these white runner beans have got crossed.

My neighbour asked me "D'yer want some o' them white runner beans?" meaning the ones he was growing last year. I wasn't planning to grow any runners this year but I don't like to turn down the offer of home-saved seed, because I can always horde it or pass it on to someone else. I was intrigued when I saw what he had though, because some of the white beans were black. And he'd harvested them all from his White Emergo plants. Clearly some had been fathered by the Black Magic crop I grew last year, despite my attempts to use a large jasmine hedge as a barrier. And there were some other beans which were a more conventional black and purple mottled type, presumably cross-pollinated with another variety growing in someone else's garden. He was going to pick out the white ones for me but I said I'd be happy to take some of the funny coloured ones too.

It's a strange quirk of some vegetables such as beans and sweetcorn that a cross-pollination can show up in the colour of the seed coat. With most plants, you won't find out about an accidental cross until you grow the next generation of plants. But where beans of different colours are grown together, individual beans that come out the 'wrong' colour are a sure sign of cross-pollination. A cross won't always show up in the seed colour though, so it's not a foolproof way to check the purity. In other words, black beans appearing in the pods of a white-seeded plant are a sure sign of an accidental cross with a black-seeded plant. But that doesn't mean for sure that the white beans aren't cross-pollinated. They may or may not be.

I collected a number of seeds from my black-seeded plants and they were all perfectly black, but the likelihood is that some of them will have been crossed with the white variety. The fact that there are no white seeds among my black ones doesn't necessarily mean anything, other than that the black colour is probably dominant.

Luckily none of this matters very much. My neighbour really doesn't care what variety of runner bean he grows, he just wants runner beans. The accidental crosses are technically F1 hybrids so they may even show a bit of extra vigour if he's lucky. And although I normally try to keep my varieties pure so that I can save their seed, I wasn't bothered too much about my Black Magic runner beans because I knew it was not going to be possible to isolate them from the crop next door. Runner beans cross so readily, it was inevitable that if we grew the same crop in adjacent gardens we would get crosses. If I'd really wanted to be sure of getting some pure seeds from my plants I could easily have resolved this by putting a bag over a few flower clusters to keep the bees out, and saving seed only from those. But I wasn't very impressed with Black Magic anyway so I didn't bother.

Fortunately for me, my neighbour's vegetable growing doesn't clash with mine very often. Most of the things I want to save seed from are things which normally self-pollinate (like tomatoes, peas and French beans) or which wouldn't normally be flowering if grown purely as a vegetable crop (like beetroot, carrots and onions). And most are things my neighbour doesn't grow anyway, as he has quite a narrow range of things he likes. The neighbour on the other side of me doesn't do any gardening at all, so there's no risk of cross-pollination from there.

Meanwhile I've been having to think about cross-pollination issues within my own garden. I've been planting out my special peas. These are mostly from the Heritage Seed Library, and are rare varieties which are not available to buy, and of which I've only got tiny quantities ... four to eight plants of each. The obvious thing to do would be to put up a nice sturdy trellis and plant them all together, but I can't do that. I need to save pure seed from all these varieties, and so I have to be as sure as I reasonably can be that they don't cross-pollinate. Accidental crosses between peas are not very common ... unlike runner beans, peas are designed to self-pollinate and their flowers are sealed so that insects can't normally get to the reproductive parts. But even with self-pollinators, there is always some risk of crossing. How big that risk is in your own garden can only be found out by trial and error because it depends on environmental factors such as local populations of insects. As I have an organic garden full of plant diversity, the pollinating insects are likely to be more abundant than they would be in, say, a conventional farmer's field. And as I can't readily replace these pea seeds if I screw them up, I have to be extra careful.

So ... I spent all day yesterday making small individual wigwams and twiggy structures for them all in different spots all over the garden, so that all of them are at least 10 or 15 feet away from any other pea varieties. Because I don't have that huge a garden it's not possible to separate them any further than that, so it'll have to do. If I have a cross-pollination disaster I'll have to rethink my strategy completely for next year. But hopefully they'll be fine. It was a lot of work though to plant them all at individual stations like this.

