Please universe, may I have some edible red podded peas?

Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded F2. First one to flower.

Today has been a perfect day for hand-pollinating peas. Warm and dry but not too sunny - which creates just the right conditions for pollen to spill its abundance and for stigmatic goo to be in the right mood to receive it. Even more usefully, it was completely breezeless with not so much as a leaf blade stirring. The bitter lessons of trying to hand-pollinate flowers that are thrashing about in the wind, not to mention walking across the garden with a precious blob of pollen on the end of a scalpel, have taught me that pollinations on breezy days are the stuff of futility. All the more so for those of us with waist-length hair, which is guaranteed to flap across your face at the very moment you were trying to deposit a miniscule dab of pollen onto a particularly wobbly and elusive stigma.

As the weather was so perfect for it, I was really hoping to get some useful pollinations done for my red podded pea project. Only trouble is, most of the flowers I want aren't ready. The true red podders aren't even producing buds yet, and my semi-red mangetout line, which I'm hoping to cross with the Luna Trick sugarsnap for some peachy-red snap pods, didn't want to play either. I found a prime pollen-bearing bud on it that was well past the usual stage for self-fertilisation but when I cut it open I found it stubbornly refusing to dehisce.


An F4 plant from my semi-red podded mangetout line, currently struggling under the temporary working name of Peachy, getting ready for some blossom action (but not yet).

So instead I did some pollinations I didn't really need using the flowers I had available. It is worth pointing out that my beloved Luna Trick pea is the result of just such a casual union, in which I used up the last of some Sugar Ann flowers to pollinate a few buds of Golden Sweet just because I was bored. It turned out to be an inspired combination. Today's efforts mostly involved Sugar Snap flowers as females, pollinated with some of my purple F2 plants which may or may not turn out to be any good. I used the opportunity to take some close-up photographs of the pollination process. It's my fourth attempt to take such pictures. Thing is, you really need three hands for it, or an assistant who knows what they're doing. I have neither, so Plan B was to stick the camera on a tripod and use the self-timer for some very cumbersome hands-free photography, which resolved the three-hands issue but gave me some more challenges in trying to get it to focus in the right place when there's negligible depth of field. Anyway, if any of them are any good I'll add them to my previous pea-breeding tutorial.

The hand pollinations are just one aspect of what I'm doing on this crimson seeking project. Since my pièce de résistance in the red podded pea department stubbornly refused to yield me any fibre-free pods, I've been looking at alternative ways of getting them. Which now involves several simultaneous endeavours.

Growing out the rest of the F2 seed from whence the original came. This is the biggest hope. The particular combination of genes I need are a minority class which will only show up in a small proportion of the F2 offspring. I need the yellow pod gene (recessive), two purple pod genes (both dominant) and two fibre-thwarting genes (both recessive). I can't be arsed to look up in a Punnett Square what the actual chances are and calculate the number of plants I need for 95% probability … I'm content to know that it may take a lot of plants in order to deliver the holy grail. This year it's down to luck anyway, as I have only a small amount of F2 seed left and so I can't grow lots of plants. Even the seed I do have is of poor quality because it was grown from a late summer crop (I used to have this trick of growing two consecutive generations in one season to double the speed of my breeding work, but have since stopped doing it because the second crop yields weak seed at best, and at worst yields nothing and just wastes valuable breeding material). So I have about fifteen, maybe twenty plants, and they may or may not offer any red pods. The moment of truth is approaching, as the F2 plants have got flower buds.





They're very pretty buds, with the mauve blush that promises bicolour flowers. Both parent varieties had bicolour flowers, so I'm expecting to see it in all the offspring. The ones shown above are fairly typical and there are others similar, with more or less purple sploshing on the stems and leaves. But I can already categorically rule out any red pods from these two plants or any of the others currently budding. The reason? Green calyx.

Green calyx means green pods. I've noticed from my work with yellow podded peas that there is a direct correlation between the calyx colour and the pod colour. Yellow podded peas are always preceded by pale cream buds which turn into a cream calyx. Sometimes it has green mottling, and pink dapples, but the base colour is always cream. (Have a look at the picture of Peachy above and see how cream the calyx is compared to these F2 buds). I suspect the cream calyx/yellow pod may actually be coded by the same gene. If they are separate genes, they are certainly slapped together pretty tightly on the chromosome, and inherit together. It's not affected by flower colour - you can get white flowers or purple bicolour flowers on a yellow-podded pea, it's just the calyx and pod colour that are inseparable from each other.

When I say that green calyx means green pods, it may also mean purple pods … or partial purple. That's because purple podded peas are in fact green podded. I know that sounds weird, and I've had to explain it so many times on plant breeding forums it's obviously something a lot of people find hard to follow. If you look closely at a purple pod, the very tip where it attaches onto the plant is green. Break it open and it will be green inside. The purple pigment, no matter how intense it looks, is merely on the surface, and the base colour of the pod is green. This is also the reason why all purple podded peas turn green when cooked. The water-soluble anthocyanin pigment is just sitting on the surface and is washed away in hot water.

I admit it did take me a while to work this out. The first time I grew F2 seeds from this cross, it produced red, green, yellow and purple pods in varying proportions. I couldn't understand why a cross between a purple podder and a yellow podder yielded so many offspring with green pods. Neither of the parents appeared to have green pods so where did they come from? The simple answer is that the purple parent is green podded, with the green hidden under the layer of purple. In the great gene reshuffle, some of the offspring end up with green pods without the genes for purple overlay, and so they stay green.

The same principle applies to red pods. They are simply yellow-podded peas with a purple overlay, which combines visually to make deep red. It's not possible to have red pods unless the base colour of the pod is yellow. That's how I know the two buds shown above are not going to give me red pods. A red-podder bud will invariably have a cream calyx, not a green one.

While I shouldn't condone the practice of peeking inside unopened leaf clusters to look at bud colours, I naturally can't resist it. And it's been very encouraging. Because two of the upcoming F2 plants which are not ready to blossom yet are showing cream buds among distinctly yellowy foliage. Even when they're tiny, the cream colour is unmistakable. The cream buds don't necessarily result in red pods, some will just stay yellow, it depends whether the genes for purple overlay are also present. But they do open up the likelihood of it. Also, one of the cream buds is showing a speck of pink colour on the calyx. While I don't have a genetic explanation for it, I have noticed a strong correlation between pink markings on the calyx and red pods. So I'm feeling lucky with this one.


Maybe it's not very clear in this photo, but this developing bud has a cream calyx - ergo yellow pods. Also a tiny pink spot on the calyx which is a good sign.

