I’ve turned this post in to a separate page – http://fuggles.wordpress.com/seeds-to-share – so that I only have one place to update!
Some beans, said Baldrick...
Finally plumped for DFB Hungarian Butter (toffee-chocolate coloured kidney shaped beans), Early Warwick, and Brighstone, CFB Polish Purple Stringless, Tomato Scarlet Knight, and squash Zappalito de Toscana.
Thanks to the wonders of the internet I now know I’m not the only person who on receiving legume seeds, has to open all the packets to see them first hand. And then, maybe a couple of other times before planting, takes them out and plays with them a few times just to make sure they really are as pretty as you recall them being. I’ve now added a picture of my new acquisitions and some of my old favourites – in the picture, from top left to right, then down the four rows – Kew Blue, Birds Egg, Poletschka, Polish Purple Stringless, Bridgwater Bean, Pea Bean, Cosse Violet, May Bean, Black Valentine, Early Warwick, Brighstone and Hungarian Butter.
With the squash came a note to the effect that they had found germination was poor and so they sent me an extra squash, which happened to be my second choice – Chicago Warted Hubbard. A completely different “intention” to the de Toscana one, which I chose because it is supposed to be good as a summer squash as well as winter, but still sounds lovely. I failed once again with squash seed saving in 2008 – my third attempt – but I am putting that down partly to the weather and one day I will succeed!
Finally my lucky dip was Bridgwater bean, which sounds interesting, although where I am going to find room for another climbing bean is anyone’s guess. I shall continue to gaze covetously at my neighbours’ desert like lawns again this year…
If anyone out there happens to bump in to Spring, could you tell it to get a move on?
I look forward to this every year – the arrival of the HSL catalogue, from which I can choose six varieties and get a “surprise” packet in addition. I feel a bit disappointed by this year’s as one or two vegetables I wanted seem poorly represented, but it might help make choosing a little easier. I’ve decided on a squash, a couple of dwarf French beans, a climbing French bean and probably a tomato, but am trying to choose varieties that are clearly different to those available elsewhere, as well as suiting my circumstances, and types of vegetable that are easy for me to save seed from – I haven’t really got the space for growing on onions, brassicas or roots to the following year, for example.
Possibles at the moment are Coco Bicolour, Mrs Fortunes, Lazy Housewife, Soldier, Early Warwick, Polish Purple Stringless, Hungarian Butter, Crystal Wax, Brighstone, and Magpie. Tomatoes are a choice between Kenilworth, Scarlet Knight, Cavendish, and Market King. I just have to be careful that my choice isn’t too influenced by nice names, attractive stories or pretty bean seeds…
I’ll be checking other blogs for their opinion on the varieties, seed catalogues and old copies of the HSL list…decisions decisions…
In April 2007 I bought “British Green Tiger” tomatoes from M&S. Even allowing for supermarket fruit not being at its best (liable to be picked underripe, and often served overchilled) I liked them, not just for their taste but also their burgundy flesh behind green and burgundy striped skin. They were slightly larger-than-average cherry tomatoes. 80% of the reason for buying them though was to see how they would grow at home…
In 2007 it was really too late to have started the plants, and growing outdoors, they did too badly to reach a conclusion about how to grow them and whether they would come true. There was, however, some sign of the tiger stripes on the green fruit.
In 2008 I tried again, eventually abandoning a couple of plants to their own devices outside and giving one space in the greenhouse, where I plumped for growing it as a cordon because that was what I did with its neighbours. It proved relatively productive, and the fruit came true so far as I could see. It was quite as tasty, if not more so because allowed to ripen. Downsides were that they were fairly thick skinned and several of mine split, as my photos show, but that could be down to lazy watering. It’s promising enough to try again another year and I still have a reasonable amount of seed from the original fruit.
