Today in the garden ... stuff in pots

This is the time of year when blogging has to take second place to the frenzy of seed sowing and labelling. And I really ought to clean that keyboard.

I dunno about you, but this is one of my favourite times of the gardening year, when spring is just looking imminent enough that I can allow myself to start sowing a lot of the seeds I've been stockpiling over the winter.

As you can see, if the labels are legible, that includes all my special rare varieties of pea from the Heritage Seed Library, and some of my home-made F1 hybrids. I'm having to start again with a new batch of seeds for my purple pea experiment after a nasty storm last October destroyed my F1 plants just as the pods were starting to swell (c'est la guerre). Like a good little plant breeder I had kept a stash of spare F1 seed, so although it was very frustrating at the time it isn't a complete disaster. It just sets me back one generation, and at least I had the pleasure of seeing how beautiful they were and finding out their flower colour.

Newly sprouted Cheltenham Green Top beetroot seedlings. At top right you can just see one of my other beetroot seedlings, Golden, which already has golden yellow stems in contrast to the pink and green. Both of these are very old heritage varieties but still commercially available.

There are a few things already sprouting away in various trays and pots on window sills, like these cute beetroot seedlings. Beetroot usually sprouts two or three plants from each 'seed', because the seeds are actually not single seeds at all, but multi-seeded corky fruits rather charmingly known as glomerules. You have to thin them of course, but I'm too sentimental to kill them so I carefully separate them all and replant them ... they seem to cope quite happily with that.

No matter how experienced a gardener you think you are there's always plenty of scope to screw things up. I sowed some onion seeds a couple of weeks ago in a module tray in the cold frame, and when the bubblewrap which was supposed to be providing frost protection got a big puddle of water in it, I managed to dump it straight onto the seed tray in a great kersploosh which washed all the compost and seeds into oblivion. D'oh!

These are gorgeous and I've never seen anything quite like them. Purple Prince on the left has a vibrant true purple colour and every bean is different, while on the right with its striking blood-like sploshes is the less romantically named Dog Bean.

And the seeds are still coming in: these lovely beans just arrived from Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots as part of a blogger seed swap (he'll be getting some of my groovy coloured spuds in return). It's too early to sow these yet, so I'll have to restrain myself until the season is properly underway. Beans grow very rapidly and they're sensitive to cold buffetting winds as well as frosts, so sowing them too early is a recipe for shredded and bedraggled plants.

Talking of shredded and bedraggled, kitten crashed through a wickerwork fence today. *sigh*

Tonight above the garden ... lunar eclipse

I took these time-lapse pictures of the lunar eclipse from a window of my house. The ghosting effect on the lower ones is caused by reflections because the pictures were taken through glass. If I'd been more dedicated I'd have taken the camera outside and done it properly ... but it was so fricking cold out there I'd probably have ended up with camera judder instead.

First daffs

I thought I'd better get this up before everyone is sick of the sight of daff pictures. I don't know what variety it is, it was left here by the previous owners.

Today in the garden ... the ginger peril

One thing you don't expect to see when you open your curtains on a Sunday morning is a strange man rummaging around in your privet hedge. But there he was, standing on the grass verge which borders our front garden with his head stuck deep in the foliage. But when he looked up and saw that I'd spotted him, instead of running away in embarrassment he came and knocked on the door.

"I lost my car aerial in your hedge last night," he said. "Mind if I have a look for it?"

Um ... how do you manage to lose a car aerial in a hedge set back from the road by about ten feet?

"Well, it was dark. And the aerial's black."

O-kay.

Whether he was a nutter or not, there was indeed a black car aerial in the hedge, and he delightedly scuttled off with it.

Meanwhile, in the back garden, we have another mysterious interloper.

I first suspected something was getting into the garden which shouldn't be there when I started to find bones in the vegetable patch. First there was one in the asparagus bed. Then another, half buried in the plot I'm preparing for my peas. Big, chunky bones with sawn-off ends. Well they ain't mine, I'm vegetarian.