It's still pot luck whether any of the plants in this small sample will give me exactly what I want, but the solution is in there if only I can grow enough F2 plants. Which brings me on to my convenient back-up plan …


Growing out more F1 plants to make new F2 seed. I still have a number of F1 seeds saved from when I made the original cross. The seeds are good, healthy mature ones too. I started off a batch of about ten F1 plants this year. The beauty of peas and their efficient self-pollination is that you don't need to do anything except grow the F1 plants and save seed from them. They are veritable F2 seed machines. Every pea they produce has a unique individual genome, its own personal reshuffling of all those genetic goodies. Somewhere among the reshuffles is bound to be the specific five-gene combination I'm looking for.


F1 hybrid of Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded. Flowering like billy-o and hopefully making lots of nice F2 seeds for me.

What's interesting about these F1 plants is that they are showing massive hybrid vigour, or heterosis. It's a phenomenon brought about by having a mixed up genome, a by-product of heterozygosity. Its cause has always been something of a mystery, though I'm told that some recent research has put it down to an enhanced ability for photosynthesis. Whatever the reason for it, my own observation is that it only happens in certain crosses - though there are degrees of it. And it's for one generation only - you don't tend to see it in F2 plants. This has been especially marked in my current crop, because I sowed the F1 and F2 seeds from the same cross side by side in the same rootrainer tray, and they are now growing side by side out in the garden. And from the moment of germination, the F1 plants rocketed away from their F2 nephews. They grew faster, had thicker stems, established themselves in the outdoors quicker, produced substantially bigger leaves and grew taller. They were also earlier to flower - and still having a burst of surplus energy to get shot of, have thrown out a lot of sideshoots too. Pea sideshoots are usually feeble, spindly things, if they ever get going at all. These are nothing of the sort. They are full-size, chunky, vigorous new branches which look set to flower and make pods.

Something else peculiar about the F1 plants, or one of them at least. I've been writing about the leaf aberrations in my peas this year, which I'm beginning to conclude are probably weather related. I mentioned the fasciation (thickening of the stem) in one of my other hybrids, despite the fact that it's a trait caused by recessive genes. Well, now some spontaneous fasciation has occurred in one of these F1 plants. To my knowledge, there are no fasciation genes in this hybrid, which is not related to the other one - they are completely separate breeding lines. Which leads me to assume that pea fasciation is not solely genetic, and can arise as an environmental reaction. What's even more weird is that the plant in question managed to unfasciate itself by splitting into two stems. A single stem with a well developed sideshoot is one thing, but this is a pair of twin stems growing at the same rate in different directions, equal and opposite.


This F1 pea developed spontaneous fasciation (stem widening) and then split into two separate but equal growing tips. This is not normal for peas!

Edit: I've just done some homework on fasciation, following a link from Rhizowen's wonderful blog, and it seems that spontaneous fasciation from environmental stress is a well known phenomenon - actually more common than genetic fasciation. It's caused by damage to the growing tip by virus, bacteria, insect nibbling or frost - and a reversion back to normal growth is also common. In this case, frost is almost certainly the culprit.

Other avenues. I had just eight seeds left from my original red podded pea. I sowed them, and three fell victim to marauding gastropods. The five survivors are doing well though, and although there will be no edible pods among them, they will enable me to make some crosses. The priority will be to cross them with my two Luna Trick lines, which are genetically similar, being derived from the same original parent variety, but represent a superior form of it with good-flavoured and fully edible yellow pods. Another batch of twenty or so are on the go, thanks to my big haired friend Graham, who grew some last year and gave me back some seeds from the best of them. Again, they won't have edible pods, but they will be priceless for making crosses and might also make the basis for a red-podded shelling pea. Also of course there's the Peachy line which has edible pods which are part-red. That might turn into a variety in its own right, and will certainly be useful for making crosses with the pure red (if it ever gives me any pollen).

A tomato round-up

I never got round to blogging about last year's tomato crop, so here is a very brief summary of it before this year's crop reaches the point where I have to blog about that instead. I didn't grow very much last year, so here are the three best ones. Bottle tops are included for scale.


Essex Wonder

Essex Wonder - I got this one from the Heritage Seed Library, mainly for sentimental reasons. I grew up in north Essex which has (or had) an extensive market gardening and glasshouse industry. Essex Wonder was a popular market gardener's tomato from the 1930s to 1950s, extensively grown in the area before dropping from the catalogues and fading to near-extinction. I found it to be a very pleasant if rather "normal" tomato compared to the weird freakish stuff I usually grow. The fruits are almost perfectly spherical and bright red and come in a range of sizes from mini-cherry to golf ball, all with a pretty decent flavour.



OSU Blue Fruit

OSU Blue Fruit - oh this is special! Bred by Jim Myers at Oregon State University in the US, it's a dark anthocyanin-skinned purple tomato which, given enough direct sunlight, turns coal black when it's ripe. At the moment it isn't available commercially (as far as I know); they're working on improving its flavour and shape, and this prototype is doing the rounds among curious collectors and amateur breeders. I got mine from Michael Johnson in Nottingham.

The fruits are only purple/black on the outside. Cut them open and they are red. They also stay red - or a deep bronzy red-black - on any part that doesn't get full sun, because they need strong light to develop their colour. That includes the area underneath the calyx at the top of the fruit, so they have a little red star on the top when you harvest them. They are supposedly more reliable at developing the full colour when grown outdoors, but I grew mine in the greenhouse and they came up a treat.

As with many exciting plant breeding developments, the mechanism behind the blue fruit is relatively straightforward. There are three wild species of tomato which contain some anthocyanin pigment in the fruit, each involving a different gene. Two are dominant: Abg comes from Solanum lycopersicoides while Aft is found in Solanum chilense, and the recessive atv comes from Solanum cheesemanii. All of these genes have already been bred into cultivated tomatoes over the years, without producing fully blue fruits. What the OSU team discovered was that if you combine all three of these genes together you get a cumulative effect which intensifies the pigment. Voilà blue fruit.

The downside of OSU Blue Fruit is said to be its flavour, which has a reputation for being "inky". Anthocyanins are normally tasteless, but they're often accompanied by other compounds and biochemical changes which can affect the flavour. Consequently I wasn't expecting that much from it in the way of taste. But I was pleasantly surprised - it was actually pretty palatable. I'd be lying if I said it was up there with the best tasting tomatoes, but it certainly wasn't poor either … it was as good as or better than most of what you'd find in the supermarket.



Pugliese Green

Pugliese Green - this Italian variety was given to me by Jeremy Cherfas over at Agricultural Biodiversity. Despite the name, it's very much a red tomato, and doesn't look significantly different from other red tomatoes, though it has a certain intensity of colour. There is one thing that makes it stand out though - the flavour is stupendously good. I'm even able to nibble at it raw (see below). It's fruity and juicy and succulent with just the right balance of gel and flesh, and will probably become a flavour benchmark for me. Thank you Jeremy.