I wasn’t able to find out how to tell the best way to grow it but the cordon method seemed to work fine. In Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties (Carol Deppe’s marvellous, but dangerously inspirational, “Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving”) I read that commercially grown greenhouse varieties tend to be indeterminate, in order to make the most of the expensive growing space. Since I bought these from a UK producer in April, it’s safe to conclude that they would be greenhouse grown (it’s probably safe to conclude that most UK tomatoes are still greenhouse grown in August!) and therefore I think the indeterminate option is probably best. I only got Carol Deppe’s book this autumn so I didn’t know this when I was growing my plants this year.
Rebsie, writer of Daughter of the Soil and also very much to blame for my interest in this kind of thing, has experimented with the same variety from the same source. She has some lovely pics and far better and more detailed information on http://www.daughterofthesoil.com/greentiger.html
M&S sold them again in summer 2008 so it may well be worth looking out for them in 2009.
Green tiger tomatoes 2007
Truss of green tiger tomatoes, 2008
Meanwhile, here are my pictures of the original supermarket fruit – cut up on a chopping board – and some fruit from the 2008 harvest.
Successes included but not limited to tomato My Girl, chillis, sweet pepper Dedo de Mocha, peas, dwarf French bean Black Valentine, yacon, oca, sweet peas.
Chilli Czech Black
Failures included but aren’t limited to cucumber (gherkin, Marketmore or Flamingo F1), a tomato and pepper, and this blog. I know the last of those is my fault, and I suspect the same goes for the others. Red spider mite was definitely one factor in the cucumber shortage, overcrowding or too short a season may have done for the beefsteak tomato and the pepper.
So, what next for a more successful future for the garden and the blog? Well, a lot of the garden is put away for the winter, but we still have beans and peas in the freezer, garlic and onions overwintering, purple sprouting broccoli almost ready to pick, seed catalogues eagerly anticipated and this year’s seed safely packeted and ready to be catalogued. I need very few new varieties, just really need to be stricter with what and where we grow things, something we have been getting better with year by year.
For the blog…I think the same “must try harder” goes on my end of term notes there! I have notes, and plenty to share which will be useful to me in future at the very least, so no more excuses Miss Fuggles…
Back very soon, I promise!
Posting hiatus may be put down to sheer indecisiveness and lack of industry. Hoping to resume better than normal service, and will start with my first, hopefully successful pollination* of a squash flower.
I finally found foot-space on the bed which contains Marina di Chioggia and Olive squashes, and looked about for likely victims to pollinate. Really, I am anxious to produce seed from the Olive, as I can buy Marina di Chioggia quite easily. However as it is the nicest squash I’m personally acquainted with, I was happy to give it a go when I found that only this variety had with a matching pair of nearly-ready-to-open flowers, (with the distinctive yellow colour showing at the top and the flowers starting to change shape).
In the past I’ve been advised even by keen food gardeners not to bother saving squash seed – the cucurbits seem to be extremely tarty and will breed with anything they can share pollen with. However they are relatively conservative in that they don’t seem to like to breed with other species – eg, Real Seeds recommends its West Indian Gherkins for those growing hybrid cucumbers because as a different species you won’t get bitter fertilised cucumbers if you grow them in the same greenhouse – http://www.realseeds.co.uk/cucumbers.html).
Even more encouragingly, a lot of seed saving guidelines recommend squashes as a good starting point for hand pollination, because the flowers are large, the pollen plentiful, and male and female easily identifiable even from a very early stage. And with winter squash, you will allow the fruit to fully ripen for eating, so you won’t lose any of your crop as you might with courgettes.
So I’ve been looking for a chance to put in to practice the guidelines from http://www.realseeds.co.uk/wintersquash.html and from Sue Stickland’s Back Garden Seed Saving. I don’t have access to perforated plastic bread bags as we make all our own bread, but I do have a lot of unusable wool leftovers, some of it in a rather fetching shade of red. I gently but securely tied up each flower at the tip to prevent it opening the next day – the red wool makes it easier to spot the flowers. This morning I checked on them and untied the male flower, where I was fairly sure I could see pollen, but I tied it back up again until the sun had hit the bed and I thought both flowers might be more amenable to my matchmaking. As I only had one of each flower I cut the male flower off, stripped the petals and used the whole stamen to rub pollen on to the stigma – there’s a very good picture of this on the Real Seed’s squash page referred to above. Once finished I tied the female flower back up again to prevent any insects bringing other pollen to it and competing with my “work”!