And it also makes conventional ideas of crop rotation pretty meaningless in my garden. All my crops are spread out and jumbled up with a bit of this here and a bit of that over there. So I don't bother with rotation, other than trying to be vaguely conscious of what grew in a particular spot last year and doing my best to mix things up. Crop rotation is a practice which goes hand in hand with monoculture. When you fill an area with large amounts of the same crop, pests and diseases soon become a problem. That's because areas of just one kind of plant goes against nature's way of doing things, and the result is an imbalance. The more diversity you have in your garden, and the more you blend different crops together and interplant with other things, the less of an issue it is. Diversity enables the garden to find its own balance in which pests exist but rarely reach problematic levels. I'm a great believer in trying to make use of nature's tides and balances rather than fighting against them. So I don't practice crop rotation as such because it makes more sense in my garden to avoid the need for it in the first place.

And of course the other advantage of garden biodiversity is that it gives you an excuse to buy loads of seeds. Heehee.

Vegetable inventory for 2007

Here's an inventory of all the vegetable varieties I've got on the go so far. There are more still to be sown, and some of these listed below may not make it through to harvest, but it'll give you some idea of what you can expect to see featured on my blog over the coming year.

I haven't bought any F1 hybrids this year, so the ones you see in the list below are from previous years and I haven't yet managed to grow them successfully. I'm increasingly feeling that the supposed superiority and vigour of F1 hybrids has more to do with marketing hype than any practical reality in the garden.

Beans, climbers
Caseknife heritage variety (Beans and Herbs)
Coco Bicolour heritage variety (Beans and Herbs)
Pea Bean heritage variety (Organic Gardening Catalogue)

Beans, dwarf
Canadian Wonder heritage variety (Organic Gardening Catalogue)
Dog Bean (blogger seed swap: Bifurcated Carrots)
Early Warwick heritage variety (Beans and Herbs)
Nun's Belly Button heritage variety (Association Kokopelli)

Beetroot
Cheltenham Green Top heritage variety (Organic Gardening Catalogue and Thomas Etty Esquire)
Egyptian Turnip-Rooted heritage variety (Thomas Etty Esquire)
Golden heritage variety (Organic Gardening Catalogue)
Rouge Crapaudine heritage variety (Thomas Etty Esquire)
White Beetroot (The Real Seed Catalogue)

Broad Beans
Martock heritage variety (W Robinson & Son)
Red-flowered heritage variety (W Robinson & Son)

Broccoli
Bordeaux (Organic Gardening Catalogue)
Veronica F1 (Organic Gardening Catalogue)

Brussels Sprouts
Rubine heritage variety (Thomas Etty Esquire)
Trafalgar F1 (Thompson & Morgan)

Carrots
Jaune Obtuse de Doubs heritage variety (The Real Seed Catalogue)
Rainbow (Organic Gardening Catalogue)
St Valery heritage variety (W Robinson & Son)

Chard
Bright Lights (Organic Gardening Catalogue)

Garlic
Music (Really Garlicky Co.)
Persian Star (blogger seed swap: Bifurcated Carrots)
Solent Wight (W Robinson & Son)

Leeks
Bleu de Solaise heritage variety (Thomas Etty Esquire)

Onions
Australian Brown heritage variety (Heritage Seed Library)
Cipolla di Genova (Red Onion of Genova) (Franchi Sementi)
Purplette (Organic Gardening Catalogue)
Rouge Pâle de Niort heritage variety (Association Kokopelli)

Peas
Alaska heritage variety (blogger seed swap: Bifurcated Carrots)
Alderman heritage variety (Organic Gardening Catalogue)
Carruthers' Purple Podded heritage variety (Heritage Seed Library)
Champion of England heritage variety (Heritage Seed Library)
Clarke's Beltony Blue heritage variety (Heritage Seed Library)
Corne de Bêlier heritage variety (Association Kokopelli)
Desirée (The Real Seed Catalogue)
Ezetha's Krombek Blauwschok heritage variety (Organic Gardening Catalogue)
Golden Sweet heritage variety (The Real Seed Catalogue)
Kent Blue heritage variety (Heritage Seed Library)
Magnum Bonum heritage variety (Heritage Seed Library)
Mr Bethell's Purple Podded heritage variety (Heritage Seed Library)
Ne Plus Ultra heritage variety (W Robinson & Son)
Oregon Trail (Penya Seeds)
Salmon Flowered heritage variety (Heritage Seed Library)
Sugar Ann (Thompson & Morgan)
Telefono (Telephone) heritage variety (Franchi Sementi)
plus my various breeding projects ...