That was last year's crop. Meanwhile the 2010 crop is going nuts in the greenhouse making the most of the unlikely sunny weather. Here's what I've got crammed in there …

OSU Blue Fruit
Tangella
Isis Candy
Anna Russian
Green Zebra
Green Tiger
Darby Striped Pink/Yellow
Darby Striped Red/Green
Pugliese Green
Essex Wonder
Pink Freud F3 (one of my own experiments)
Banana Legs x Green Tiger F1 (another bit of hand-pollinated jiggery pokery)


The horrendous affliction of late blight means that it's no longer practical to grow tomatoes anywhere but inside the greenhouse, where they're sheltered from the warm summer rain which brings the deadly spores to the garden. Normally it's not worth trying to grow any outdoor tomatoes any more, but Patrick kindly sent me some seeds of Tomatito de Jalapa, which is supposed to be blight resistant. There are genes for blight resistence in certain wild species of tomato, and some of these are being bred into garden varieties. From what I gather, this has been working OK with small cherry tomatoes but is not much cop when it comes to the big-fruited types. So if you want blight resistance you have to have tiddly little fruits. Which is fine by me, I don't mind. I have little knowledge of what Tomatito de Jalapa is like or how assiduously it fends off blight, but I'm looking forward to experimenting with it. The greenhouse is full, but the beauty of this one is that I can grow it outdoors.


Tomatito de Jalapa seedlings, as photographed a couple of weeks ago. They have since been potted up individually and are growing like rockets.

I've also got another tomato that I pinched from a restaurant. I don't know what variety it is, but I had to have it. At this point I need to confess something. I actually hate raw tomatoes, and can't eat them unless they're mixed with something else. I love them cooked, and I love growing them, but when it comes to snacking them off the vine - forget it. They actually make me gag. But a couple of months ago I was in a little basement restaurant in Cheltenham called Café Rubik, which does very nice food. The curse of being vegetarian though is that everything you order always comes with salad. Chefs seem to assume that all vegetarians are health freaks and don't want to eat chips or anything stodgy and interesting, so if you're vegetarian simply because you don't want to eat dead animals but do want to eat stodgy interesting and unhealthy stuff without dead animals in, you're out of luck. So, confronted with the mandatory pile of bleak greenery, I was thinking "fuck, how am I going to get through all these raw tomatoes?" But when I nibbled the edge of one I was surprised to find it rather fruity. I nibbled a bit more. It didn't taste of tomatoes at all, it was like a tangy little fruit - a cape gooseberry or something. I then astounded myself by eating a whole one, and actually enjoyed it. This really was a momentous event because I've never eaten a raw tomato like that before. It was unprecedented.

Well obviously there's only one thing you can do in those circumstances, and that's steal one to take home and get the seeds out of it. I waited some while for a moment when the waiter wasn't looking, but he seemed to be looking all the time, so in the end I just grabbed one and shoved it in my pocket. He looked a bit surprised but didn't say anything. I took it home and fermented the gel and got quite a few seeds from it. Although received wisdom has it that tomatoes need to over-ripen to the point of inedibility in order to produce mature seed, I've always had perfectly good results saving seeds from eating-stage tomatoes, and indeed other vegetables. If you like the taste of it scrape some seeds out of it, that's my motto.


The original Café Rubik tomato, as pilfered.

Sure enough the seeds germinated rampantly and have grown into very healthy plants. They all look the same so far too, which is a good sign, as it implies that it's a true-breeding open pollinated variety and not a hybrid. I've no idea what variety it is, though presumably it does have a real name. It might even be a well known mainstream commercial variety for all I know. But I've called it Café Rubik in lieu of an identification. Not much to tell from its outer appearance … it's round, and red, and tomatoish. I'll post pictures of the plants as they grow in case anybody recognises it.

Leaf weirdness

Well it was only a few days ago that I blogged about the likely genetic expression in my Alderman x Salmon-Flowered F1 pea. And already the plants are thumbing their noses at me and proving me wrong.

Let me begin my explanation by showing you a picture of their dad.


Salmon-Flowered pea growing in my garden in 2007. This is an umbellatum type pea which bears all its flowers in a clump at the top. This happens because the new stems formed at each successive leaf node fuse together and are drawn upwards into a big fat monster stem, for which the technical word is fasciation.

I mentioned that fasciation is caused by a very particular combination of three recessive genes. Because they're recessive, and they need to present themselves all together in order to do their thing, I wasn't expecting to see any sign of fasciation in the F1. I thought they would be masked by the dominant alleles of Alderman. Shows how much I bloody know about it.




Young Alderman x Salmon-Flowered F1 plant showing early but unmistakable signs of stem fasciation. In other words, it's going to be an umbellatum phenotype with a clumpy flower posy at the top.

I don't know why this is happening - I was expecting the growth habit to be more in keeping with the hybrid's mum, Alderman. Multiple-recessives do have interesting effects, but you see that in the F2 plants, not the F1. What's most odd is that I have some young Salmon-Flowered plants on the go at the moment and they are not yet showing anywhere near as much fasciation as this. Perhaps Alderman has one or more of the recessive fasciation genes hidden unexpressed in its DNA. Perhaps the recessives don't have an equivalent dominant allele and are able to express themselves freely. I haven't got a clue (suggestions welcome) so I'm just speculating. At any rate it's showing itself consistently in all the F1 plants.


Alderman x Salmon-Flowered F1. The leaf stems have divided and doubled themselves, a feature of umbellatum peas.

Meanwhile though, I'm seeing some leaf aberrations in my other peas too, and those are even more devoid of an explanation. It takes many forms and it's mostly happening among my hybrids, but not exclusively. I've no idea what causes these effects. Cold weather? Virus? Genetic mismatch? Mystical cosmic rays?

Pea leaves usually come in pairs, but here is a gallery of weirdness.


Trefoil. Golden Sweet x Kent Blue F1.


Quatrefoil. Magnum Bonum x Carruthers' Purple Podded F2.


Another quatrefoil. This one is bearing one of its leaves upside down, and has two sets of tendrils, one on each side. Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded F2.


Quatrefoil at the main node, creating a butterfly effect. Red-podded pea (Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded F5).


Magnum Bonum x Carruthers' Purple Podded F2. This hybrid is the one that is showing by far the most leaf weirdness, with a number of the plants showing what I can only describe as a "cabbaging" effect … with surplus leaf growth bunching up around the growing tip, and sometimes even terminating the tip in a leaf-and-tendril dead end. But curiously, it is only affecting the plants that were grown from light-coloured (cream or green) seeds. I sowed the dark coloured seeds separately in the same tray and those are all normal.


May Queen, an old English variety, with two leaf nodes fused together. Each node has a fully formed pair of leaves and a single flowering stem, but all squashed up together.