My suspicions were confirmed when an enormous trench was dug in a tub of overwintering carrots and a large soggy partially masticated dog chew deposited in the hole. I recently read a post on John's Spade Work blog about a German Shepherd who had taken to harvesting his own carrots, so it's obviously not just me. I eventually found a small gap at the bottom of the chainlink fence, probably just big enough for next door's small white terrier-type thing to squeeze through.

However my garden is facing a new peril which is causing more damage to my plants than all the slugs, snails, dogs and other pests put together. It's our ginger kitten. He's a gardener's nightmare. He digs up or bites the heads off all my seedlings. He wees in my flower pots. I can't plant anything anywhere without it being interfered with. When I tried to protect my sweet peas by making a thicket of prickly branches around them, he stripped the prickly stuff off with his teeth and then crawled in and bit the heads off all the peas. He's such a little hard man, I even saw him gleefully chewing on a bramble the other day.

Here he is ... oh ... er ...

He was slightly less macho last week however, when he somehow fell down a gap between two fences and couldn't get out. It was dark and tipping down with rain, and I could hear this desperate pitiful squeaky mewling. Unfortunately I couldn't get to him ... he was too far down for me to reach and the area was tangled up with brambles. The fence was too high for him to climb. Eventually though he managed to scramble half way up, just high enough for me to grab him. And of course managed to cover me with muddy footprints.

Heritage vegetable review Climbing bean: Kew Blue

Age: no idea
My supplier: Heritage Seed Library
Pros: velvety purple pods, elegant plant, multi-purpose, gourmet flavour
Cons: none that I noticed

Kew Blue is a beauty. All purple podded beans seem to make for nice-looking plants, but this one really is a corker.

I don't know very much about its origins. I've never seen it available anywhere except the Heritage Seed Library and a small UK supplier called Beans and Herbs (I've ordered from them and they're good ... they appear to have the best range of rare heritage beans in the UK). According to the HSL catalogue, this variety was originally from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London. But whether it was actually bred there, and if so when, I've no idea.

The plants have purple stems right from the early seedling stage. And it's a spectacularly rich, translucent colour which is difficult to describe and isn't conveyed adequately in photographs. All I can say is that I spent a lot of time just staring at it. Amazingly beautiful. The leaf stalks graduate in colour from deep purple at the base to green at the top. Leaves are a bright rich green and darken with age, turning gorgeous deep pink and purple colours in autumn.

Kew Blue is a climbing bean and becomes a tall plant (you'll need 7ft canes for a wigwam) and it produces fewer leaves than other beans I've grown ... large, slightly gnarled and asymmetrical. I found it slow to germinate and a bit sluggish to establish itself, but once it got going it was very vigorous. The stems are chunky and their colour is so deep and vibrant it almost glows. Flower buds are a rich purple but open up into a pink-mauve.

When the pods start to form they're dead straight, satin smooth and very slender. They're a very dark purple colour, with a flush of green in the younger pods, and again the colour has a depth to it which is hard to describe. They look very special. They're produced in pairs on long trusses, like they're dangling from little handlebars. You can see them easily when you want to harvest them. Yields are high, although not exceptionally so. Mine was completely trouble free all season and kept flowering and podding well into the autumn.


I tried harvesting the youngish pods and steaming them, and they were sweet and lovely. Very refined indeed with a nice texture. As with all purple beans (as far as I know) the colour changes to dark green during cooking, although if you give them the very lightest of steamings they may retain a trace of purple. The pods stay stringless and tender until they're quite mature, although they lose some of their refinement. If left to mature even further you can shell them out and eat them fresh. The slightly flat kidney-shaped beans are white at this stage but turn a greyish blue after cooking, and their texture is firm and nutty. The flavour is delightful. You can also leave them to mature fully and use them as dried beans, and they turn a tan colour with very light speckling.

