I’ve done a last bit of seed cleaning over the holidays, so that’s my seed list finished for seeds collected in 2024. You can find the full, up to date list in the SEEDS section.
Maybe I shouldn’t call it a seed list any more though, as I’ve been experimenting over the years with ways to send other bits of plants through the post and there is now a fair variety of roots, tubers, rhizomes, bulbs, bulbils, runners and whatnot on the list. This is something I want to do even more of in the future.
A few of the plants are of particular interest. I’ve been mucking about trying to improve skirret (Sium sisarum) for many years now and am starting to see some progress. For anyone who doesn’t know it, skirret is a very useful plant in the carrot family which produces a bundle of sweet-tasting roots. To harvest it, you just dig it up, snip off some of the roots and replant. Its main drawback is a fibrous core to some of the roots and I have been trying to eliminate this. I haven’t got rid of it from my entire gene pool yet, but I have an increasing number of clones that I’ve been following for several years and have found to be consistently core-free. The seed I offer comes from these plants. That isn’t a guarantee that the offspring will be the same, but it should definitely increase the odds. I am busy bulking up the best plants and in the future I hope I’ll have enough to send out crowns instead of seed. For now, although I can send crowns they are only the regular, unimproved version.
Then there are the perennial kales. where for reasons of space I’ve had to concentrate on a few of the most promising lines. My favourite, but also currently the most frustrating, is the perennial Nero di Toscana. A successful cross between my most reliably perennial clone (which I christened Purple Kale Tree) and annual Nero di Toscana gave several similar plants with leaves similar to its Italian parent but a much taller growing habit. Unfortunately if anything this has been too successful a perennialisation. After a few years of producing seeds the original clones have now renounced the habit and become fully asexual perennials. I had hoped to back-cross them with annual NdT, but I am now having to do this with their offspring instead. Watch this space.
Another attempt to perennialise an existing kale is going better. Pentland Brig is a favourite of mine and it has been self seeding in the allotment for years, interbreeding with the perennials in the process. I’ve selected fairly hard for staying true to type, which rather selects against perennial genes, but nonetheless my plants have been becoming slowly more long-lived and are starting to reach the balance between flowering and growth that I look for while staying recognisably Brig-ish. Finally there are the variegated kales. I can’t resist selecting for this trait and again it’s slowly becoming more widespread. Of course selection for a purely visual trait reduces the ability to select for anything else, so these aren’t my best kales, but I’d like to keep it in the population so that it can cross with the more culinary ones. Starting in the spring I can send out a limited number of cuttings of my more interesting plants as well as the seeds.
Aside from the plant breeding, I’m still acquiring and trying out new species. Korean celery (Dystaenia takesimana) has impressed me and has also provided plenty of seeds for me to share. A new discovery this year has been pearl onion, which despite the name is actually a leek. that forms an ever-dividing clump of plants with marble-sized bulbs. I’d always thought it would be impossibly fiddly, but having been given a division of a variety called Minogue’s Onion I’ve found it very useful as the plantlets, although small, need minimal preparation and so far they have soldiered on through everything the winter can throw at them. I’ve also managed to propagate a number of new edible Lilium species. For now they are too small to produced seed, but perhaps in the future I’ll add them to the list.
Finally, all the seeds I collected in 2022 have been cleaned up and put on my seed list, ready for sowing in 2023. There are all the old favourites, plus a few new things like perennial leek seed, hog peanut/earth bean (Amphicarpaea), crow garlic bulbils, broad beans, zenteika daylily and Nanking cherry – plus a variety of tubers and whole plants or roots cuttings only available in winter.
As usual, everything is open pollinated, meaning that ‘true’ progeny are not guaranteed but excitement is. Everything is offered on an open source basis, meaning that you can do whatever you like with my varieties but you can’t patent or otherwise restrict them. And everything is on a gift economy basis, meaning that the seeds are not free (they cost me a lot of effort), but the prices are up to you.
With the addition of these Chinese quince seeds, that’s the list of the seeds that I have available for sowing in 2022 pretty much complete. Many forest garden seeds need stratification (winter cold). This seems to be in plentiful supply at present, but sowing of these seeds – unless it’s in the fridge – shouldn’t be put off for too much longer.
I now add seeds to the list as they become available, so it’s worth checking back every now and again. I’ve been experimenting with sending out roots and cuttings lately and have added more of these to the list. Unfortunately, for plant health reasons, I can only send these within the UK. As usual, everything is offered on a gift economy basis: this does not mean that they are free, but you can pay, swap or pay forward according to your means.