At least I haven't suffered any losses (yet) in the recent spell of unseasonal frost, except for a pot of bush basil which 'melted' overnight when the temperature got too low for it. Apart from that, I've been lucky - thanks to Cheltenham's sheltered climate and my garden being hemmed in by trees and houses. Garden pests have been taking their toll though. After an abnormally dry spring which kept the slugs and snails in hibernation for weeks longer than normal, a few days of heavy rain brought them all out and they were ravenously hungry. The Luna Trick F4 crop suffered some quite severe damage, with about a quarter of the plants gnawed down to stumps within 48 hours. The damaged ones will make new shoots, but it will set them back by several weeks. Sluggy bastards. I even had a potato haulm completely devoured in the space of two nights - gone and vanished without trace. The culprits for this damage tend to be either the large brown garden snails or the tiny keel slugs who live in the soil and are barely noticed at the crime scene.

The other garden pest damaging my peas at the moment is a ginger cat with a big arse. It's a funny thing about cat social mentality - he wants attention and doesn't care whether it's positive or negative as long as he's getting it. He enjoys cuddles but is really just as happy when I'm yelling and chasing him off with a broom. Since he discovered he can get lots of noises and arm-waving from me by crashing over onto my pea seedlings, he's taken to doing it repeatedly. And the more I go "aaaargh!" the more he does it. I'm trying to reverse-condition him by walking away and ignoring him, but it's easier said than done … when someone slaps their capacious backside down on baby F4 plants that represent four years' breeding work, sometimes you just have to leap around and shout.


The Arse of Doom

F1 hybrid peas and axil splodges

I thought I'd put up some pictures of the F1 hybrid peas I've got going, even though they don't look all that exciting at the moment. They aren't flowering yet but this is a good time to admire their axillary pigmentation.

I don't read up as much as I should on pea genetics, but it certainly seems that the genes controlling the expression of colour in different parts of the plant tend to come as a package deal. From what I have bothered to read, I know that there are distinct and separate genes for pink splodges in the leaf axil, for purple or pink bicolour flowers, purple seedcoat speckles and purple pods - plus another gene which switches colour production on or off for the whole plant. The purple pod genes (there's actually two of those) are often inherited separately, but the rest seem always to go together. It's quite useful in some ways, because the axil splodge enables me to predict flower colour several weeks before they flower, or even to select for flower colour before I sow by going for the dark-coloured or speckled seeds. Although they're different genes they are presumably all squidged right up together on the same chromosome.

The axillary splodges are made by just one major gene, but there is a lot of subtle variation in how they are expressed.


Golden Sweet x Kent Blue F1

I made this hybrid in 2007 and the seeds have been sitting around ever since waiting for me to do something with them. The plants have a very intense blotch in the leaf axil, with a distinctively purple hue.

I'm not sure what I'm expecting to get from this hybrid, it's one of my suck-it-and-see crosses. Both parents are heritage varieties of some considerable vintage, which usually makes for interesting hybrids. Certain traits can be predicted in the F1: Golden Sweet is yellow podded, but there is no trace of yellow colouring in these F1 plants because it's a recessive trait and will be hiding for now. I expect to see yellow pods in a quarter of the F2 offspring next year, but not in these. Bicolour purple flowers are pretty much a certainty though, as both parent varieties have them. But Kent Blue has the unusual feature of changing its flower colour. The flowers open as normal mauve and maroon bicolours, but within a day or so they change to a sky blue and midnight blue bicolour. They also have very pronounced veining on the back of the petals, which is very pretty. Whether these traits will show up in the F1 flowers remains to be seen. I'm also curious to see what happens to the pods in terms of width and knobbliness. Both parents are edible podded varieties of a slightly primitive type (i.e. not as sleek and fibre-free as a modern cultivar). There are two recessive genes responsible for edible pods and the way they interact is quite crucial. Depending on which ones I have here, the hybrid may be completely fibre-free (better than either parent) or they might be totally inedible. It may seem strange that you can cross two edible-podded varieties together and end up with inedible pods, but it does happen (and has happened to me!) It's one of the endearing little quirks you get in a multi-factor cross with recessive genes.




Golden Sweet x Carruthers' Purple Podded F1

This hybrid is the parent of my red-podded pea. The red pods showed up in a small proportion of the F2 seeds, and so I'm growing another batch of F1 plants in order to produce more F2 seed, in the hope of getting some red edible podded recombos. These plants are from the original batch of seeds from the cross I made in 2007, and despite the seed being three years old they are showing considerable hybrid vigour, overtaking all the other peas in the garden.

The axillary pigmentation is very flamboyant, forming two distinct pinky-red rings with a white band in the middle, and something of a Bowie lightning flash at the top. This is an exaggerated form of the double axil ring inherited from Golden Sweet.

As I've already grown some of these F1 seeds I know what to expect from them, but a lot of it is easy to predict anyway. Both parents have purple flowers, which are dominant, so the F1 will have them too. Both parents are tall, and that's also dominant. Carruthers' Purple Podded passes on the two dominant genes for purple pods, so the F1 hybrid will have purple pods. Golden Sweet contributes the yellow-pod gene, but that's recessive, so none in the F1 generation. It's when these genes segregate out in the F2 that things get exciting, because when the two purple pod genes happen to come together with the yellow pod gene, that's the magic formula that gives red pods.




Alderman x Salmon-Flowered F1

Another 2007 hybrid which has sat in a box and never been grown before. This one is a cross between one of the best heritage shelling peas and a botanical curiosity, so it is venturing into uncharted territory. See how subdued the axil colour is on this one. It's a soft muted pink and sits tightly within the axil without spreading out into the leaf. The upper stem and tendrils have a rosy blush too, and the leaves have red edges. These traits are all inherited from dad, Salmon-Flowered. There are no obvious colour genes in Alderman, though it may have some unexpressed ones lurking in its genome waiting to burst forth in an unexpected carnival. On the surface it's a fairly normal green-podded pea, chosen for its excellent flavour.

What makes Salmon-Flowered such a curiosity is that it's an umbellatum type pea. These were popular in past centuries, once known as crown peas, but they are now rare. Instead of producing flowers and pods up the length of the stem, they bear all their bounty in a whopping great clump at the top. They look so different from normal peas that they were formerly classified as a separate species, Pisum umbellatum. This has now been dropped, however, since it was discovered that they are botanically the same as other domestic peas and their bizarre form is merely the result of a combination of three recessive genes, whose exact function and interaction is still not fully understood.

Well I don't understand them either, but as they are all recessive I can probably assume that none of the umbellatum traits will be apparent in an F1 hybrid. Even in the F2, it may be a very small minority class (where all three recessives combine). Never mind, there is other excitement to discover. Such as flower colour. Alderman is a white-flowered pea, and white flowers are recessive. Salmon-Flowered is ... er ... salmon flowered (two-tone pale pink and salmon pink) which I believe is also recessive. What happens when I cross these two shrinking violets? God knows. I'll have to wait and see. They may be pink, they may be white - or they may be neither. As I said above, a multi-factor cross with recessive genes can throw up surprising and counterintuitive results. I'm looking forward to seeing what turns up.