Peppers
Cochiti heritage variety (Association Kokopelli)
Fresno (Association Kokopelli)
Georgia Flame (Association Kokopelli)
Hungarian Semi-Hot (Association Kokopelli)
Jupiter Elite (Association Kokopelli)
Lemon Drop (The Real Seed Catalogue)
Lipstick (The Real Seed Catalogue)
Napia (The Real Seed Catalogue)
Ortega (Association Kokopelli)
Perfection (Association Kokopelli)
Red Marconi (Marconi Rosso) heritage variety (Association Kokopelli)

Potatoes
Red Duke of York heritage variety (home-saved tubers)
Shetland Black heritage variety (home-saved tubers)
Witch Hill heritage variety (home-saved tubers)

Squash
Butternut (Organic Gardening Catalogue)
Waltham Butternut (Association Kokopelli)

Tomatoes
Black Cherry (Tomato Growers Supply Co.)
Black Prince (blogger seed swap: Bifurcated Carrots)
Boondocks heritage variety (Association Kokopelli)
Caro Rich (Association Kokopelli)
Copia (Tomato Growers Supply Co.)
Clementine (Organic Gardening Catalogue)
Des Andes (Association Kokopelli)
Golden Sweet (blogger seed swap: Spade Work)
Green Tiger (grown as an experiment from Marks & Sparks tomatoes)
Isis Candy (Tomato Growers Supply Co.)
Muskovite heritage variety (Association Kokopelli)
Peacevine (Association Kokopelli)
Pink Jester 3 (dehybridising experiment)
Purple Calabash heritage variety (Association Kokopelli)
Roma (Franchi Sementi)
Salt Spring Sunrise heritage variety (Heritage Seed Library)
San Marzano (Franchi Sementi)
Siniy heritage variety (Association Kokopelli)
Speckled Roman (Association Kokopelli)
Venus' Nipple (Teton de Venus) (Association Kokopelli)
Tigerella heritage variety (Thompson & Morgan)
Yellow Taxi (blogger seed swap: Bifurcated Carrots)

Turnips
Noir Long de Caliure heritage variety (The Real Seed Catalogue)
Orange Jelly heritage variety (blogger seed swap: Bifurcated Carrots)

I really do buy too many seeds, don't I?

Purple pea project photo gallery

My own personal F1 hybrid, which I got by crossing Alderman with Mr Bethell's Purple Podded. The flowers have a colour different from either parent, two-tone with deep maroon wing petals underneath. This one is just opening so the colour is at its most intense. All photos taken September and October 2006.

The standard petal (the wide main petal) is a kind of pinky blue, or more precisely it has streaks of pink and blue all swirled together. It looks more like a sweet pea than a culinary one.

There was some variation in pod colour in this batch of plants. This one was mostly purple, but they all had some green in them too.

Marbled pods. There are several possible reasons for this mish mash of purple and green. It's most likely co-dominance between the genes for green and purple.

When I was planning out the project I predicted that my F1 hybrids, which are the first generation of plants grown after making the cross, would have purple pods. That's because I'd read that the purple pod gene is dominant, and so I would expect purple pods to assert themselves as the default type. And some were indeed almost entirely purple. But they all had some green in them, and they all stayed blotchy and semi-purple until quite late in their development, purpling up a little as they matured. And some just remained blotchy. F1 hybrids are not supposed to show much variation, so I was a bit surprised, but nature is full of surprises and she's no great respecter of one-size-fits-all genetic theory. And there may have been environmental factors involved too.

The blotchy mixed up colouring looks to me to be a case of co-dominance, where the dominant purple gene has found itself matched up with a dominant green gene, and their struggle for dominion over one another produces the halfway house you see in the pod picture above. There are other possible reasons for it, but in my limited experience that's the most likely one.