I love Kew Blue and will definitely grow it again. It's truly multipurpose and tastes wonderful at all stages. If you want a gourmet quality bean which also looks lovely in the garden you need look no further.

The purple pimpernel

Self-seeded annuals like this field poppy (Papaver rhoeas) are always welcome in the vegetable garden (photographed last summer)

I managed to get outside today and get on with some weeding. Even at this time of year when there are very few crops growing, weeding is a delicate business for me and has to be done carefully. That's because I'm selective with my weeds. In all the veg beds I allow annual flowers like poppies and calendula to self-seed. I've had to get good at recognising different plants at the seedling stage, so that I know what's what. Field poppies like the one above have not really got started yet, but I have quite a few California poppies which have successfully overwintered and there are also some new self-seeded opium poppies, so I have to carefully hoe around all those. I love opium poppies; not only do they have the most beautiful colourful mop-headed flowers but the bees go absolutely nuts over them. These pollen-rich flowers are a good thing to have in the vegetable plots because they attract hoverflies, bees and other beneficial insects, quite aside from looking gorgeous. The result is a mini-ecosystem with lots of biodiversity and natural pest resistance, thrumming with life. I don't subscribe to the idea of having a separate flower border and vegetable patch. In this garden it all gets shoved in together.

I'm also careful to preserve any scarlet pimpernels I come across, at least until they flower. Now that probably does seem a bit mad, because the scarlet pimpernel is a bogstandard weed in the UK with pretty flowers but no obvious garden merit. But mine are special.

When I first moved here in 2004 and the whole garden was laid to lawn, I spotted something with purple flowers growing through the grass just as I was about to run the mower over it. It took me a moment or two to be sure it really was a scarlet pimpernel because I've never seen one with any flower colour other than the usual creamy scarlet-orange. I spent the rest of the season carefully mowing round it, which meant I had a weird sticky-up tuft in the middle of the lawn all summer, but needs must.

Scarlet pimpernels are not always scarlet (photo taken last summer)

I know nothing about the genetics of scarlet pimpernels. And I don't suppose anybody else does either. Research on plant genomes is limited almost exclusively to economically important crop plants, and there's not much funding available for garden weeds. So I can only hazard a guess at why this plant had purple flowers. It could be a recessive gene which is commonly present in the landrace (wild plant population) but rarely gets a chance to express itself. Or it could be a spontaneous mutation, a natural "mistake" in the plant's DNA. Either way, I only had the one plant so my only option was to save its seeds and hope some of its offspring would be purple. There was no guarantee at all that they would be.

In 2005 I spread the seeds around the garden and let nature do its thing. To my delight, several of the plants turned out purple-flowered. I started weeding out any 'normal' scarlet flowered pimpernels and just left the purple ones to mature and self-seed. In 2006 there was another increase in their number.

So now I appear to have my own strain of purple pimpernel. If you're wondering what's the point, there isn't one. I just like having something different in the garden even if it's a weed. And why not? I don't know how common purple pimpernels are but it's something which my garden gave me spontaneously, so I treat it as a gift.

Tomatoes got headache?

Here's a tip if you're sowing tomatoes at the moment. Sometimes when the seedlings first emerge and straighten out they still have the seed husk stuck on their head. It may come off as the seedling grows and expands, but more often than not it stays there and the seedling is effectively strangled, unable to free itself. When this happens, try putting a drop of water on the head of the seedling. The seedling should then be able to free itself within a few hours. If not, moisten it again until it does.

The problem arises because the seed husk dries out and contracts once it's elevated out of the soil, and if the seedling still has its head inside it when this happens ... ouch.

Never ... (I offer the rosy red fruit of my own experience here) ... never attempt to pull the seed husk off with your fingers. You'll be sorry.

Anyway, I'm growing a preposterous number of tomato varieties this year, albeit in small quantities of each. These are the ones I already have growing as fine sturdy seedlings, and no constricted heads. More varieties still to come.