Now this is good customer service ...

Always looking to explore unusual heritage varieties and seek out material for breeding experiments, I was pleased to see that AlanRomans.com were stocking minitubers (that is, small laboratory-grown seed potatoes) of an old and hard to find blue potato called Congo. I'm interested in Congo because it's blue-fleshed - blue all the way through - and I have a strong interest in vegetables that bear this colour pigment because of its nutritional benefits as well as its glorious beauty. As well as being historically interesting and quirky, Congo has a reputation for being a good berry setter. That would make it an excellent variety to experiment with in breeding work, because it would ensure a good supply of TPS. I could have some real fun crossing it with other varieties, but also growing out its own self-pollinated TPS, which would in itself yield some interesting segregation for different traits (if you've read my article about TPS below, you'll know that the tetraploid arrangement of the potato genome gives it something of the nature of a genetic fruit machine).

So I ordered a pack of five Congo minitubers - not the kind of quantity that would give a good yield for the dinner table, but plenty enough to get the variety established in my garden and see what it has to offer. When my order arrived a couple of days later it contained not one minituber pack but two. The handwritten note explained that they only had 15mm-ish tubers left in stock rather than the 20mm-ish ones they preferred to supply, and so they sent me 6 rather than the 5 I ordered. Additionally, they sent me a pack of 5 minitubers of another rare and special variety, Red Craigs Royal, as a freebie. The Red Craigs Royal tubers had already started to chit and were at a stage where they really needed to be planted. This is really good customer service - it's a great way to keep people like me happy, because I get to add another precious heritage spud to my inventory and ensures that I will want to order from them again next time, and it shows that their attitude to heritage varieties is well motivated, in that they would rather give unsold stock to a good home.

As far as I'm aware, nobody in the UK is doing more than Alan Romans in conserving and promoting heritage potatoes. You may have seen these varieties making an appearance in Thompson & Morgan's catalogue, and in Waitrose - but all that is down to him. And it's not a simple case of reintroducing them on a whim either ... the laws and regulations relating to the sale of seed potatoes (and culinary ones) are complex and restrictive, and he's had a heck of a lot of bureaucracy to struggle against. It wouldn't be legal to sell field-grown potatoes to gardeners without an expensive process of certification, and minitubers are his latest solution to this obstacle. They are produced in a laboratory environment from disease-free plants held in vitro. Although they are small, they can be grown on and will soon build up a decent yield. The sterile environment in which they're produced may make them a little vulnerable when you plant them in the unfettered ravages of the soil, but they seem to cope and I've managed to grow laboratory-raised plants under organic conditions without too many problems. The bottom line is, if it wasn't for the laboratory process these rare and interesting varieties simply wouldn't be available at all.



Red Craigs Royal minitubers. The original Craigs Royal was introduced in 1947, bred in Scotland from a cross of Craigs Defiance x Gladstone. This red-skinned sport appeared in Perthshire in 1957 and quickly became extremely popular for its good yields and excellent flavour - only to be plunged into obscurity a few years later as the market moved on to other things. It's a second early type with a floury texture. As for its usefulness in my breeding projects, well, I'm not sure what to expect because the European Cultivated Potato Database lists it as a poor producer of berries but also as having high fertility pollen.



Congo minitubers. They don't look very exciting at the moment, but they are full of potential. There is a degree of confusion over this variety because there are two Congos. This blue-fleshed one is of British origin, thought possibly to have been created by a shepherd in the Scottish borders in the late 19th century. The other Congo is from Sweden and has white flesh (edit - or maybe not!). As if that wasn't confusing enough, there are suggestions that the blue version has many synonyms and may be known around the world as All Blue, British Columbia Blue, Russian Blue, Himalayan Black and McIntosh Black, amongst others - though they may be variants rather than identical clones. Congo is a very late maturing variety - so here's hoping the blight pestilence will be merciful.

Sowing potatoes from TPS

Flowers of Salad Blue, one of the few potato varieties which produces copious quantities of true seed.

I have a very exciting new project underway. My good friend Patrick sent me some true potato seed - generally called TPS - from legendary potato-tomato breeder Tom Wagner. Tom was the founder of TaterMater Seeds in the 1980s, is the creator of the Green Zebra tomato and various others which are now ubiquitous in seed catalogues, and now dispenses his wisdom on the TaterMater messageboard. These potato seeds are from various hybrid and open-pollinated lines in Tom's ongoing breeding work and it's a real privilege to have them.

Not many people grow potatoes from TPS, and there's a few reasons for that. It's not as quick and easy as chucking a few shop-bought tubers in the ground … although the long term rewards are greater. The seeds are not readily available either. I've never seen them for sale anywhere, and you generally have to save your own.

First I should explain what I mean by true seed. When you buy a bag of spuds for planting, they are normally sold as seed potatoes. But it's a bit of a misnomer really. A seed potato (i.e. a tuber) is a root cutting - or clone to use the US term - of the original plant. Tubers are genetically identical to each other, as they only reproduce by mitosis - that is, they are a vegetative extension of the parent plant. Although spontaneous mutations can and do happen, they're uncommon enough that you are pretty much assured of getting a harvest that exactly matches the tuber you planted.

TPS is not the tuber, but the actual seeds - which come from the plant's flowers and fruits. As seeds are produced by sexual means, a coming together of egg and pollen from different flowers or different plants, they represent a genetic recombination. In other words, they are not genetically identical to the parent plant. They are newly created individuals.

If you sow these seeds they will grow into unique new potato plants, and produce their own tubers. The tubers will be small the first year, and will need to be replanted the following season to produce decent sized yields. So it takes two years, but then you go on growing it from tubers as you would any normal potato, and you effectively have a new variety. Potatoes raised from true seed are generally free of virus and disease (at least for the first couple of years).


True potato seed, extracted from the berries of Salad Blue. The seeds look rather like tomato seeds, but smaller and smoother.

Potato varieties don't come true from seed, so you never know exactly what you're going to get. Conventional wisdom has it that any plant that doesn't come true from seed is not worth sowing. But to me, and probably most people reading this blog, the unpredictability is exactly what makes it interesting! Even if you sow seeds which were self-pollinated, you can end up with a lot of variation.

A lot of people don't realise that potatoes produce fruits, for the very good reason that most of them don't. Domesticated potatoes have got so used to reproducing through root cuttings - tubers - that they can't be arsed to make viable flowers any more. Some don't flower at all, while some make flowers with sterile pollen, and the flowers just drop off. But every now and then you will find plants which set berries. It's mostly a variety thing, although environmental factors also play a big part. The berries look like small green tomatoes, sometimes with a blush of blue or purple. Some potato varieties produce berries very freely. Salad Blue (pictured above) is a prolific and reliable berry bearer. As is Mayan Gold below.