Some time ago, I wrote a post about the principles of perennial kale breeding. Since then, I’ve been aiming to produce a population of kales that are mid way between the near-sterile Daubenton’s perennial kale and the traditional biennial kale: that is to say, plants that flower enough to breed from but don’t flower themselves to death. I have been increasing the diversity by crossing all my favourite traditional kales with plants that have these traits.
Here is a round up of where I am at. Not all of the results are finished varieties that I’d want to propagate vegetatively, but all have at least one trait I want to keep in the population. The ones at the top are still alive and you’ll find seeds on my seed list. Please note that they are all open pollinated, so seedlings will show considerable variation – which is part of the fun! Towards the bottom you’ll find information on cultivars or grexes that I no longer grow but that I have sent out seeds of in the past.
The hands in some of the pictures are for scale and measure 22 cm.
Last edited May 2025.
Purple kale tree
This is perhaps my favourite that I have seed for. It is seven years old and still growing strong: the original stem grew to about 10 cm and eventually died, but others have taken its place and it roots itself by layering, Daubenton-style. The leaves are large, tender when young and, of course, purple. Flowering intensity: low. Flowers: white. Some of PKT’s offspring are similar but with even larger leaves and faster growth.
Here is one offspring of PKT that hasn’t flowered yet.
For reference, I’m 1.9m (6’3″).
And one that has, imaginatively titled ‘Son of PKT’. It has the same tall growth habit but a leaf shape that might indicate a cross with ‘Cabbagey’ (see below).
Flowering Daubenton
This is the most similar to classic Daubenton’s with similar leaves and growth habit, but it flowers every year, with a medium flowering intensity. Not a great kale in itself, but good for breeding off, especially for its strong branching habit and short annual growth which give it a relatively neat, dome-like form.
Cabbagey
I suspect that this plant had Brussels sprout somewhere in its ancestry, giving unexciting but mild, cabbagey leaves. With a very straggly growth habit and moderately high flowering intensity. I still have some seed of this but not the original plant. Its influence is visible in the cultivar that I call Silver Kale Tree, but most of its offspring have been a bit too much on the straggly side.
Silver Kale Tree
A very interesting plant, looking intermediate between Cabbagey and Purple Kale Tree. The leaves are nothing spectacular, but it has a very heavy crop of sprouts in spring – despite which it has come back year on year since 2021. It is the first plant in which I noticed a ‘coppicing’ habit, – growing new shoots from the base rather than just going up and up. Sometimes these side shoots collapse, but the plant as a whole keeps coming back. As a result it is more bushy than tree like, but I named it from its similarity to PKT.
Nero di Toscana perenne
A group of plants (originally three) arising from a cross between Purple Kale Tree and Nero di Toscana. . They are generally very tall, reaching over 2 m in 2 years (too tall in fact – need to breed in shorter internodes).. I have had to give up the site where these were originally planted but I took lots of cuttings and have fortunately managed to preserve all the lines I had on the old site. The flavour is generally recognisably Tuscany-y.
It has been hard to find the balance between flowering and perenniality in this group. The best plants are completely perennial, leaving me to try to breed from the inferior but more heavily flowering ones. I am trying to back-cross them with biennial Nero and they are also of course crossing with my other perennials. Obviously the seed I have to offer is from the more heavily flowering ones.
Plant 1Plant 2Plant 3Leaves of 1, 2 and 3 (L to R)
Perennial Brig
Pentland Brig is one of my favourite kales for flavour and texture. It is a heritage variety resulting from a cross between Thousand Headed kale and curly green kale. It has been self seeding in my allotment alongside my perennials for many generations (of kales) and now some of the individuals are at least short-lived perennials themselves, while remaining recognisably Briggy.
Variegated perennial kale
The variegated trait has been knocking around in my population from the start and I have tried to encourage it. As a result it is becoming more common and I have a few perennial plants with variegation, although only the cold-season type that disappears in summer. One is a yellow-and-green-leaved plant that seems to be non-seeding (but I have seed from a heavy-seeding sibling). Another is a more complex white, green and purple mix (a suffragette kale?) that is showing something of the multi-stemmed ‘coppice’ habit of silver kale tree.
2021 update
The winter of 2020/21 was a cold one in Aberdeen, with temperatures down to -15 degrees C: testing temperatures for a kale. This was great for plant breeding, in that it weeded out the less cold-tolerant varieties, but less good for individual lines.