Now, I’m not at all sure this is going to work. The flowers may have been too young? I was forced to use a male and female from the same plant for now which isn’t ideal, although Sue Stickland says it is acceptable at a push. Having to tie up the female flower strikes me as not such a good idea as wrapping it with a more airy perforated bag, for example (it’s just struck me that old tights might be a good alternative). And there are probably other things I’ve not thought of yet. But I’m feeling rather pleased with myself just for trying, it hasn’t done any harm to try, and if it does fail at least I will be able to learn from it for my next exploit when, I hope, I get a chance to try the technique out on the Olive squash (where even the unfertilised “embryo” fruit are whoppers!).
(*Why is pollination spelled with an i and not an e as in pollen?)
I haven’t been entirely lazy all the time I’ve not been posting and have a pile of photos to help with getting back up to date, so hope to add a bit more soon. In the meantime, the most relevant picture I could find – the first flower on our Nano Verde di Milano courgettes, from early June which we’ve been eating for about a month now.
The rogues with the biggest price on their heads this week:
Slugs and snails – in this case the price in question is about £2.50 for some eggs (or rather the resultant shells) and about 40p for some copper tape..but I suspect this price is going to go up, as the little blighters keep breaking through the barricades. The helpless victims are the Victorian Purple Podded peas (of course – they are the ones I had the fewest seeds of!) – even though they’re being grown in a huge container, set out on what other people might call a lawn, if they did lawn-type things to it. Still, they’re moved further out still, and sitting on a large log, with more egg shells added as fast as we can eat the contents. Half a dozen or so of the plants have made it a foot or so tall so there is hope, but it’s very frustrating.
Vine weevils – this season’s most wanted. As I think I said in the post above I’m annoyed we didn’t act sooner on finding a single adult last year. They are very distinctive, and we should have been less optimistic. Our two interesting rhubarbs, Grooveless Crimson (marvellous name) and Fultons Strawberry Surprise, seem to both have suffered, with at least one of the six plants very close to meeting its maker. We noticed they were looking sad, and my beloved emptied one out to have a look and found the grubs all over it with the remainder of the fat roots coming off in lumps.
Fortunately the nematode treatment has turned up, and the rhubarb, an emergency case because of the difficulty in replacing it, has been treated today, along with the ground born sweet cicely and asparagus (again, some difficult/time consuming plants to replace – and edited to add, prompted by my better half, that we also hope this might provide a nursery situation for the nematodes to spread through our soil a bit). When the heavy rain has passed in a day or two the remainder will come out of the fridge and be shared between our potted plants (a few trees, blueberries, fruit cuttings), which are, I believe, the most vulnerable.
Rather unhappy about them but at least we are doing something. I may have to obtain another barrier treatment of some sort against the slugs – we are reluctant to use nematodes for them as most of our vegetables are grown above our wildlife ponds.
Weekend of 19-20 April
Sowed cucurbits for the propagator
6x Black Forest F1 climbing courgette (T+M)
4x Squash early yellow straightneck (Real Seeds)
3x Gherkins Parisian Pickling (Real Seeds)
2x Cucumber Flamingo F1 (Wallis Seeds)
Once these are out, Loofa and winter squash will go in. Squash are something I’ve yet to succeed much with seed saving yet, although last year’s loofa seeds are germinating in test pots so that’s rather gratifying. This year I’ll be trying Olive from the HSL.
Potted up as many tomatoes as have pots for – 9 toms and 3 peppers lined up for a brother’s greenhouse, and sister and a couple of friends are hopefully going to rehome some others. OH divided another yacon and potted up two of the largest ones.