Potato berries on Mayan Gold. This variety is a hybrid of Solanum phureja, a little different from yer common or garden spud, which is Solanum tuberosum. The berries are slightly strawberry shaped - indicating that this species is diploid - whereas most potato berries are more rounded, but the same principles apply.

I'll leave the explanation of extracting and saving TPS for another post, as there are no berries around at this time of year. I will also hold off giving a more detailed genetic explanation, as I'm still on a learning curve with that myself. But what I should explain, briefly, is the reason potatoes grown from TPS are potentially so variable.

The cells of most plants (and humans for that matter) have pairs of chromosomes, in which each gene is inherited in a simple either/or relationship. This arrangement is known as diploid. When a diploid organism reproduces, each parent contributes a single chromosome, and the two join together to make a new chromosome pair. Somewhere along the line, nature had a bit of a freakout with potatoes. Instead of reducing down to one chromosome per parent, an unreduced pair of chromosomes managed to get it together with another unreduced pair. The result is a tetraploid - an organism with four chromosomes instead of the usual two. This basically means it contains two complete genomes - and twice as much genetic material.

Most of the potatoes we know and love today are tetraploid. Although it's a freak of nature, it's quite a beneficial one as tetraploids tend to be bigger and more perfectly formed than their diploid equivalents. If you're interested in how it works and why it's useful, I recommend the Polyploidy Portal for a readable explanation. For the benefit of this post however, I'm going to simplify it to its most basic level. When you make crosses with a 'normal' diploid species, the potential genetic recombination at each allele is very like what you would get if you toss two coins. Plenty good enough for some interesting combinations. With potatoes, however, it's more like the effect of tossing four coins. An exponential increase in the number of possible outcomes. This is why potatoes are so variable when grown from true seed! It's a genetic pile-up bursting with magical possibility.


TPS seedlings from Tom's seeds. These are an F1 hybrid between Mandel, a Swedish potato renowned for its flavour, and Tom's own variety John Tom Kaighin, which has been bred for flavour and blight resistance. Neither of these varieties is readily available in the UK. There is a good chance of some excellent flavoured spuds from these seeds, most likely with yellow skin and yellow flesh, and some fingerling types.


How to sow TPS
When Tom Wagner visited the UK last year he gave a lot of advice about how to grow potatoes from TPS. Much of this was captured in a series of videos which you can watch or download on Patrick's blog. What I'm attempting to do here is distil some of Tom's basic instructions into text form - but you can find a lot more detail (including a demo of how to extract the seeds from the berries) in Patrick's videos.

TPS can be sown in spring from mid-March onwards, in any kind of tray or module, and any kind of seed compost. It doesn't need to be a deep module. In this respect, TPS is the opposite of peas. I sow my peas in deep containers so that they produce a deep root run. With potatoes that isn't what you want, because the aim is not to produce lots of root under the seed, but to earth up the young plant as it grows and encourage it to produce roots along the stem. So effectively, you are encouraging the roots to develop upwards rather than downwards!

Potato seeds are small, and so are the emerging seedlings. So you don't want to bury them too deeply. Sow them thinly on the surface of the compost and either press them in or give them a very light covering. I used vermiculite to cover mine, as it helps to keep them moist. Even then I used only a tiny sprinkling, and scooped out the very fine, dusty vermiculite from the bottom of the bag where there are fewer big chunks.

Once you have sown the seeds, keep them warm and damp. As with all small seeds, it's safest to water them by lightly spraying the surface of the compost or using a very fine rose on a watering can. If you're not careful you can wash the seeds away. You can put the tray in a polythene bag or under clingfilm to keep the moisture in, but Tom doesn't recommend this as it increases the likelihood of mould forming on the compost.


Another of Tom's hybrids which I'm growing at the moment. This is an F3 from Pirampo x Khuchi Akita. These are Bolivian landraces whose tubers look quite different from modern conventional potatoes … in fact I've never seen anything like them in Europe, so I'm very excited by the possible diversity in this hybrid. Pirampo is pink, and Khuchi Akita is purple skinned and crescent-shaped. Tom made this cross to introduce a bit of historic diversity into the potato genepool. The parent landraces are diploid, but can be crossed with other potato varieties to make tetraploids with lots of diversity.

Most of the seedlings will germinate in 5-10 days. But it's not necessarily a bad sign if they take longer. Like tomatoes, they can be fickle about germinating, and will pop up when they decide the time is right - sometimes weeks after sowing.

If you're used to the big chunky shoots that potatoes produce when grown from tubers, you may be surprised - alarmed even - at how small and delicate the TPS seedlings are when they emerge. Although they look similar to tomato seedlings, they are significantly smaller. Have faith - they will grow!

Something else they have in common with tomatoes (and peppers) is seed husk retention. Some seedlings emerge with the seed husk still clamped over their heads. You don't need to worry about this though, because potato seed husks are paper thin, and much less of a problem than the tougher tomato and pepper husks. As tiny as the seedlings are, they will soon tear their way out of their helmets without any need of human intervention.


My tray of potato seedlings enjoying a bit of outdoor sunbathing. As they are still young and delicate, I put them in a box to keep the wind off them.

One piece of advice that Tom wanted to make very clear is the importance of sunlight on the young seedlings - by which he meant direct outdoor sunlight and not a greenhouse or sunny windowsill. The reason for this is that potatoes evolved in a part of the world where light is very intense and the air very thin, and so they are dependent on the ultraviolet light that can only be got from direct exposure. If there's a day when the sun is shining (and of course that is a big 'if' in the United Kingdom, but never mind) it's worth putting the potato seedlings outside in the sun, even just for a couple of hours. That way, they develop into strong sturdy plants rather than stretching out and going leggy. However they are still quite delicate at this early stage in their life cycle so you need to stop the spring winds from blowing across them. Placing the seed tray in a larger box, as shown above, should give them the protection they need while still allowing them to sunbathe in the open. If the weather is rubbish when the seedlings emerge, well, there's not a lot you can do about that, but it's a case of making the most of whatever sunlight there is.

I'm going to deal with transplanting in a later post, when my plants reach the appropriate stage and I can take some photographs. In the mean time, I can grow them in these modules until they're a couple of inches tall. The principle of transplanting is the same as that for tomatoes … they benefit from being transplanted at least twice and being buried up to the top set of leaves each time. Because potatoes, like tomatoes, are very efficient at producing feeding roots along their stems. This is, of course, why tuber-grown potatoes are earthed up as they grow. Although the TPS seedlings are tiny, the earthing up method is still the most effective way to grow them.

More anon.

Looking to grow a potato variety that is available in the UK and likely to set berries?
This list is based on a quick search of the European Cultivated Potato Database, but don't rely on it too much. The ECPD takes its data from available research - but you may find differences when you grow the spuds in your garden!