I'll find out more when I grow the next generation (these plants didn't survive, but I'll be growing and saving seed from more of the same). If it is co-dominance, I will know because the offspring (F2 generation) will come out approximately a quarter green podded and a quarter purple podded, with the remaining half being blotchy bi-colours like their parents. That's because when plants reproduce they inherit one half of the genome from each parent, and so each parent can pass on either the purple gene or the green gene, but not both. The result of this is four different possible combinations: green-green, green-purple, purple-green, or purple-purple. It's entirely down to chance which of these each seed inherits. Green-purple and purple-green both result in blotchy pods as the two colours fight for dominance, so they pretty much count as the same thing.

If the colour mixture is caused by something else other than co-dominance, I won't see these ratios. For instance, if it turns out the green gene is actually recessive rather than dominant, I will end up with roughly three quarters purple podded and only a quarter green. That's because the purple gene will dominate in three out of the four possible combinations, leaving only 'green-green' capable of creating green pods.

*sigh* I keep meaning to write a post on basic genetics ... then my strange ramblings would make more sense!

It's complicated but it's all great fun.

Another variation: one of the plants produced two flowers per node, as shown here (the blue flower is older and has started to fade). This is a trait not usually seen in either parent.

My new purple pea projects

My hand-pollinated hybrid pea (sadly destroyed by a storm before it set seed) was an absolute beauty, made from a cross between two heirloom varieties

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you'll know all about my purple pea quest, a project to breed my own personal idealised pea using the genes of my favourite heritage varieties. To start with, the project involved hand-crossing Alderman, a voluptuous Victorian pea in a flavour class of its own, with Mr Bethell's Purple Podded, a British family heirloom purple-podded variety with moderately good flavour compared to other purples. My aim is to breed something with the gorgeous looks and flavour of Alderman but in a purple version with pink or blue flowers. Why? Just for the hell of it. Alderman is lovely but I like pink or blue flowers better than white.

Or, to look at it the other way round, I love Mr Bethell's Purple Podded as it is but I'd love it even more if it had sweeter peas.

Although my plants were destroyed I'm starting again with another lot from the same 'sessions' and hope they'll turn out the same. They certainly should do, because they're F1 hybrids, which tend to be quite uniform. The next step in the project is to grow the F1 hybrids to maturity and collect as much seed from them as possible. Those seeds will be F2, and the offspring from them will be a hotchpotch of diversity from which I can select the plants I like best.

In fact these are so beautiful I think I'll do another gallery post soon to show them off ...

The purple colouring in pea pods is created by anthocyanin, which I mentioned in my purple sprouting broccoli post. It's a vacuolar flavonoid pigment. That didn't help did it? I don't know what it means either, but anthocyanin is also a very beneficial antioxidant, and it's not present in most green varieties. So purple varieties have nutritional advantages as well as looking quirky. (This applies not just to peas but to most other vegetables that have red or purple forms, like beans, carrots, broccoli and cauliflower ... and dark fruits like blackcurrants.) But only if you actually eat the purple bits. Alderman is a shelling pea and if I breed purple colouring into it I won't get any benefit from the anthocyanin because the pods just get discarded. The peas inside are green and don't contain the magic pigment.

So clearly while I'm at it I ought to try breeding a purple mangetout (snow) pea and a sugarsnap. And that's exactly what I'm planning to do this year.

I'm not the only person with an interest in purpling up the available pea range. Carol Deppe in her wonderful fabulous and unequalled plant breeding manual for amateurs Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties describes her own purple pea projects along with enough genetic information and practical detail for you to try it at home. You can also see some varieties under development at purplepeas.net. And Ben and Kate at The Real Seed Catalogue would like to be able to offer a really good purple mangetout in their catalogue. There isn't anything quite right at the moment but they have ideas about how they could develop one. Except that they're engrossed in courgette breeding projects and don't have time to take it on at the moment. So they asked me to do it for them.