Clementine
Black Prince
Yellow Taxi
Green Tiger
Speckled Roman
San Marzano
Roma
Purple Calabash
Siniy
Salt Spring Sunrise
Copia
Isis Candy

This year I'm growing them in simple coir (from reconstituted blocks) watered with a very dilute solution of organic seaweed extract. If the weather's bright and not too breezy I put them outside during the daytime to maximise their exposure to light. A day or two of winter sun every week brings them on nicely.

Woohoo! My potatoes germinated

Potato seedball harvested last July. I'm now in the process of growing its seeds.

It may not seem like much to get excited about, but it is for me. It's the first time I've tried growing potatoes from seed. That's right, not the usual tubers left sprouting in eggboxes on windowsills (though I have plenty of those too) but real, true seeds.

Just to confuse things, the term 'seed potatoes' or 'potato seed' usually refers to tubers which are supplied for planting. But they're not seeds really, they're vegetative cuttings. Potatoes do produce real actual seeds though, and to differentiate them from seed tubers they are called 'true potato seed', or TPS.

If you've been looking at the blog for any length of time you may remember the small green 'apples' I collected from my potato plants last year. Not all potatoes produce them, because many these days don't have fertile pollen in their flowers and so have lost the ability to set top fruit (or seedballs, as they're properly called). But every now and then they appear.

They look very like miniature green tomatoes, for the very good reason that potatoes and tomatoes are closely related (hence their susceptibility to blight). When you open up a potato fruit it has juicy white flesh full of small tomato-like seeds. I saved some last year, not knowing whether they would be viable or not, and they have taken a couple of weeks to germinate ... but there they are, little pale green noses poking up out of the compost just like tomato seedlings.

You may be wondering why I'm bothering to grow potatoes from seed when it's easier to grow them from tubers. In fact, it will take two seasons to get a decent harvest from them this way. But the appeal (for me) is that each seed is unique, and effectively a brand new variety. Some will be worth keeping and some won't, but they'll all be unique.

When I do my pea breeding projects I know which genes control the traits I want, and I can predict to some extent what I'm going to get if I cross Plant X with Plant Y, even down to the likely ratio of particular characteristics in each batch of offspring. But that's because peas are efficient inbreeders, genetically stable and easy to control. Potatoes are the opposite. They are a gene lottery. I don't even need to do any crosses ... I can take self-pollinated seeds from one plant and the resulting offspring will all be different from the parent plant and from each other.

The reasons for this are a bit complicated, and if you're not interested in plant genetics you may want to hum a pleasant tune to yourself while you read the next bit. It's basically down to potatoes having twice as much genetic material as normal.

Here goes then. Genes are carried on chromosomes, which are chunks of DNA. In most plants chromosomes are arranged in matched pairs, which means there are two copies of each gene. Each gene pair may consist of two dominants, two recessives, or one of each, and these combinations determine which traits are expressed in the plant. The technical name for this gene arrangement is diploid. When a diploid plant is fertilised and produces seed, the chromosome pairs are torn apart down the middle and only one half is passed on by each parent. The seed (and the plant that grows from it) inherits one set of chromosomes from the ovule of the flower which produces it and one from the pollen which fertilised it. The two sets match up into their correct pairs, so the seed ends up with a new diploid (paired) arrangement made up of one set of chromosomes from each parent.

Potatoes are not diploid though, they're tetraploid. Instead of having two sets of chromosomes they have four. So when they reproduce by setting fruit, each seed inherits two complete sets of genes from each parent instead of one. Every chromosome carries many thousands of genes, and as both parents have four sets of chromosomes each, and the chromosomes break up into parts which randomly recombine, it becomes quite a major reshuffle ... more or less any combination of genes could end up being passed on to the offspring (or not). Which makes for a right mixed bag.