A majority didn’t make it. My oldest plant of ‘Purple Kale Tree’ died, but another grown more recently from a cutting sailed through. This is often the case with perennial kales. Unfortunately the survivor plant barely flowered this year so I can’t offer seed for a while. The oldest individual plant to survive was ‘Flowering Daubenton’, adding to its list of impressive qualities. The Nero di Toscana crosses also did well, although this might owe more to them all having had to be regenerated from cuttings last year than inherent hardiness. Plant 2 didn’t flower at all, but 1 and 3 did so I have seed from this line for others to experiment with. This year’s to-do list includes sowing some actual NdT in the same bed to do some back-crosses. One purple-ribbed plant both made it through the winter and seeded. It wasn’t one of the ones that seeded last year, so it doesn’t have a name yet. Come to think of it, I might call it Purple Rib.
Another plant, with greener leaves, both came through the winter and is showing impressive mildew resistance at a time of year when many plants get badly affected – but unfortunately showed no inclination at all to flower. Some others which sprouted last year and survived the winter had the opposite problem: they flowered too much to be considered good perennials and were removed from the gene pool. I also decided to get tough with a tendency to straggliness in one group and removed all plants that were too floppy.
You can’t keep a good perennial kale down though, and everywhere where one has died several more have sprung up over the course of the year. I have thinned these to leave the more interesting and sturdy ones and now have nothing to do but wait to see how perennial they are. For interest, some of the lost plants are described below.
2022 update
A better year for kales, with no losses over winter and a few interesting new plants passing the tests of flowering and growing back. I have also acquired a range of perennial kales, such as Taunton Deane, that I didn’t have before and can now add to the gene pool.
2025 update
For reasons of space I’ve had to concentrate on a few of the most promising lines. My favourite, but also currently the most frustrating, is the perennial Nero di Toscana. A successful cross between my most reliably perennial clone (which I christened Purple Kale Tree) and annual Nero di Toscana gave several similar plants with leaves similar to its Italian parent but a much taller growing habit. Unfortunately if anything this has been too successful a perennialisation. After a few years of producing seeds the original clones have now renounced the habit and become fully asexual perennials. I had hoped to back-cross them with annual NdT, but I am now having to do this with their offspring instead. Watch this space.
Another attempt to perennialise an existing kale is going better. Pentland Brig is a favourite of mine and it has been self seeding in the allotment for years, interbreeding with the perennials in the process. I’ve selected fairly hard for staying true to type, which rather selects against perennial genes, but nonetheless my plants have been becoming slowly more long-lived and are starting to reach the balance between flowering and growth that I look for while staying recognisably Brig-ish. Finally there are the variegated kales. I can’t resist selecting for this trait and again it’s slowly becoming more widespread. Of course selection for a purely visual trait reduces the ability to select for anything else, so these aren’t my best kales, but I’d like to keep it in the population so that it can cross with the more culinary ones.
The perennial kales that I planted from cuttings in 2022 have generally been a disappointment and a reminder of why I moved away from traditional perennial kales. Taunton Deane in particular turns out to be a sprawling thug. I know some people with more space who like it, but for my allotments habit of spreading by growing tall, collapsing and rooting made it quite a handful, especially in exchange for rather mediocre leaves and no spring shoots. It was completely non-flowering and (perhaps thankfully) offered no opportunities to breed from it. The only one that shows some promise in terms of both flowering and surviving is one called Thousand Headed Kale.
Plants from here on are no longer on my seed list.
Deep purple
With deep purple, lobed leaves and a rather straggly growth habit. This straggly habit was also pronounced in its offspring and I ended up discontinuing the line.
Big leaf Jack
The flattened winged stems of this variety reminded me of Ragged Jack and it had big leaves. Flowering intensity medium-high.
Tall savoy
Tall, upright ‘kale tree’ growth habit, with somewhat savoyed leaves. Medium flowering intensity.
Lobed purple
Another of the lobed-leaf group, this time looking like it has Ragged Jack in its ancestry. Strongly branching. Flowering intensity: low. The parent plant died in 2023 but its genes live on in the gene pool.
Big Green Lazy
I ended up evicting this plant from the gene pool. It had big leaves, but the ‘lazy’ in its name refers to its habit of growing very thick, sprawling stems which made it a hard plant to manage. I am now selecting for more compact, upright plants.
Oak leaf bush
Large, lobed green leaves and a bushy habit. Flowering intensity: high. Died in the cold winter of 2021.