It's very flattering to be asked to take on a project like this, because I must own up to being an entirely amateur plant breeder with no training whatsoever. Everything I know I either learned from Carol Deppe or the internet, or from the hours spent in my garden prodding things with a scalpel. But I think there's a huge need for people doing what I'm doing at the moment. Plant breeding has become almost entirely the preserve of commercial enterprise, and a totally different mindset prevails in the industry from that of people who just enjoy gardening and want to grow a few nice veggies. It's not that plant breeders don't care about gardeners. But they have to make a living from what they do, and there's not much funding available to breed new vegetables just because they look pretty or taste nice. It's only us amateur dabblers who have the luxury of being able to experiment with whatever takes our fancy.

Ben and Kate run a not-for-profit seed company in South Wales. They select everything in their catalogue from their own experiences of growing it and eating it, and produce much of the seed themselves. The varieties they offer are collected from all over, many of them heritage or traditional types and eclectically sourced from seed banks and individuals across the world. They also offer some of their own new varieties, which you occasionally come across as you browse the catalogue. The thing that makes them stand out from other seed companies is that they only sell open-pollinated varieties, not F1 hybrids, because they promote seed saving as good gardening practice. That's right, they actively encourage you to save and replant your own seeds rather than buying it from them again next year. And just to be sure you know what to do, they give seed saving instructions for all their vegetables on their website and with the seed packets.

So where do you start when you want to create a new purple mangetout pea? Ben thinks Golden Sweet is the best mangetout pea around. It has smallish yellow pods, blue flowers and purple-flecked seeds. I bought some from them last year and it did well. The texture and flavour are good, and the plants are vigorous. He's also keen on a purple-podded pea called Desirée, which is one I've never grown myself so I don't know much about it yet. So this is the first stage of the breeding project, to cross those two varieties. Ben sent me the seeds and I currently have a batch of each variety growing in Rootrainers. I got 100% germination from the seeds he sent, which doesn't happen all that often with peas. Now I just have to hope they'll both flower at the same time.

Golden Sweet and Desirée in Rootrainers, being hardened off for planting out. They were both sown at the same time but Golden Sweet (on the left) is faster growing!

It will of course take a few years to produce a stable new variety and trial it sufficiently, and then it may take more time to bulk up the stocks of available seed before it can be offered for sale. And there's no guarantee I'll come up with anything that's worth selling anyway. But it's going to be a lot of fun to try and I'll be blogging its progress as it goes along.

And of course as a little sideline project I mustn't forget the purple sugarsnap. I'm currently growing a few plants of Sugar Ann, a shortie height-wise but well esteemed for flavour, and my intention is to cross it with one (or several) of the purple podded varieties I'm growing this year and see what happens.

Today in the garden ... brassica bounty

Purple sprouting broccoli, a favourite in British gardens since at least 1777. I've already harvested the main head and now it's producing loads of these sideshoots.

Well, here we are at the Spring Equinox, and the weather in the UK has turned bloody cold in the last few days which has thwarted my intentions to plant stuff out and resulted in some serious windowsill congestion. I have peas trying to climb up the curtains, turnips straining towards the light, a bathroom full of beetroot and trays of as-yet-ungerminated seeds stashed on top of bookcases because there's nowhere else to put them. I even have a crop of purple peas on the lid of the downstairs toilet (don't ask).

Meanwhile the things I've already planted out have survived remarkably well, and the old lady's net curtains get a big thumbs up for their weather-shielding properties. I've been using them around my early pea crops, and although the plants are looking a bit fed up after three days of buffeting by icy winds and hailstones, they are undamaged. I have some really thick bunched up super-frilly curtains in the shed which may come in useful for tender crops.

One thing that's completely unfazed by the wintry storms is purple sprouting broccoli, which is just coming to fruition now. Although there are now several named cultivars and hybrids available with different maturity times, 'purple sprouting' is often used as a generic name for assorted unnamed varieties, and certainly there's a lot of variability in mine, which came from three different sources. Some have large loose florets while others produce tight compact little drumsticks. Some have purple stems, some thick and others thin, some have a violet flush in the leaf veins ... they're all slightly different. But they all taste good, even if I slightly prefer the texture of the ones with small compact florets.

After a few minutes' steaming ... mmm, tasty! These two heads are clearly not the same variety, although they were both called Purple Sprouting.

I can't vouch for other cooking methods, but when steamed they do keep much of their colour. The stems and leaves go an intense green and the florets darken to purple-black, and will stain other food on your plate with purple colour. But that's a good thing ... the purple pigment is anthocyanin, a natural chemical with powerful antioxidant properties which is very good for you.