If you want a good chance of berries, try these varieties:

Cara
Desiree
Marfona
Maris Bard
Maris Piper
Mayan Gold
Pentland Dell
Salad Blue
Valor

Garden gallery: some of the herbs I grow

Chocolate peppermint, a variety of Mentha piperita. I love peppermint, it's my favourite of all the mints for flavour and for medicinal use. I'm always a little sceptical of 'flavoured' herbs, because some of them really are rubbish and don't taste anything like their names suggest. We would get Pomegranate and Ginseng thyme or Oak-Smoked Cheddar and Somerset Raspberry basil if somebody thought they could make a quick buck out of it. But Chocolate peppermint is good. It doesn't really taste of chocolate of course ... the name is partly for the warmly chocolatey stem colour and partly because the sweet, clean, intense flavour evokes the taste of After Eight mints. But it's tasty enough that I eat the leaves straight off the plant. Love it.



And another of the flavoured herbs which stands out for me. This is Lemon Variegated thyme, more properly known as Thymus pulegioides Aurea and a product of Thymus x citriodorus. It has large rounded leaves of a deep green with bright yellow margins. I always thought the golden variegated thymes were bred for ornamental rather than culinary use, but this one is a corker. The lemon taste is sharp, intense and well developed with no bitter herby undertone, and a little goes a long way when you cook with it. I have two other citriodorus thymes: Lemon Curd, despite its enticing name, has an uninspiring flavour while Doone Valley, another golden variegated one usually sold as an ornamental, tastes better ... but neither of them are in the same league as this one.



Silver Spires rosemary. This is a silver variegated rosemary bred by Christine Wolters of Mayfields Nursery in Guildford. I keep reading that silver variegated rosemary, which was prized in England in Shakespeare's day, has been lost and no longer exists. Well I have it, and it certainly does exist. I bought the plant in 1997, and salvaged it from my old garden when I moved, but haven't seen it anywhere since. Shame, because I rate it highly for looks and flavour. There is a golden variegated rosemary which is more readily available, but this one is quite different.



More thyme. This one is an unknown variety, but I've had the plant for many years and it's the best culinary thyme I've ever found - very intense, refined flavour and dries exceptionally well. I've never seen it in garden centres. It has fine, narrow greyish leaves and grows taller than most popular thymes ... the leaves are looking quite green at the moment because it's on the cusp of flowering. The plant originally came from Waitrose, of all places. It was being sold as a fresh organic herb, the idea being that you don't bother to plant it, just take it home for the windowsill and murder it for this week's dinner. But I did plant it, and it thrived. It came from an organic farm in the Dolomite mountains of Italy, and that's all I know.



Rosemary blossom. One of the joys of this time of year, and the bees think so too.

Luna Trick F4 seedlings go forth

Luna Trick F4 plants all tagged up and ready to plant out

Well both my F4 Luna Trick batches are now planted out in the garden - the standard version and the sugarsnap version. They were sown a couple of weeks apart, in the hopes that their development will be staggered somewhat and I will be less overwhelmed by the workload. Growing peas is not in itself much of a workload … they are independent little dears. But breeding projects have a habit of being very time-consuming, especially this one, because I'm being very careful about collecting individual data on each plant. It takes a lot of effort to label and track every single plant in the project and write down detailed notes for all of them. But it will save me time in the long run because I will be able to select more precisely for the traits I want - and it will teach me a lot about the genetics involved, and pea genetics generally. By labelling every plant with its own number, which includes a code for its specific pedigree, I can identify which lines are true-breeding for dominant traits such as tallness. I'll be able to see which pedigree lines are entirely made up of tall plants and save seed only from those, which should eliminate unwanted recessives very quickly. If I pooled the F4 seed and selected from the whole group, I wouldn't know which of the tall ones were hiding unwanted recessives. So although it would save me a lot of note-taking for this year, I'd be weeding out unwanted dwarf types for years to come.


Luna Trick F4 plant, photographed today. This one is the offspring of LT10, which so far looks to be the only line which is true-breeding for tallness.

As these plants are so important to me, I take extra care with them. They have been raised in rootrainers, which in my experience are far more reliable than any other method for producing strong seedlings and healthy plants. The expense of rootrainers doesn't necessarily make them a good option for pea cultivation generally, but for me they are a worthy investment. The next important thing is soil preparation. I don't bother with fertilisers because peas don't really need them … they have a unique mechanism for producing their own. But what they do benefit from is a digging in of organic matter of some kind. Compost is good. Horse manure is excellent, but in the light of the disgraceful aminopyralid poisoning of Britain's grasslands, I'm not using manure in my garden at the moment. Removal of perennial weeds such as couch grass root is also important, because it's difficult to weed around peas once they get established.

The other special care I provide them with is protection from the weather. Peas are hardy, and I'm not at all worried about the April frosts. The cold nights we're getting at the moment are bringing out some lovely red colour in the leaves of peas capable of producing red colour (which Luna Trick isn't) but it's not harming them in any way. What peas do suffer with though is the cold blustery winds that are so common at this time of year. Having said that, this year has been astonishingly warm and settled, so it hasn't been an issue. They are only really vulnerable to this when they're young and first planted out … the cold winds wither and damage the young growing tips. Once they've got established after a couple of weeks, they are a lot more robust. So what I do for precious peas when first planted out is set up a netted fabric screen round them. Horticultural fleece is the conventional choice, but the lovely old lady who lived in my house before me has saved me ever having to buy any. The house was festooned with about 30 miles of net curtains, which do an admirable job in taking the edge off the winds without losing too much sunlight. I'm growing Luna Trick in a frame made of bamboo canes, so it's the work of a moment to attach the net curtains round it with clothes pegs. I do have to be careful to lay a few unwelcoming heavy twigs around the outside as well, because my cat finds it amusing to charge into the net curtains at high speed.


Doesn't that look grand? Well all right, it looks bloody awful, but old net curtains are very effective at filtering the English spring breezes while the seedlings get established. I make no apology for the state of my garden ... the breeding and heritage conservation work is so time consuming I don't have time to make it look pretty as well.

I keep each of my breeding projects in their own personal filing containers, made from ultra high-tech re-used cat food boxes. When I picked up an empty box the other day for a new project I'm starting, it turned out not to be empty. Rattling around inside were about a dozen lovingly sorted and labelled bags of Luna Trick seed from the best of my F3 lines, and three unmarked whole pods left loose in the box. I'm afraid I do have this bad habit of failing to label things and then forgetting what the hell they were. These seeds were all harvested earlier in the season, when I was selecting the best plants and harvesting the pods as they matured. I remember harvesting them but don't remember shelling them and boxing them up, which serves me right for smoking too much weed in my youth. There were about twelve pedigree lines in labelled bags, including a load of extra seed from my best plant LT10 … so I've sown another fifteen of those. You can never have enough LT10 as far as I'm concerned. And by starting off another batch of them now, in addition to the ones sown about a month ago, I'm greatly increasing my window of opportunity to make crosses with them.