Peas seem to be doing OK, adding crushed baked eggshells as they become available.
Bad news is the discovery of vine weevil grubs in our precious rhubarb pots. I suspected we had them last year, and now regret not taking some action at the time, as one plant is nearly dead and another starting to look sick. I have ordered some nematodes from the Organic Gardening catalogue, along with some coir bricks, of which more later, but chemicals haven’t looked so attractive in years…
22/4/08
One of our Buff Sussex hens laid an egg today. Nothing momentous except it was the first one this year, and our ladies are 7 years old. We don’t expect much from them, and as long as they are fit and healthy, we’re happy for them to enjoy their retirement, clearing up the odd slug or eight, providing compost, and stealing broccoli leaves, blackcurrants, strawberries, tomatoes, peas…hmmm. I actually admire those who are able to dispatch their laying hens humanely and make use of the meat, but these were our first birds, and have taught us – me especially – so much, that they well deserve their time in the sun now.
From this:
to this:
in less than a month. Eek. We might have to move house.
We were a bit sceptical about the growing tips (surely you can see why from the top picture) even though Real Seeds has never let us down, but we followed the advice to pot them up right away and as our house is not particularly warm or draft free house we put the pots in the propagator as space was freed up from chillis and tomatoes. As soon as the green tips showed, we moved them out and gave them as much light as possible (as advised by Simon Hickmott’s Growing Unusual Vegetables, a dangerous book to have near an internet connection if ever there was one). They’re now spending daytimes in the greenhouse and nights in the kitchen (who needs work surfaces anyway?).
Three of the tubers actually have two growing tips on them (bottom left plant in the top picture) so yesterday my better half took a division from one of the plants, potting it up on its own, and leaving the main plant in the original pot. It drooped a little at first but perked up and can only be interesting. A maths conundrum..if we didn’t really have room for five yacon plants, how are we going to find space for six?…
We dabble in home brewed beer and wine – time and space and other interests currently keep us from wading as deep as we would like, hic. This was one of the reasons that a few years ago, we obtained some hop plants from Deacon’s nursery on the Isle of Wight . They’re almost certainly planted too close together (suggestions range from 1ft to 5ft – as usual it would seem that six inches of soil on top of pure chalk wouldn’t be top of their list of desirable homes either), but at about 2ft apart we still can keep track of which plant is which while we learn more about them. Cuttings are easy as they root like they’ve been taking lessons from bindweed, and we’ve been able to pass a number on to friends and other gardeners. We chose the popular varieties Fuggles (aha!), Mathon and Cobbs (types of Goldings, of which Mathon is supposedly more rain resistant).
We’ve had a couple of harvests of hop flowers (see above about hopelessly optimistic planting) and used them in beer. Mmmm beer. However, each year, you are only supposed to allow a few shoots to continue growing (one or two in commercial situations!) and the “hills” throw up scores of them. This I suspect is the reason that in times gone by, apparently the shoots used to make a regular appearance in London markets – when Kent and surrounding areas would have had a surplus of such shoots every year, it must have been a useful sideline.
As we are confident our hops are settled in, this year we’ve tried our first few hop shoots, cooked and served “as a side dish similar to asparagus” (a phrase which is only slightly less ominous than “may be used as a spinach substitute”). Wary, we doused them with butter – and were in fact pleasantly surprised. Although I’d say that the predominant flavour could best be described as “green”, there was no bitterness (which some sources warn of and suggest cooking in changes of water) and they were tender quite a long way down the stalk. I can see that if you were growing seriously they would be produced in such quantities that it would be very worthwhile to harvest and sell. Even on our home garden scale, they’re welcome as fresh greenery when a lot of spring vegetables are only just starting to get going.
If you’re unfamiliar with the different uses of hops, PFAF’s site is as always an excellent starting point:
http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Humulus+lupulus
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