Also rich in anthocyanin and even more gorgeous in colour is the Purple Cape winter cauliflower, which is now coming to maturity. I've only got the one, I admit, but hey ... I've never successfully grown a cauliflower before, ever, so I'm quite excited by it. It's another heritage type, introduced into the UK in 1808, but it's still widely available, and rightly so. The colour is astonishingly beautiful ... much richer than that of purple sprouting broccoli. It darkens with age but is still gorgeous. I'm looking forward to finding out what it tastes like (and reviewing it).

Purple Cape cauliflower. This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago when the colour was at its most intense. The heads darken as they mature to a deep royal purple.

Other than the brassica excitement, most of the work that needs doing in the garden at the moment is digging and tidying. I tend to put it off because it's not much fun, but I really must get stuck into it before it gets out of control. My sandy soil dries out very quickly in spring so the ground is plenty diggable. At this time of year it's relatively easy to remove couch grass roots, as they pull through the soil like spaghetti through bolognese, so efforts made now will pay off later in the year. But it's still a chore, so I don't do as much of it as I should. Ah well, the sun is shining and I must brave the freezing cold and get on with cutting back some more brambles ...

The garden in March. Most of the ground is mulched with grass cuttings. That big barn thing is not mine, sadly, it's in next door's garden.

Seeds Without Frontiers

I'm sure most of you are aware to some extent of the wonderful work done by the Seeds Savers Exchange in the US and the Heritage Seed Library in the UK. Both are playing a vital part in protecting biodiversity and resisting the commercial exploitation of garden vegetables. This is especially important in the UK and Europe where restrictive and short-sighted laws introduced in the 60s mean it's illegal to sell vegetable seeds which are not on the official National List. As it costs hundreds of pounds to get each variety listed, it's only worthwhile for large scale commercial varieties and the result has been a catastrophic loss of heritage and heirloom varieties.

So I just wanted to mention another lesser known organisation in Europe which does similar work but on a much wider scale than the Heritage Seed Library. Association Kokopelli is based in France but its reach is global. It was founded in 1999 after its predecessor, Terre de Semences, was forcibly shut down under pressure from the French Ministry of Agriculture for selling unregistered heirloom seeds. Association Kokopelli operates under the same threat, existing as it does on the fringes of legality.

I discovered Association Kokopelli during my searches for a US-bred sweetcorn which I've coveted for a while, a beauteous multi-coloured open-pollinated variety called Rainbow Inca. It's quite easy to find in the US but apparently only from companies that don't do overseas shipping. I searched high and low for a UK supplier, to no avail. Maybe the seed companies know something I don't and it won't grow in the British climate, but I'd like to have the option to give it a go at least. I was on the verge of asking one of my American friends to order it on my behalf and forward it on to me, when I found that the UK branch of Association Kokopelli (based at an organic farm in Kent) stock it in their online catalogue, along with 1000 other organically (and sometimes biodynamically) grown heirloom vegetable varieties.

Their website is a little eccentric ... it's not very well organised for casual browsing so the best thing is to type something simple like "tomato" into the search box at the top. That will bring up a list of around 200 tomatoes of extraordinary diversity, from Uralskij Mnogoplodnij to Venus' Nipple, all open-pollinated (no F1 hybrids) and certified organic.


Association Kokopelli is way more than an heirloom seed catalogue though. It runs a project called Semences sans Frontières (Seeds without Frontiers) which encourages ordinary home gardeners to donate their surplus seeds to be distributed free of charge in parts of the world where seed availability is poor or non-existent. In the last few years the project has supplied hundreds of thousands of packets of seed in countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America and set up seed banks and educational facilities to help some of the planet's neediest people to grow their own vegetables. The seeds they distribute are all open-pollinated varieties. This is important because it enables farmers to save and replant their own seed. The Association helps out people who have no seeds at all and those who have been misguidedly given seed aid in the form of F1 hybrids (a favourite poisoned chalice of the seed industry) which lock them into a cycle of debt as they're unable to save seed from their crops and are forced to buy more each year.