The loose pods were something of a mystery, but there had to be a good reason I kept them separate instead of bagging them up like I did the others. According to my pollination records, which can also be a bit sporadic when I'm busy, I did some crosses between the best Luna Trick F3 plants and one of the trial varieties I grew in 2009, Buerre Cosse Rouge. This latter is quite a special little variety because it has red-sploshed pods … not quite the deep consistent crimson I got in my red-podder project, but reasonably close to it. And it's a sugarsnap type. It does have some frustrating weaknesses though. The plants (in my trial at least) were tiny and not very strong, and the yields absolutely miniscule. It produced miniscule pods that have about three peas in them, and more often than not they withered and fell off before they reached maturity. I didn't even get to taste Buerre Cosse Rouge, because I was struggling to scrape together enough seed just to regrow it this season. In doing these crosses, I had in my head the idea that I might get some red-pod gorgeousness into the voluptuous sweet abundance of Luna Trick. There is a chance - only a chance mind - that these loose pods had been kept separate because they were hybridised ones.

Fortunately for me and my slack incompetence, I should be able to find out fairly quickly. My old friend gene A will help me out. It's the gene which switches on the colour pigment in peas. Luna Trick doesn't have it - it's true-breeding for the recessive a a genotype which cannot produce anthocyanin pigment. Buerre Cosse Rouge presumably has the dominant A A type, because it has lots of anthocyanin colour. Crossing the two will give me the a A genotype, in which the recessive colourless gene gets elbowed out. In other words, if the seedlings show any trace of red colouring, I will know they are from a cross. If they turn out to be the normal unpigmented Luna Trick type, then I'll know they weren't from a cross. Thus nature sometimes forgives us for poor labelling.

(The seedlings have now emerged and so far are not showing any obvious traces of anthocyanin. Arse!)

The herb garden resurrected

I've finally got round to doing something I've meant to do ever since I moved here in 2004 - install a proper herb garden. In my previous garden, which was a miniscule 30ft by 12ft, I didn't have room to grow many vegetables and so herbs were my main thing. In that tiny garden I collected 80 varieties of herbs - culinary, medicinal and shamanic ones. But over the years most have been lost, either by dying off or having to be left behind when I moved. I always intended to make a new one, but it's taken me six years.

Last year a friend up the road had some alterations done in her house which involved knocking two rooms into one, and she said I could have the bricks if I wanted to come round and collect them. As it was an 1890s house and the bricks were lovely handmade ones full of character, I thought they would be perfect for building a raised herb bed. They didn't feel quite so perfect after I'd lumped 140 of them into the boot of my small and very antique VW Polo and made three journeys back home with the exhaust pipe practically scraping along the road - and I was so knackered I stacked them up round the side of the house and didn't do anything with them for a year.

Beautiful as Victorian bricks are, if you've ever salvaged "pre-owned" bricks you'll know what a fun job it is to chisel all the old mortar off them, which has to be done before you can re-use them. But once I'd got enough of them cleaned up, I made this rather nice walled bed. It's five courses high, curved along the front edge, and has enough room for a good collection of plants which will have full sun and good drainage. There's also a border at the back of it which faces south-west, and with the shelter and the reflected light/heat from the bricks it should make another good place to grow some of the more marginal herbs.


The new herb bed planted up with a few things already. Chives, chamomile, oregano and various thymes and parsleys.

Yes, it's a bit amateur and homespun. I've never done bricklaying before (and I don't have a bloke to do this kind of stuff for me) so I just get on with it and hope for the best. I probably shouldn't admit this but I didn't make any measurements or design plans at all. I just laid out the bricks on the ground until I liked the look of them and cut round them to make the outline for the foundations. Then I positioned them all by eye without recourse to tape measure, string-line, set-square or spirit level. What would Geoff Hamilton say? Maybe I'm daft but I'm just not the kind of girl who measures or plans things. Everything I do is improvised. To be honest, the bricks are all so individual and full of subtle variations it would still have looked a bit wonky even if I had meticulously planned everything. So bugger it. I like wonky things anyway.

And as I was building it I suddenly hit on this idea of incorporating this carved stone ouroboros which I've had lying around for years. It dates back to when I was 19 and lived in a farm cottage on a Cotswold hillside (which was freezing cold and infested with mice, before anyone has the word 'idyllic' get anywhere near their head). In my youthful idealism I used to go up the hill and find flat-faced chunks of Cotswold stone, then half kill myself lugging them back to the cottage to carve medieval motifs on them. The hill where I lived, Bredon Hill in Worcestershire, was circled by pretty villages with ancient churches, some of which had spectacular medieval stone carvings in them. The idea was to make hand-made copies of some of these carvings. I can't remember which parish I found the ouroboros design in, but anyway, I spent a happy few days smacking seven kinds of hell out of a chunk of stone until this little chap emerged.


Ouroboros carving, set with a few bits of coloured glass.

I love the ouroboros symbol. It's a deep alchemical motif which carries the idea of motion within stillness, completion, wholeness, energised balance and eternal renewal of cycles. All good things to have in a garden. For years I've been carrying my ouroboros (and a couple of others I made at the time) around with me and could never decide what to do with it. After all this time it's beautifully and naturally weathered - and it fits into the wall perfectly.

Another slightly more subtle feature in the wall … when I was lumping bricks into the car I spotted a set of fingerprints in one of the bricks. It had been pressed into the clay before it was fired, and thus preserved. Maybe this picture isn't the clearest, but the brick retains every detail of the lines in this person's fingers. Things like this are really precious to me. I love the idea that an unknown brickyard worker imprinted their identity into a housebrick 120 years ago and it still survives today as clearly as if it had been made yesterday. Perhaps it has an added significance to me because my grandfather was a brickmaker. Not that there's anything remotely romantic about that. In fact it killed him at age 37. But these little personal touches (literally) of people long gone from the world are the most special historical treasures to me.


A brickmaker's fingerprints etched into a brick surface.

That's not the only bit of hard landscaping I've done this week. My neighbour informed me the other day that he is giving up growing vegetables, because "they don't come to anything anyway, it's a waste of time" (speak for yourself, mate) and turfing over his vegetable patch. I find that very sad, but each to their own. I have benefited from it personally though, because he offered me the edging stones which had formerly made the boundaries of his vegetable garden, which happened to be exactly the right size and quantity for edging the path in my greenhouse, for which I had been trying to psych myself up for a trip to Wickes because I was in urgent need of some. These are old tiles and far nicer than anything I could have got from Wickes anyway. Thank you God. Thank you neighbour.*

*Not that the two are in any way synonymous.