Variegated Kalettes
I got quite excited about this one. It appeared to be a cross between Brussels sprout (my allotment neighbour let his flower a couple of years ago) and kale – a combination now being marketed at ‘kalette’. It looked quite ordinary until cold weather set in, when it started to become variegated, a feature that persists into the sprouts. Moderate-to-high flowering intensity but regrew strongly. Unfortunately it didn´t prove to be very long-lived, but the cold-season variegation remains in some other plants.
Purple Rib
Grew in 2020 and survived 3 flowerings, despite flowering intensity being much higher than ideal for a perennial kale. Attractive, tasty leaves. Form rather too sprawling and I eventually removed it for this reason.
That’s pretty much all the seeds I have added to my online seed list now. This is a good time for sowing seeds that need stratification (winter cold) before germination, which in the forest garden is a lot of them.
New seeds this year include angelica, Manchurian spikenard (a continental version of udo), common storksbill, spignel, evening primrose, orpine, fen nettle and Scottish-grown chamnamul (Pimpinella brachycarpa). As usual they are offered for swaps, donations or the love of plants.
One new thing I have done this year is add codes to the plant listings which should save me spending ages hunting for them. Please quote Latin names with the code. The list is at https://foodforest.garden/forest-garden-seeds/
I have set dates for a couple of Introduction to Forest Gardening courses in the next few months. These are the only courses that I’ll have time to do this year. Day courses
The one-day course will cover all the basics that you need to start forest gardening, including designing, planting, looking after, harvesting, cooking and eating from your garden. It should be particularly relevant to those growing in an allotment, small garden or community setting. It will cost £50 and will be on the dates below. I can take a maximum of 8 people on each, so please book in advance. You can book by clicking on the booking link below. If you would like to come but really can’t afford the fee, email me.
Saturday 27th July 11:00 – 17:00 – booking link
Tuesday 8th October 11:00 – 17:00 – booking link Accommodation
If you need to stay over in Aberdeen for any course I can put one person up in my spare room (two if they are willing to share a small bed). First come, first served!
The leaves are all off the trees now and autumn is shading gently but firmly into winter, but there is still plenty happening in the forest garden. Low light and wet plants make photography difficult, but a friend with a better camera and better skills than me recently took some shots, which prompted me to write a round-up post.
Photos by Julian Maunder
It’s counter-intuitive if you are used to an annual garden, but autumn is a major sowing and germination time in both nature and the forest garden. Many seeds require stratification, or a period of cold, to germinate, and the easiest way to achieve this is to sow in autumn and let nature take its course. Other plants are self-sowing and coming up in autumn, taking a punt on managing to survive the winter and seed early. A mild autumn can be a really productive period with such plants: I’ve particularly enjoyed having copious supplies of rocket this November. I wonder if, after many generations of self-sowing, rocket is becoming hardier in my garden? Last winter – by no means a mild one – was the first time a plant survived the whole winter through and managed to seed in the spring. It is the offspring of this plant that are growing so vigorously in the cool weather now.
I was also very pleased to see miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata) self-seeding freely. It has been a bit frustrating watching this species thrive in unexpected places like the nearby university car park while taking a long time to really get established in my allotment. It is a really nice, mild salad crop, so I’m sure the wait will be worth it.
I particularly like getting biennial carrot family members established as self-seeding populations in the garden These are often quite difficult to grow each year from seed, having often short-lived seed with demanding stratification requirements and vulnerability to various diseases that are ingrained in our long-established allotment site. Saving seed, or allowing plants to self seed, is the only way to really guarantee fresh, viable seed. Parsnips, coriander, fennel, celery, angelica, alexanders and turnip-rooted chervil all self-seed this way. Of these, autumn is a particularly productive time for the celery and alexanders. I’m also getting there with Hamburg parsley, a variety of parsley that produces an edible root.
Seeds of alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) can be put in a pepper grinder and used as a spice
Angelica (Angelica archangelica) showing a wonderful deep red at the base
Another pair of related plants providing both food and colour at this time of year are the pot marigolds (Calendula officinalis) and chop suey greens or shungiku (Chrysanthemum coronarium). Both are producing cheerful yellow and orange flowers against the gloom, and the flower shoots of both can be used in stir fries. With the marigolds I use them flower bud and all, but the bud of the shungiku is very bitter so I remove it.
Chrysanthemum coronarium
Calendula officinalis
The wood mallow is also still going strong, providing edible leaves and flowers, and the little seed-heads known as ‘cheeses’. When you add in the kale, the leeks and the veritable treasury of root crops still to be dug up, winter may be coming but that is no cause for the forest gardener to worry.