When I bought my Rainbow Inca seeds I also bought a copy of their book The Seeds of Kokopelli written by the association's founder Dominique Guillet. Originally in French but now available in English translation, it comes with three free packets of tomato seeds (!) and is a truly encyclopaedic manual for the home vegetable gardener. Again there's an idiosyncratic homespun flavour to it and the translation has given me a few smiles but it's a unique and extraordinary book and I've never seen anything else like it. It gives descriptions of 2500 heirloom vegetables and grains, including many I've never heard of, with several colour plates full of lovely photos ... particularly of unusual tomatoes, peppers and squash. Seeds for most of them are available to the association's members free of charge, and many are also available for sale to non-members via the website. It also gives cultivation advice and detailed instructions on seed saving and cross-pollination issues for each vegetable. And an explanation of the importance of seed saving and biodiversity, plus a description of some of the charitable work they do in India and elsewhere. There's absolutely no way any commercial publisher would have produced a book like this and it's a delightful rough-edged gem. It's written with a profound respect for the earth and the seeds and a spiritual delight in the act of growing vegetables, but is still full of practical hands-on advice and scientific explanations. For vegetable nerds it's a joy to browse.

Association Kokopelli has a branch in the US too, called Kokopelli Seed Foundation, and their website is worth visiting just for the tomato diversity picture on the front page. This branch doesn't sell seeds (it doesn't really need to, since heirloom seeds are so much more easily available in the US and much of their work is already covered by the SSE) so the focus is on encouraging American gardeners to donate seeds. They will take any organically-grown seeds of open-pollinated heirloom varieties, and if requested they'll send you free packets of seed to get you started. As they point out on their website, a single tiny cherry tomato can produce 70 seeds and a single flowering lettuce can produce 10,000, so even gardeners with small plots can make a difference.

Association Kokopelli has three stated aims:
 
-- to promote the preservation of biodiversity through the distribution of organic and open-pollinated seeds of heirloom varieties of vegetables and grains.
-- to create a network of gardeners involved in seed saving.
-- to help Third World countries to develop sustainable organic agriculture through the gift of seeds and the setting up of seed grower networks.

You can read a wonderful little article about them here: Sowing seeds of change across the world

Do Ireland a favour ... don't buy peat

Appropriate that it should be St Patrick's Day when I saw the first slow-worm of the season, lounging around underneath a blackcurrant bush

Meanwhile, 'tis the season to start getting through vast amounts of potting compost, so I thought it would be a good time to recommend the things I've found useful.

The big problem with potting composts is that (in the UK at least) they're usually made of peat. I haven't knowingly bought peat since I stood on the summit of Croagh Patrick in the west of Ireland and saw the hideous gouges ripped across huge areas of what was otherwise a breathtakingly magical landscape. It really shocked and upset me. There's no shortage of beautiful scenery in Ireland, but even so, the destruction of vast areas for commercial peat extraction (mainly to feed an English addiction to cheap compost) is a sickening thing to behold. And since then I've tried to find a less environmentally damaging substitute ... with varying degrees of frustration.

Peat bogs are ancient and irreplaceable habitats supporting their own unique range of flora and fauna. They take hundreds of years to develop. Destruction of these ecosystems damages the wider environment too, because peat bogs play an important part in the spongelike absorption of carbon dioxide. Although Ireland suffers the brunt of the damage, peat-rich habitats in the UK and Europe are also being pillaged.

Things are going the right way, very slowly. The late lamented Geoff Hamilton outraged the peat industry more than a decade ago by urging BBC viewers not to buy it, and after his death Alan Titchmarsh took up the gauntlet. Retailers have started to work towards reducing or diluting peat products. But the reality is, despite the good example set by TV gardeners and recent government targets to reduce its use, most of the stuff available to buy in garden centres is either peat or it contains peat. Most people still buy it rather than put up with the hassle of finding substitutes. To make matters worse, many of the peat-free composts which have started to appear in recent years to cater for the environmentally-conscious are totally crap. Some go mouldy. Some are full of weed seeds. Some are so dense, stodgy and heavy they're unusable unless you mix them with something else. And they're often more expensive. No wonder so many people just buy the peat and stuff the environment.