And suddenly the system of one gene being dominant over its neighbour becomes a lot more complicated. Instead of a simple 'either-or' situation you get four copies of each gene vying for dominance. You may get one dominant and three recessives, two of each, four recessives, four dominants, etc. Recessive traits which have been hidden for generations suddenly emerge. The likelihood of a seed-raised potato having the same genetic makeup as its parent(s) is very small indeed.

One way of looking at it is to imagine a diploid plant is like a one-armed-bandit fruit machine with only two wheels spinning inside it. The number of combinations possible with two wheels is relatively small. Increase the number of wheels to four though, and suddenly you have a massive increase in possible combinations and much less chance of predicting what you might get. That's basically what happens with a tetraploid.


Even if my potato seeds come from a flower which pollinated itself, the number of possible different combinations of genes should ensure that every plant I grow is a new variety. Some will be crap and may not even survive. Most will be good, but probably not very interesting. But with any luck a few will be excitingly different. At the end of the first season I will harvest the tubers from each plant and select the ones I like best. They will only be mini-tubers, not full sized potatoes. To evaluate them properly I will have to save them over next winter and replant them in 2008, when they should reward me with a decent crop. And once I've done that, I can select any I want to keep long-term, and that's how I get my new variety.

OK ... so how the hell do you maintain a new variety, when there's so much unavoidable variability every time you reproduce it? Well actually that bit is easy. Once you've grown a potato variety you like from seed, you just save and replant its tubers. The great random genetic lucky dip is only an issue when plants reproduce sexually by producing seed. Because tubers reproduce by vegetative propagation they are actually root stem cuttings (clones) from the parent plant. So each new plant grown from a tuber is genetically identical to the plant which produced it, and remains so in successive generations. This is true of all commercial potatoes too of course. If I plant a tuber of King Edward, for example, I'm essentially growing a cutting from the original King Edward plant which flourished in a Northumbrian field back in 1902.

So that's the genetic basis for wanting to grow potatoes from seed. But there are other benefits. Tubers are genetically identical to the parent plant but they also very efficiently store and pass on all the viruses and nematodes the parent plant may have had. These can build up over successive generations and become a serious problem, which is why most countries have laws requiring commercially available seed tubers to be tested and certified disease free (usually involving hefty blasts of chemicals). However, potatoes raised from seed are generally virus-free anyway, because there are very very few seed-borne potato diseases. And growing from seed represents a good opportunity to select new varieties with better disease resistance, specially adapted for your own garden, because most modern commercial varieties are pretty rubbish in that department.

If you're interested in developing your own potatoes I highly recommend a fantastic eBook, Amateur Potato Breeder's Manual by Raoul A. Robinson, which the author has generously made available as a free download. It's angled towards breeding for sustainable disease resistance, but the information is so thorough and clearly explained it's a gift to anyone who wants to grow spuds from seed. He even explains how to graft a potato scion onto a tomato rootstock so that it has to put all its energy into forming flowers and seedballs instead of tubers. Now that sounds like fun!


2010 update
As this page still gets a lot of hits, I thought it worth mentioning that I've written a new and updated article about growing potatoes from seed, with more pictures.

Ice gallery

Rainbow chard

I had a message today from someone offering me a chance to become a pop star. So that was nice. Possibilities of Top 20 hits and big tours. *cough.* I don't think I'm the person they're looking for, unfortunately. Just as an example, today I went out to post a letter and when I put my coat on it felt a bit heavy on one side. When I looked I found I had a potato in my pocket. That's right, not only am I the kind of girl who has potatoes in her pockets, I don't even have any recollection of how it got there, which is even more worrying.


The weather (as those of you in the UK will know) went from pleasant warmth to ice and then to snow over the course of the week, and made it far too cold to get anything useful done outside, so I've mostly been busy on music stuff instead. But I did nip out in the garden and take a few photographs. The snow pictures were nice, but the hoar frost ones were better, so here's a selection. All taken on Wednesday morning.

These dangly mirror discs appeared in a previous blog post in the summer ... as did the rainbow chard

Yellow jasmine

Purple sprouting broccoli