Rainbow chard seedlings growing in pure coir

My compost preference has always been for the John Innes types, but I've been completely frustrated in my attempts to find a peat-free John Innes. It may be that somebody somewhere is making one, but I certainly can't find it at any garden centre in my local area. So these days I mix my own composts.

I started doing it as a last resort, after I bought a large bag of so-called multipurpose peat-free compost which turned out to consist of soggy black half-rotted tree bark which was so completely useless for its stated purpose it probably violated the 1968 Trade Descriptions Act. Rather than write to my MP in disgust or throw it away and buy something else I tried mixing it with horticultural sand and coir to break it up and aerate it a little. I ended up with a lovely compost ... and found the process of mixing it quite rewarding. It certainly wasn't any more trouble than driving down to my local soulless B&Q megastore and trying to hump bloody great bags of the ready-made stuff into the boot of the car. It only takes a couple of minutes and I make it up in small batches and adjust the mix for whatever I'm planting in it.

My basic compost recipe is just coir and sand with a sprinkle of fertiliser. It's a bit lazy but most things grow in it happily enough. For seed composts I often just use pure coir on its own, and that works well too. If I need something more specialised I might add perlite (for aeration), vermiculite (for extra moisture retention as well as aeration), coarse sand (for drainage), dried blood (for boosting leaf growth) or bonemeal (for growing good roots). Home-produced compost and leafmould are also excellent, though I can't produce either in very large quantities.

My basic material is coir bricks which I get from Chase Organics by mail order. They're lightweight and don't take up much space in the shed. They look rather like giant slabs of hash (I should be so lucky) but are actually made from compressed coconut fibre. They cost a couple of quid each and when you dunk them in warm water they mushroom into a great mound of fluffy compost, albeit with a rather odd resinous smell. And even when reconstituted they weigh less than most composts, which saves backache when lifting large pots around. They contain little or no nutrients, so I add that myself as and when it's necessary (for seeds you don't need it ... I just start watering them with a liquid fertiliser once they get established). Coir blocks are not the perfect earth-friendly solution ... they come from Sri Lanka and the Philippines and have to be flown in, but seem to me to be the lesser evil compared to peat. They're a by-product of the coconut industry and would otherwise go to waste.

Pipe dreams: no it's not a slab of finest pressed Moroccan, it's just a coir brick ... light, convenient and renewable

Also available from Chase Organics are these biodegradable coir pots called Green Start sets, a very fine alternative to the popular Jiffy-7 peat-pots. The pots themselves are formed from stringy coconut fibres, and have very good aeration and drainage. Each one comes with a compressed coir disc at the bottom. You just add a little water and within five minutes the tiny discs swell up to fill (and overflow from) the pots with compost. I tried them out last year and they gave me very good results. The open fibrous structure of the pots keeps the compost contained but allows the roots to grow through freely. They have an amazing ability to conserve water within the compost and stay dry on the outside while remaining very open and permeable.

Tomato seedlings growing in Green Start coir pots. Six pots fit snugly into a Tesco's mushroom punnet.

Whether coir is as good as or even better than peat is something that can be endlessly argued over, because it really depends what you're growing and what you expect from a compost. One of the disadvantages of peat is that it's difficult to reconstitute when it dries out and forms an impermeable crust on its surface ... coir doesn't have this problem. On the other hand, if you grow azaleas, coir can't compete with the natural acidity of peat.

Going completely peat free is a tricky matter because many of the plants you buy in the garden centre are still grown in peat. None of my local garden centres seem to stock peat-free container grown plants. One solution of course is to grow everything yourself from seed, and not buy container-grown plants at all, but that's not really the point ... it would be nice to be able to go out and buy a tray of pansies without having a guilt trip over it.

There is one peat-based product which is more or less environmentally sound, Moorland Gold, which is produced from peat and silt deposits built up from natural erosion by the filtration of water off the Yorkshire moors. It's high quality and I've heard a lot of good things about it. Local availability is another matter though.

The magnificent Eden Project has had a peat-free policy since its inception. The National Trust has adopted one. So has Kew Gardens. It's time the garden centres and manufacturers of composts got their act together ... but they won't do it unless consumer pressure forces them to.